Workbench lash-ups ... The Battery holder

[Brumby]

Have you ever had a battery you needed to connect to - like NOW - but not had the right holder for it?

What have you done to address the lack of time to do anything but work with what is within reach......?


Here's my contribution from today - an A23 12V:


A couple of M5 bolts stuck through the package they came in, with a nut for gap adjustment.  Worked much better than I had hoped.

Has the additional benefit of accepting eye terminal connections with a few extra nuts.

[Ian.M]

Heh.  That's much better than the usual rubber band round the battery long-ways, with a spare set of meter probes stuck under it.

[ledtester]

There are some ebay/aliexpress offerings for this... search for: "4 wire battery holder" or "4 wire battery stand":

[Brumby]

Yeah ... I don't have any of those laying around.

Very fancy.

[Ian.M]

Yes, that's overkill for anything except precision cell testing.

Fancy is usually any hard plastic tube you have handy that's a reasonably good loose fit for the battery diameter, with a couple of holes in it for nails across it.  A conical spring for contact pressure is nice, but at a pinch, a bit of aluminum foil wrapped round a chunk of closed cell foam will do.  It gets a bit unwieldy if you want 12V as for an AA pack that ends up being about 17" long!

[mcinque]

Magnets and wires soldered? Maybe they doesn't allow too much current, but they works fine

[Mr Evil]

Nice reuse of one of those horrible plastic packages.

I cobbled together something when I wanted to do some battery capacity measurements. I took a couple of bits of copper sheet, cut a bit off one side to form two ears for clipping wires to, for 4-wire measurements. From the offcuts I hammered the copper offcuts into dome-shapes and soldered them on so that they can make contact with batteries that have recessed ends. Some scrap carbon fibre angle and bolts glued on allow them to clip into the holes in my clamp, so they can be adjusted to hold any size of battery securely.

[JohanH]

Had the same issue the other day with an A23 battery. Two terminals and an IC tube to the rescue.

[Daixiwen]

wires and duct tape. works great too 

[lwatts666]

I've been caught raiding the kid's Lego...