Two Good Excal Upgrades

[JohnA]

One is the NIMH battery pack from onlybatterypacks.com. Just finished 15.5 hrs on the first charge before the first squeal. Also impressive was the 17 days it held the charge. Sweet. The other is the new 2 piece Lightning Rod from Demarco. Very well made and light. Combined with a belt mount, you can hunt until you turn into a prune.

 

[mike k.]

With the nimh battery pack ,can you use the minelab excallibur charger to charge this ,and if so how long does it take ?-thanks

 

[Bobbie]

I will be replacing one of my batteries with those packs. I also have the lightning rod from DeMarco.......it is balanced very nicely.

 

[JohnA]

You could, but it would literally take days as it is only 60ma. I got a Tenergy battery pack charger for 24.00 and cut the adaptor and about 18 inches of wire off the Minelab charger, got male/female connectors at Radio Shack, hooked them up to both chargers and the now separate adaptor wire. This charger has a 900ma and 1.8 amp switch. Using the 900 ma switch it takes slightly less than 2 hours to charge the pack. Whatever charger you buy, stay below 1 amp as I was told by a Battery's Plus guy over that amperage the pack may overheat. Also get a charger specifically for battery packs as the circuits charge the packs correctly. Will use the NICAD pack only as backup and only when I get up to about 14 hrs. I went out this AM with 11.67 volts on the NIMH pack and still got 1.5 hrs use on it before it started chirping. Could probably have squeezed another 15-30" out of it W/O too much loss in depth as it was way before the death squeal , but wanted to re hit a little hole with the Infinium. So I think there is plenty of room for error on the battery-life roulette wheel, especially if you monitor the voltage when you hit double digits on usage hours.