Description

The VRUZEND V1.6 kit comes with enough components to build a battery with up to fifty-two (52) 18650 cells.

Building a battery larger than 52 cells? Just combine multiple kits together to reach any battery size you need.

The V1.6 kit replaced our V1.5 kit by adding barrel bolts to compress the pack’s connections. This helps ensure consistent connections even under high vibration environments. The caps are also slightly longer to give more gripping surface, but the dovetail interconnections are still backwards compatible with V1.5 kits.

Each basic kit includes:

104 cell terminal blocks with SS spring contacts (enough for 52 18650 cells)

104 screw terminals and nuts

130 stainless steel conductive bus bars

6 main wire clamps (for charge/discharge wires)

12 barrel bolts for securing the caps on the cells

The VRUZEND V1.6 kit includes everything you need to physically join your cells together and perform all of the electrical connections. However, you’ll still need a charger to charge the battery and a BMS if you you’d like to use one (recommended for safety). You’ll also need 18650 cells. You can’t have ours – they’re just for pretty pictures!

Features:

No soldering or spot welding required… at all! You can finally build a battery with nothing more than a socket driver or wrench and your bare hands!

You can finally build a battery with nothing more than a socket driver or wrench and your bare hands! End cap standoffs – four posts on the end of each cap keep the conductive metal components off of your workbench and help reduce the chance of short circuits. Safety first!

– four posts on the end of each cap keep the conductive metal components off of your workbench and help reduce the chance of short circuits. Safety first! Inherently vibration resistance – the plastic cap material works as a firm spring to keep the nuts from vibrating loose. No nylock, split washers or loc-tite needed!

– the plastic cap material works as a firm spring to keep the nuts from vibrating loose. No nylock, split washers or loc-tite needed! Customizable and adjustable – build a battery of any size, and increase the battery voltage or capacity as your needs change. By simply moving or adding cell blocks and series or parallel connections, you can increase the voltage or amp-hour capacity of your battery easily!

– build a battery of any size, and increase the battery voltage or capacity as your needs change. By simply moving or adding cell blocks and series or parallel connections, you can increase the voltage or amp-hour capacity of your battery easily! Serviceable – if a cell ever dies, you can open up the pack and replace it!

For assembly you’ll need a 5.5 mm socket wrench or nut driver. We know that’s a bit of an odd size, and even if you have a metric set of drivers, it usually jumps from 5 mm to 6 mm. So we’ve made it easy by supplying a 5.5 mm nut driver for cheap (in price, not quality!!), which you can find here.

We recommend that for best results, you limit the current draw of the battery pack you build with Vruzend battery caps to approximately 3.5 A continuous per cell. Current bursts of up to 7 A are acceptable, but for periods not exceeding 10-15 seconds. Higher current results in more waste heat being generated which can rob your pack of performance. That means that if you build a battery with six cells in parallel, you should try not to exceed about 20 A continuously with that pack, though bursts of higher current are ok. We’ve had some people do tests with higher current, but it usually isn’t worth the extra waste heat. Extremely high current can even be dangerous. Please be safe and don’t try to pull too much current from your battery cells – this is true with any battery building project, not just with Vruzend kits.

We are at work on an upgraded version of the Vruzend kit that can sustain higher current levels, but until then, please remember to plan for enough cells in parallel that you can reduce the current per cell to a reasonable level. The added benefit is that you get even more capacity that way! And heck, who would turn down more amp-hours?!

Beginning with the V1.5 and continuing with the current V1.6 update, the caps have been widened very slightly to make the assembly process easier. This means that the caps aren’t as extremely tight as they were in previous generations though, and other methods may be useful to ensure strong connections in vibration-heavy environments. Learn more here.

*Note: We have found that some Panasonic 18650 cells are unique in that the positive end of the cell can occasionally measure as narrow as 17.98 mm instead of 18+ mm. For these narrow cells, users have found that they fit more snugly in the Vruzend caps when an extra layer of heat shrink or a wrap of electrical tape is added to the positive end of the cell to make it slightly wider. Learn more here.