NiMH batteries fitted to Olympus motor drive?

[r._j.]

Has anyone tried NiMH batteries in the Nicad Pack used on OM 'drives?

 

A well known OM tech-o in New York used to offer such a service, but

he stopped doing so for one reason or another.

 

Now my own tech-o is recommending the procedure because, he says,

NiMH batteries are far superior today than they were in previous

times.

 

Thus, he suggests that a Nicad pack fitted with NiMH batteries will

have more power than a fully charged Nicad pack, will never suffer

from nicad 'memory' problems and carries a longer life before

recharge is required) than normal Nicads do.

 

It's looking hard to resist his offer of upgrading the power source

in my OM motor drives!

[douglas_green1]

I don't see any reason to doubt him. I use plain off the shelf NiMH cells in both my Olympus Winder-2 and my Nikon MD-4 motors with no problems at all.

[james_lai]

You'd also have to get a suitable NiMH charger. The Nicad charger will charge the batteries, but will cause overheating and damage the batteries.

[douglas_green1]

BTW, off the shelf NiMH chargers cost $10-20 nowadays, and are available everywhere. See if you can get a battery pack that has a clip to take standard AA batteries. If you get a sealed proprietary pack, and a custom charger for that pack, you are certainly going to pay ALOT more than you should.

 

Proprietary battery packs tend to be sealed units that use standard cells inside anyways, and are simply a way for the vendor to maximize their profits.

[skip_williams]

You can use NiMH batteries in the 15V Control Pack for the MD1 and MD2, but it's not a simple substitution. John Hermanson at Camtech in NY was offering that service, but I believe he said that he lost money on every conversion as it's so hard to do. I know that he stopped doing the T45 packs for just that reason.

 

There have been probably 10 or 20 threads on the Olympus List over the past 5 years on this subject. If I remember right, the final conclusion was that the NiCad's offered better power output characteristics than comparable NiMH's, even though they suffered from memory, etc.

 

Regarding the charger, you can't use off-the shelf componants for either the charger or the batteries. The batteries have to be soldered together and crammed inside the unit. And the only way to get charging power to them is to use the Olympus charger with that wacky, 6-pin, square plug. I guess that you could cannibilize a Relay Cord and attach a stock charger to a pack if you were so inclined. Me? I have NiMH's in my 15V packs and I use the standard, Olympus charger, but make sure that it doesn't charge more than 5 hours, which was John's recommendation when he did the swap for me several years ago.

 

There are pages here for your fun:

 

1. Electrical diagram of the Motor, 15vpack, charger, pin-outs, and how to make a home charger: http://olympus.dementia.org/Hardware/PDFs/OM_15VCtlPack1_03A.pdf

 

2. 15V Control Pack exploded diagram: http://olympus.dementia.org/Hardware/PDFs/M.15V_ControlPack.pdf

 

3. 15v NiCad pack rebuild How-To: http://petroglyph.crestline.ca.us/Olympus/controlpack1.htm