Make Your Own Battery Snaps

January 10th, 2006 | by ghostshadow |

In this write up I am going to teach you how to make heavy duty battery snaps. These snaps are a lot more sturdy than the store bought ones that you get at RadioShack and other electronic outlet stores. These snaps are very simple and rugged and can be used for all kinds of projects and testings. Plus you’re creating less waste by recycling parts from your electronic goods, it’s a win win situation.
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Materials Needed

Dead 9v battery
Pliers
22AWG Wire (preferably a red and a black wire)
Soldering iron
Solder
Hot glue gun (optional, but works well in assembly)
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How To

First, take your dead 9v battery and start prying at the seam of the battery, starting at the bottom until you can get the battery all the way apart, like so:
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Next, what you want to do is take out and keep the bottom plastic part and the top plastic part (the part with the connectors on it). You can recycle the rest of the battery, you won’t be using the rest of the contents at this time.
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Now lets take a look at this connector. We have a positive and a negative. The positive on the 9V battery is the “Round” connector and the negative is the “Star” connector. For this project we have to change this so that the positive side is the “Star” connector and the negative is the “Round” connector. This is why it’s a good choice to use two different colored wires (red & black in this case).
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Now that you know the “Star” side is the positive side and the “Round” side is going to be negative, you can flip the connector over (remember which side is which). In the photograph below, the “Star” side is on the right.
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Now you are ready to put this thing together. Heat that soldering iron up and get ready. What you want to do is take the red wire and solder it into the “Star” side connector. Do the same with the black wire with the “Round” connector. If you find the solder is not sticking to the metal area, you might need to rough it up a bit. My connector had a coating on it and I had to sand the connector a little and the solder connected to it. Just take some sand paper and rub it a little and your solder should adhere to the connector.
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Now that both connectors have the wires attached there is one more step before assembling the final product. You should flip the wires to the other side (see the photo). This puts less tension on the wires when the battery snap is being used.
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Next step is to put this thing together, so heat up that hot glue gun. What you want to do is get your other piece of plastic ready and you’re going to put hot glue on the part that has the wires connected, dab just enough glue on there so the other piece of plastic will hold. You’ll want to squeeze both plastic pieces once you put the glue in since hot glue dries fast. Once it’s dry you should have something like this:
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Now you are done and ready to test your projects or attach the battery snap to your project, etc. Here are a couple of pictures of the new battery snap in use.
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