Home-made Charger Instructions

Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1997 18:04:35 -0800
From: Anonymous
To: toby@eskimo.com
Subject: hacked external charger

Toby, 

It wasn't any cool, high-tech thing.
I took a couple of those 9-volt battery plug-in connectors, cut them
apart and hot-glued the smaller contacts to a piece of plastic so they
fit on the terminals of the Dauphin battery, ( I used three - but only
the horizontal pair carried power- the third was just so I wouldn't
screw the polarity up by mistake. ) I then connected the wires to a 12V,
750A power brick I had laying around. I hot-glued a couple of really
thick rubber bands to the terminal piece so when attached to the battery
it would stay connected. 
Whenever the charge would run out in my battery, I would just strap on
the hacked charger to the battery and plug it in. After about 1 1/2
hours, the battery would start to get warm, I'd pull it off, and get
about 1 1/2 hour charge.   
Note the lack of automatic power-off or limiter of any kind. Not only is
it easy to accidentally leave the battery plugged in too long and ruin
it, if this happens you also run the risk of the battery blowing up!
Actually, I believe there IS a power limiter or fuse built into the
battery pack itself so probably this couldn't happen, but you never
know... 

If you want to use this on your page, feel free. However, you may want
to build one yourself, ( or have someone else do it, ) and give better
directions. Also, as I'm sure you can tell, it's not exactly the safest
thing. I'm sure with all those EE folk out there someone could provide
plans for a real charger with resistance detection and auto-off. 
Or maybe not. 

Glad to see you continuing the work on the page. While I owned my
Dauphin it was a really big help.
Thanks, 

Anonymous