<VV> 1960 battery

[Rad Davis]

There's no mechanical magic inside a battery.  There is, however, lots of 
electrochemical magic.  The good news is that it's portable.  You might be 
able to move the plates and separators into a tar-top rubber case, but it 
would depend on the measurements, as you might expect.

The other thing that would probably trip you up is the bus bars between 
cells.  They have to stand up above the cell walls and must be well clear 
of the electrolyte.  I suspect the physical layout of these is different in 
a plastic battery than in the tar tops.

There are two other things worth mentioning:  1) there's a sump area below 
the plates where debris falls.  If the debris (which is usually chunks of 
plate or plate paste) rises too high, it shorts plates and kills the cell 
(making your 12v battery a 10v battery).  So a deeper sump can give longer 
battery life, but at the expense of plate area, which gives more cranking 
power. and,

2) lead is bad for you.  Sulfuric acid is bad for you.  lead sulfate and 
sulfide are very, very bad for you.  Cadmium salts are very, very bad for 
you.  All of these fun things can be found in car batteries.  Buy the 
heaviest industrial-grade nitrile gloves you can find for handling this 
stuff, don't get it on your skin, keep plenty of baking soda around, 
etc.  If you inert the tar-top with baking soda before dismantling it you 
won't get an acid burn, but this doesn't address the many problems with 
getting heavy metal salts into your body, and yes - it can go through your 
skin to get there.  Likewise, lead and cadmum poisoning through vapor is 
well documented.  Plenty of fresh air is your friend if you need to solder 
bus bars together.  Just remember that a lump of lead isn't very dangerous 
because it's not bio-available.  If you atomize and inhale it (as with 
soldering or casting), or make it into a salt (which is what makes a 
lead-acid battery work), you've made it available to your body and it can 
do a real number on you.

I'm sure somebody will jump in and say "Oh, I've done it x times and it 
never hurt me."  My reply:  you have one body.  You get to decide what you 
want to do in excess that will use it up and kill you.  I prefer a more fun 
means of death (and a less nasty mode of death) than progressive nerve 
system damage from heavy metals.  They don't let pregnant women work in 
battery factories anymore for a reason.

---- ex-environmental chemist Rad Davis, who prefers to buy his car 
batteries pre-assembled and uses a Honda battery in his Greenbrier.


At 01:26 PM 5/29/2006 -0700, Tony Underwood wrote:
>At 09:25 hours 05/29/2006, MarPack57 at aol.com wrote:
>>I have two 60's but they share one battery. Got my group 53 locally at a
>>battery only place. It's a Trojan Commercial made in Santa Fe Springs CA. 
>>and was
>>about $65.00. Guy told me certain forklifts use them.
>>   Ed in Fla
>
>
>
>
>Yep...  local Exide outlet keeps a steady stream of "fork lift" batteries 
>around for the warehouses around here.    The trouble is that I've not had 
>a lot of luck with these Exide batteries, didn't really last that 
>long.     I've had better luck with the 51s I get from Auto Zone and 
>Advance etc.
>
>I even gave some fleeting thought to gutting an old tar-top 53 and seeing 
>if it was possible to stuff it with the innards (after some mods of 
>course) from a 51, just to see if it could be done.
>
>...ever try to dismantle a modern car battery?    ;)
>
>
>tony..
>
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__________________________________________________________________________
Rad Davis:                                        rad.davis at comcast.net
Corvairs--65, 66 Corsa coupes, '65 'brier Deluxe   http://www.corvair.org/
Keeper of the Forward Control Corvair Primer: 
http://www.mindspring.com/~corvair/fc1.html
"We did Nebraska in seven minutes today. I think that's probably the best 
way to do Nebraska."                            --Brian Shul, _Sled Driver_