Scooter Battery Teardown Part 1

I took some time today to start trying to understand what exactly it was that I'd gotten my hands on: It was time to figure out how I was going to harvest the cells from the battery packs I received, and if they would even be worth anything. The battery packs I got are NEE1009-W, and since I have 77 of them, I wanted also to start to plan for how to tear them all down as efficiently as possible. I enlisted the help of a friend, and we got out my pack of chisels and went at it.

Splitting the battery case with guitar picks – simple, effective, and surprisingly gentle on the plastic.

With the top removed, a first look at the cells and their arrangement, each one neatly encased and connected.

The lone top case.

Removing the silicone reveals the electrical architecture of the battery pack.

Hacksaw Time Sometimes you just need a hacksaw...

Peeling back the lower plastic

Finally, the battery pack stands bare. We ran out of time, but did manage to verify that all the cells are okay--the groups measured out to 3.7v and the whole pack was still at ~36V

We came up with some ideas for how to improve the process (pressured air, drill press to grind out some of the enclosure knobs, etc.) and will see about getting the individual cells out in the upcoming days and coming up with a polished process.

Author: kraln

Jeff Katz is an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has founded companies across a wide variety of industries including security, finance, and IT. He's worked everything from electrical engineering through firmware, cloud architecture, engineering management and CTO, for startups as well as multinationals such as Telefónica and Daimler.

About

I bought an RX-8 with the intention of converting it to run on Hydrogen. Conveniently, the hydrogen fueling network where I live was shutdown shorly after I brought the car home. After driving the car around with the original drivetrain for much longer than I originally intended, it started to lose significant power. Rather than simply replacing the existing (fun, but unreliable) drivetrain with a rebuild, or a different (boring, but more reliable) gasoline engine, I'd want to return to the original goal of making my RX-8 zero-emissions.

The goal is an RX-8 that, from the outside and inside, is indistinguishable from stock. All safety and comfort features should still work, and the car shouldn't gain too much additional weight. The original structure should stay as intact as possible, and the handling and dynamics should be as close to as-delivered. It should still be fun to drive but reliable as a daily, and it should still zoom-zoom.