How to Make a Super Long Life 9V Battery (Answer Inside)

[runmikeyrun]

I'll have to build this recharger circuit, i have 4 low batteries on my workbench.  What's the minimum voltage that you can successfully resuscitate a battery from?

Bush Mechanics sounds like an awesome show, where could i download or find episodes?  Youtube?  Kazaa?  Bittorrent?

I really liked the british show The Secret Life of Machines in the late 80s.  They showed it on Discovery channel here, back when there was only one discovery channel!  There's a guy on the web who has all the episodes for download, i've downloaded all 3 seasons and have gotten abou 2/3 of the way through them.  The cool part of is was how they made working models and examples of most of the stuff they were explaining.  They went through modern household machines like washers, tvs, and some things that we consider archaic now like VCRs and Quartz watches.  The best part was when they were explaining the internal combustion engine and the guy punched a hole in the oil filter of a running engine on a stand.  It sprayed his all over the face and torso and he just kept going with his explanation like nothing happened! 

The link to the guy's site to download the episodes is on my comp at home, if you're interested PM me i'll send it to you.

MacGyver was a hero to me and my brother.  We were in grade school really into building forts and stuff always wandering the woods and things (unlike todays kids who do all their "exploring" with RPG) and we had swiss army knives and were always doing things like making bows and arrows out of trees, lean tos, digging booby traps and other stuff.  That was the good old days with motorized squirt guns that were still all black and people were holding up stores with them

Later, i made a connection between that show and a favorite movie of mine, Animal House- Bruce McGill.  He was D-Day in A.H. and Mac's buddy Jack Dalton in MacGyver.  It took a long time because even though he had the same moustache he had put on a considerable amount of weight!  I guess at the end of Animal House when it says "whereabouts unknown" we know where he ended up

[Paul Marossy]

You know, I abandoned the battery charger idea. Pretty much every 9V Duracell that I have tried to recharge didn't work. One even "exploded" quite some time after I recharged it. They all start bulging and stuff, too. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

[runmikeyrun]

Oh! I thought of something else- along the lines of the solar power.  Since most of us practice and/or perform where there isn't much ambient light, what about rigging up a solar panel and using the AC power from your board to drive one of those small halogen lights used on track lighting?  You can get ones that are on a gooseneck, and it would be easy to both mount and shorten a piece of the track.  The lights just snap into it.  YOu could bend the light over so it's close to the panel, that way every time you use the board your panel is getting an excellent source of light and, if you don't have too many pedals, hopefully charging or at least breaking even on generating voltage for your pedal array.  I'm going to try to figure out where i could get some cells and how to make a simple battery charging circuit.  Solar cells already produce DC, correct?  Might be a simple matter of the battery charging circuit posted early with a regulator (to control for any extra ambient light) to keep them batteries recharged... i guess you'd need to put an extra (or modify existing) DC jack on each pedal to connect to the battery.

[MetalGuy]

If I remember correctly Z.Vex suggested a 5 V low drop regulator after the battery to generate +5V and then a charge pump to generate -5V. This way you can have 10V even your battery goes down to 6V

[Paul Marossy]

Well, it's been very close to one year now. It still measures 8.60V, but I decided to change it out this morning with a new one because I am going into the studio with my wah pedal this weekend. Not too bad... it lasted a year, being used an average of at least one hour per day on most of the last 365 days.

[paguitarist]

Someone needs to make a pedal with 1 of these in: (1.3Ah)

Or 1 of these (18Ah):

"Yeah dude, the gains so high, it needs a battery -THIS BIG-!"

Anyone else thinking "battery powered portable pedal board".

[Paul Marossy]

I just thought I'd give an update on this battery I made in 2006. Now I haven't been using my wah pedal every single day, they have sat dormant for a long time, but one of these battery packs I made shown in post #15 is still going in spite of everything.