Jinx,

I have the commercially made NiCad Zapper in one of my junk piles.
I vaguely recall that it charged a capacitor to 40 VDC and discharged
the capacitor into the NiCad battery. If your interested, I could locate
the NiCad Zapper and forward the schematic to you.

Sincerely,
Ned Seith
Nedtronics
59 3rd Street
Gilroy, CA 95020
(408) 842-0858
ned@nedtron.com

At 12:30 PM 8/18/01 +1200, you wrote:
>A couple of years ago I was given a cordless drill that
>wouldn't charge. I found that one of the cells in the pack was
>dead flat and was stopping the others charging up. At the
>time I was told how to break down the high resistance
>inside that flat cell, which I did, and the drill has been as
>good as new since. But I can't remember the details of
>what I did. I seem to recall applying 12 or 15V to it for a
>few seconds, keeping an eye on when the meter swung
>from 0 to a rapid charge (indicating that the insulating
>dendrite barrier had been punched through) and then
>removing said 12 or 15V and putting the pack into its
>normal charger. Have I got it right ? There are one or two
>appliances around here with what I think are dead cells
>and I'd like to get them operational. As always, the cells
>are an odd size and would be expensive to replace with
>the manufacturer's "recommended" spare part
>
>TIA
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
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