bringing t3's back to life

Stu

Active member
have been given ten oldham t3's and a bank charger. the cells are bone dry with a white crusty deposit on the inside casing. what would be needed to bring them back to life, materials, charging regime etc? it may well be a futile and expensive attempt... but assume i like banging my head against brick walls and that i'm going to try anyhow! cheers in advance
 
H

Huw Groucutt

Guest
well basically the cells sound as though they are fooked.

Best bet is probably to canabalise them and then cut the divider out of the middle of the case (i presume T3's have a central divider) and then get yourself something like a yuasa battery (which are cheap anyway) and wire that up and you got a lamp. Not sure if you could use your T3 charger with that, you may have to buy a yuasa specific one. Or you could get an electrolyte mix thing and remake the actual cells in the oldham.



Or you could just buy yourself a nice sexy fx ion 7 LED! 8)
 

SamT

Moderator
Or you could just buy yourself a nice sexy fx ion 7 LED!

and suffer years of misery and expense as you struggle with the dodgy contacts - flickering lights - expensive replacement parts and to boot - most of the caves you go in will seem dull and lifeless due to the flat blue light they give out.

There's nothing sexy about poorly manufactured plastic'y kit that looks like it should have come out of a xmas cracker. (but cost £120)

As for recharging them - it aint gonna happen

Best thing to do is purchase some nicads from caving supplies or some such

See
http://www.caving-supplies.co.uk/cgi-bin/psShop.cgi/add|31008||~@c~NiCad~Cells~@b|0|user|1,0,0,1|5

its the 10ah 1.2v batteries.

Caving supplies do an instruction leaflet on how to put the cells into T3 cases - It aint hard. I think the cells just slide into the two slots.
They aren't as long as an olham so if you want you can have a 'sawn-off' by cutting the case to the right length and gluing the base back on.
There are some 20 amp hour ones which are longer and fit in the full length T3 case in my old C.S catalogue but I dont know if they still have them in stock.

Then get yourself a nice trusty oldham cap lamp - tri led bulb for a backup. Nice bright halogen for throw - one happy well inluminated caver. :D
 
H

Huw Groucutt

Guest
so i take it you don't like fx ions!

All i can say is that i've never had any problems with it, i much prefer mine to my previous light (an oldham), oldhams are ok for walking along a nice big passage but such a pain in small stuff. I seriously would not like to attempt the Daren Cilau crawl with an oldham!

Anyway, we've had debates on fx-ions before so lets not start again!

Those batteries on CS look fine, or as i mentioned before yuasas which several people i know use, standard size one for an oldham case gives 17 hours of good light on halogen bulb.
 
Top