Alright, I'm going to do something I rarely do now and **** all over a specific brand of aftermarket automotive component. Mostly because the level of ignorance and/or disregard for customers displayed in this product is... shocking.

I should note this is my personal opinion, and in no way connected with my employer.

Braille Batteries - **** you.

We start with our patient, a Braille ML7 family lithium ion racing battery which has failed: (I have four or five of these sitting here failed, ordered over the course of several years. This is not an isolated example.)


Since it's junk anyways and the engine manufacturer prohibits the use of lithium ion batteries unless they contain a charge balancing circuit I might as well find out why my $400 racing battery failed, right? Time to void that long-expired warranty and crack this sucker open.

Oh.
(Yes, the filament tape was cut by me.)
I'm seeing a lot of hamfuckery going on in here...

The vent is installed using what appears to be large gobs of gel cyanoacrylate. They didn't even get full coverage, there are gaps in a few spots.


Oh dear. :stare:

The terminal wires appear to have been soldered by me when I was nine. That looks remarkably like filament tape someone bought at the post office and electrical tape purchased at home depot, as well.
And what the **** is up with a 6ga wire in parallel with a 12ga wire? Just use the right size in the first place.

:wtf:

The nickel terminal strips seem to have been cut with a set of rescue scissors and a loose idea of what size they need to be rather than any sort of machine or die. The terminal spotwelding appears to have been done by a drunk or someone suffering from Parkinsons and the holes "drilled" (I'm being rather generous here) in them for positive terminal alignment appear as if they were chewed out by a rabid badger.

Other end of the pack.

Wait a minute, is that a logo I recognize?

Yes it is.

Southwire THHN. Excellent wire for home/commercial building plant wiring, not so much for a ******* race battery.

One wrap of filament tape holding the whole shebang together before it gets jammed into the case.


And most importantly - ZERO evidence of any sort of charge balancing/management hardware. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not only that, there are no inter-cell taps connected to a small charge balancing controller connector on the outside of the case, either. You can't do that with lithium batteries. They MUST be charge balanced regularly. If you don't, one set of cells will fully discharge and become impossible to recharge and/or present a fire risk. Every reputable manufacturer of lithium batteries for motorsport either builds one into their pack or provides a connector to which one can be attached occasionally to rebalance the cells before any dip below minimum charge.

The best part? Braille states that for optimal battery lifetime you should regularly use their charge balancing unit. Which is nice and all, but it connects to the same two external connectors any other charger does, and doesn't have access to the inter-cell taps since they didn't wire any such thing up, so it's physically impossible for it to determine if the cells are unbalanced, nevermind balancing them. Pure snake oil.

Even the guy in Florida home-building his battery housings from clear plexiglas and selling them from a website that looks like it belongs in 1993 on Geocities knows enough to build better battery packs than this. I'm disgusted - by Braille, not the other guy, he seems to have gotten the electronics right if not the packaging.

Cell pair voltages for this pack at present, positive to negative: 3.656V, 3.662V, 3.710V, 0.291V. One of these things is not like the others! (I wonder which pair of cells failed...)

Guess what? The best condition pack I had left caught ******* fire today. Wish I had pictures of it for effect, but it was basically unrecognizable and got whipped into a dumpster and vigorously assaulted with a garden hose and is now gone.

Buy better lithium batteries that either explicitly state they contain a charge balancing circuit or have an external connector for one - unless you want to risk a fire and experience vastly reduced starting battery lifetime. Then, Braille batteries are right for you! :thumbsup: