Hello Spot Welding using Super capacitors? Yes! I Always knew there must be, um, a good use for super capacitors and uh, turns out this is One Spot welding. So what I'm doing here is spot welding. Um, a nickel plated steel strip onto well, the circumference of a an 18650 lithium ion cell. The circumference because it just gives me more uh, area to play with.

Let's try another world. Yeah yeah! Fun spot welds courtesy of this thing. The Uh Keck Super Capacitor Spot Welder I'll take a close look at these spot welds but let me just try peeling that off. This is razor sharp nickel plated steel.

so I've got to be a bit careful. Oh, they do come off. Perhaps I could apply a little bit more power? Yes I think I'll do that. And here are some I did earlier.

Um, like I say this is nickel plated steel. It's worth pointing out that this Spot welder can't do pure nickel strip. So if you're into ultra high power battery charging and discharging, then look away now. So here it is.

Uh, this is the Keck Super Capacitor Powered Spot Welder. You can see there's a PCB on the top, mounted on the two capacitor end points. a little OLED display there. The flickering is a camera artifact.

so these capacitors are charged up to five volts. There are various parameters here. Delayed star is 0.1 seconds I Can't see the purpose of that quite frankly. Uh.

interval between the two pulses 10 milliseconds I Haven't really experimented with the interval or the two pulses. Uh, here are the pulse lengths. They're two milliseconds and three milliseconds and you move around the four information areas with this middle button here and you increment and decrement with the altitude buttons. It's nice and simple.

The capacitors are these. They're absolutely humongous. They're 2.7 volts, 3000 farads each. Uh, they're about the size.

Well, I'll go and get a Coke can actually to show you the size. Um, well actually this is Sicilian lemonade. but uh I think you get the point. So this is a standard 330 milliliter can and you can see the size of the capacitors.

I mean they're pretty big uh in comparison with this can Now I should say straight away, never ever do this. What? I've done. Insert the probes into these little handy spaces down here and I'll tell you why. The reason is that these caps do not come with the spot welder.

Now, these caps came from these two cheap pound shop permanent markers and they just happen to be exactly the right fit so you won't get these caps. and unless you can Source them, you never want to put particularly the positive probe down into that space. And the reason is the positive probe is connected directly across to the most positive point on the two super capacitors and down in this little well is the piece of metal that Bridges the two capacitors together At the bottom, you can see that piece of wire runs down to that piece of metal so that the protection circuits here can independently protect the two capacitors. That means that if you didn't have this cap on, you would potentially or very likely be connecting capacitor positive to capacitor negative on this capacitor.

And these things are capable of massive currents. and you'd notice that. So with these caps on I think it is safe to do this. but I hesitate to do this because someone's going to copy the idea and blow the thing up right? What's on the PCB There's a microcontroller here.

You can see the programming interface there. There are five of these large uh mosfets here. two there and three actually sitting underneath the display. There are a set of power components here.

There's a very loud buzzer here. It's going to go off in a minute because this time's out after a minute or so. As an inductor, there is not too isolated there. Yes, I Have seen those on spot welders.

Interesting design and up here there are some discharge resistors so that if you charge this over 5.4 volts, these protection circuits will kick in and top balance the two capacitors. Oh, and at the end there is the charge port. It's USB type C I'll talk a lot more about that in a minute, but let's change these parameters so I'll move across to the two milliseconds. Perhaps we'll set that to three milliseconds.

And that three milliseconds? Oh, I Don't know. Let's put that up to four milliseconds. I Haven't done much of this. so I'm still experimenting.

Really like I say a perfect fit. The inner part of this cap is over this knurled um. clamp. So I'll just bring out the the two probes.

These probes are solid copper. Yeah, this one won't come out for some reason I think I've slightly over tightened the clamp there and it won't pull out without the use of pliers. Okay, let's do a spot weld at this new higher power setting. So you put one probe down to hold the strip and then you put the other one down and it is difficult working on this curved surface, but it kind of teaches you how to hold the probe still so it's probably good for practice.

And then when you do the flat tops and bottoms, it'd probably be a lot easier. Okay, oh yeah, that seems like a deeper weld. So you get the short beep which indicates I think that the two probes have touched together. Let's do it again.

Then you get the long beep which I think is just a warning beep that it's about to do the world. You can see it's a bit more sparking coming off this thing now. Um, and then you get the pulse of current and it is of course the well. Now three plus four, seven milliseconds.

Yeah, that's probably a bit better. Try pulling that off. Oh yeah, that's much. Yeah, I can pull it off, but it takes a huge amount of force.

So I think that's probably about, right? Yes, charging these Super capacitors. It appears that perhaps a little less thought went into the charging process than the welding process. This, uh, short USB type-c to type A cable is supplied with the Spot Welder. but um, look at this.

Yes, if I plug this into this. uh, seven Port Hub which I cut the cable off which way around is it that way? you can see that immediately lights up. And if I switch these on and then switch this one on. Yes, it immediately backfeeds to all the other ports.

So the point is that this connector here has the full voltage of the super caps on it currently about five volts. and there's no anti-reverse diode here. and there's no sort of current limiting power supply built into the Spot welder. so really, you've got to make your own Provisions for that.

It's a bit naughty, really, because you wouldn't want to plug this into just any old charger. So I Bought this and this is quite an interesting little power supply in its own right. If I plug 12 volts into that. um, yes, that's just looking at the output voltage and that's interesting because, um, it shows you the voltage on the output Port Um, even when it's switched off.

So if I plug this in I Can see that the super capacitor is at five volts. So if I set this thing to 5.4 volts, let's do that foreign 5.4 5.40 that's in the set mode. It will then revert to the measuring mode. So the super Caps are currently at 5 volts now I need to set the current so press and hold set.

That lets me set the current. Yeah, two amps is absolutely fine. So we'll switch on the output and you should see uh, two amps appear on the current part of the display. No, it won't because actually the cable is absorbing the difference between 5.4 volts here and 5 volts on the super cap.

With one amp running through that cable, there's actually 400 millivolts across it. Interesting, but the capacitor will creep up to 5.4 volts as this current. Falls Now, what's interesting about this power supply is that it's Sepic, so it is actually a boost converter topology. so it has the diode pointing towards the output so it can't back feed.

And it does say in the description for this thing I'll put a link to this as well as the super capacitor welder in the description. it does say in the listing for this that you can connect it directly to a battery. You don't have to worry about anti-back feed diodes. Okay, let's stop that.

I'll turn the output off and we can now see that the super caps have risen slightly, although not much. Perhaps I'll turn it back on and do a little bit more. And the other benefit of this thing for me was it's got a 2.1 mil Barrel Jack on the input. but also it's got this USB socket on the output so it works directly with the cable supplied with the spot welder.

And the USB socket is not limited to 5 volts. it's whatever you set on the output so you can raise it to the 5.4 volts which is the maximum for the super caps. And after that little bit of charging, let's switch this thing on and just see what it says. The cap voltages? Uh, okay.

well it's gone up a little bit to 5.1 volts. now. it's probably worth looking at this section in red here. from the manual notice the Red Spot Welding Pen is charged.

What they mean is it's connected to the most positive point on the super capacitors which are charged. Don't use it to touch any components on the board, so don't poke around on this board. And also, very importantly, don't poke around down in this well the well at the bottom unless you found some pan shop pen tops and they happen to fit absolutely perfectly. It Also says the pass blur shall be strictly in accordance.

In other words, don't go over 5.4 volts. It is forbidden to spot well. Pure Nickels Sheet, so battery purists can stop watching now. Lithium ion, monolithic, aluminum and copper pole lugs.

In other words, lugs on batteries which are not steel I suppose and soft clad aluminum pole lugs so only weld nickel plated Steel onto the surface of your battery. Okay, let's do some more welds. Uh, remove the cap off there. Tip out the copper now.

I Imagine these will wear down gradually and you'll need to resharpen them or purchase new ones. I think these are 12 gauge or something. There was something about 12 gauge and 10 gauge I think these are the bigger ones. Uh, okay, let's do this one.

This one probably won't Oh, it has come out excellent. Let's have a little bit protruding I Don't know about a centimeter just so I can get nice and low and there's no problem at all with touching the metal work. Here it hits only five volts. It's not going to hurt you.

Uh, okay. is it ready to weld? Yes. I Think it is. So let's do a spot.

World Now the sequence is the short bip, the long beep, and then the world. and I Have to say the first time I did this I nearly left out of my chair mainly because I just wasn't expecting I wasn't used to the sequence so I didn't know what was going to happen. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, these do look like better worlds now.

so I'll rotate that slightly and put another one in and then perhaps bring it back and put one in up here. Um, that's a bit more tricky because welding on a curve is more difficult. but I do feel it's good because you learn how to really hold these things and stop them slipping because that's a problem if they slip. Yeah, my fingers were touching the metal work there and you don't feel anything at all, so there's absolutely no problem with that.

You might want to wear gloves I can't see the point I don't think there's much UV given off, it's mainly just a shower of Sparks and I mean the shower Sparks is not even as vicious or as what's the word as a sparkler, so it's uh, it's not going to do you any harm and I haven't felt anything I am wearing glasses and I would recommend wearing glasses. you don't want one of those Sparks going into your eye I'm wearing glasses so I can see what I'm doing. But yeah, that seems to be producing pretty good welds. And here are those worlds in macro mode.

Yes, they do seem to be a little deeper than the ones just to the left of them, which are the ones I did a while back. Yeah, the spot welds. This thing certainly seems to work very well. So the reason I bought this well.

firstly because I love things that have super caps I love an excuse for a device that uses super caps. but um, yeah, they're to make up battery packs using these sodium ion 18650s which I bought recently. So I'm going to do these with proper welds on the bottom and on the top. I've got end caps for these I've got Nickel strip.

So yeah, there's nothing stopping me getting on with that now. So that is the Keck Super Capacitor Spot Welder with its giant Super capacitors. Uh, 3 000 farads each. Never put the probe tips down in these.

Wells I Mean actually, when you haven't got these uh pen tops, they don't stay in here anywhere. they fall out so, but don't do it. It's an extremely bad idea. Watch the video to find out why.

I'll put links to the Spot Welder and also that little power supply in the description below the video. This cost me, uh, 63 pounds approximately including shipping and V80. It's not cheap, but I think it's a good implementation of the technology and it seems to work and there's a huge amount of Headway I mean these uh, millisecond parameters can be taken a lot higher. so I think it's got the power.

It does say you need to charge it up to 5.4 volts if you're going to do 0.3 millimeter nickel plated steel strip. I'm currently working I think on 0.1 or 0.12 and so I've got the millisecond numbers set quite low. But yeah, that's it. Super Capacitor Spot welding.

Cheerio!.