{"id":5327,"date":"2012-12-15T17:11:22","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T01:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5327"},"modified":"2013-01-09T05:23:55","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T13:23:55","slug":"2012-12-15-nutty-makeshift-aaa-to-aa-cell-adapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=5327","title":{"rendered":"2012-12-15 Nutty Makeshift AAA to AA Cell Adapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I bought a few bricks of 40 AAA cells at Fry’s, mainly because they were only $4.20 each, or about ten cents apiece – that’s cheap!<\/em>\u00a0 But I really needed AAA cells because of all the Fenix LD01 and similar flashlights I now have.\u00a0 But I have so many AAA cells that I’ll never be able to use them up by their 2017 expiration date.\u00a0 Unless…\u00a0 I start substituting AAA cells for AA cells in low current devices like my Blue Blinky flashers.\u00a0 So I had to come up with an adapter.<\/p>\n

I bought a handful of AAA to AA adapters from Dealextreme; each one is a plastic snap apart case with a metal button on one end to extend the length.\u00a0 They’re not bad, but they’re not available at the local store like the ones I made below.<\/p>\n

The AAA cell sill fits into an AA cell holder, but it’s too loose and may fall out.\u00a0 So I needed a metal spacer to go between the AAA cell and holder to take up most of the room and make the spring pressure high enough to hold the AAA cell securely.\u00a0 What have I got plenty of that’s about that size?\u00a0 A NUT!\u00a0 Yeah, a nut from a quarter inch screw is thick enough to make the spring tight.\u00a0 But I have only a few 1\/4″ nuts.\u00a0 But Burt used to tell me, “There’s no shortage of nuts around here!” and he was right.\u00a0 So I looked into another screw drawer and found that I had plenty of 8-32 nuts.<\/p>\n

I grabbed a few and tried them between the AAA cell and the AA holder.\u00a0 They worked good enough, so I took ’em out and put them on a burn proof surface and soldered them together.\u00a0 After cooling off, I put the pair of nuts back into the AA holder along with the AAA cell, and that left me only one thing to do: make the on\/off switch – see the photo.<\/p>\n

I took a scissors and cut out a section of the side of a plastic pudding cup. \u00a0 This L shaped section included the rim and part of the wall.\u00a0 The wall\u00a0 is the part that goes between the battery contact and the holder, and the rim acts as a finger pull tab.\u00a0 It can also be seen in the picture.\u00a0 It fits nicely between the side of the battery and the holder during use.<\/p>\n

I wrapped enough black electrical tape around the middle of the AAA cell to help center it in the holder so it makes good contact.\u00a0 But with the nuts in place, the battery is secure enough without the tape.<\/p>\n

One thing I noticed about AA and AAA cells in general: different manufacturers make them different lengths.\u00a0 One may be several millimeters shorter than another.\u00a0 I noticed that with the two #8 nuts, the spring was compressed down to its minimum, and the AAA cell just barely fit.\u00a0 With the two #6 nuts, the spring isn’t so compressed and the cell fits snugly but not tight.\u00a0 So I may choose the #6 solution for most of the holders.\u00a0 But the #6 nuts are smaller in diameter and tend to fall down and make contact off center with the spring.\u00a0 But the holder still works okay.<\/p>\n

Many of my projects have low enough battery current that will allow the AAA cells to be used and still have a reasonably long battery life.\u00a0 The only problem is that some battery holders may have four cells, which means I’m going to be soldering a lot of nuts together!<\/p>\n

Back to nut soldering…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought a few bricks of 40 AAA cells at Fry’s, mainly because they were only $4.20 each, or about ten cents apiece – that’s cheap!\u00a0 But I really needed AAA cells because of all the Fenix LD01 and similar flashlights I now have.\u00a0 But I have so many AAA cells that I’ll never be <\/p>\n

(Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,5,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magnetics-electromagnetics","category-flashlight","category-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5327"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5421,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5327\/revisions\/5421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}