Ballistic Battery Tester

180mph batman boat....

While there's a price to pay for new ones, flat batteries are usually free of charge.

Good one.

Really interesting! I hadn't heard that! Thanks!

Now I gotta try it...

Maybe that is why my aunties used to keep dead batteries to throw at fighting cats because if they missed they didn't bounce too far away to be retrieved.

Wonder how far I can throw a dead lead acid battery and will it bounce or just go kersplat?

Start at 1:00....

Car batteries should be tested by measuring electrolyte specific gravity and not by the AA battery method, IMHO.

I just use a multi-meter for all of them...

Yep, when a standard alkaline cell gets down to about 1.36 Volts, it's pretty much toast. It might run a clock or some other very light load for a while but even then those cells are done when they get to about 1.2 Volts. A new alkaline cell usually comes in at about 1.56 volts.

My battery weighed a whole lot less when it was discharged. The cannon balls were gone... And someone drank all the beer.

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thewildotter

A battery is usually six tubes, isn't it? That's an interesting coincidence.

...or perhaps 6 pots and pans.

I have to use six big pre-heated pans for my shrimp after they have been through beer battery prep. Each salvo from each cannon preheats a pan of shrimp but with 100 artillerymen to feed per battery, few shrimp are left in reserve for a second salvo. Then we have to send out the shrimp boats again.

One clever veteran we sometimes call "Lieutenant Dan" for obvious physical reasons, put the six cannons right on his boat. The gulf has not seen the enemy in quite some time now but Dan keeps coming back for more powder and grapeshot. No morale problems on his ship but his crew is gaining a lot of weight ! Does the crew count when weighing the battery ?

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thewildotter

Just to be explicit with this memory device story...

For Civil War Historical connections.

For beer electrical battery background.

For entertainment (movie) references

And to explain a bit... there are less painful ways of remembering details about a topic. You make up a story with important details (six cannon in a battery, 100 artillery men to operate it, carbonized residue to make an electrode, Forest Gump's boat captain's name was Lieutenant Dan) embedded prominently in your story. As one gets older it gets harder to remember detail and easier to invent stories. This is how I strung this "ballistic battery topic" together to form something I could remember. To bring back the entire story in the future I will just picture the Lone Star Beer bottle as a cannon silhouette and all those connections come flooding back. This post provides a partial bibliography of the sites I visited as I was researching the history of artillery batteries, the ecological value of using waste from beer production to make electrical battery parts, and the pop culture references to shrimping boats. Young people might think these stories are way off topic. I give them fair warning, as they age, concepts and stories will remain but details and references evaporate. In short, nearly all of you will eventually turn into your version of me. Practice this technique before you really need it. Note also that it is web enabled by this post if I can get the words Ballistic Battery from my beer bottle silhouette memory, I can find this bibliographic entry and thus navigate back via the hyperlinks to even more and probably newer detail than I have strung together here. Realize that the more concepts you weave together into a story, the more chances you provide to trigger memories of. say, the electrical battery physical characteristics one can test without an explicit battery tester which was, as you recall, the original topic of this thread. The corpulent boat crew members also form a mental picture of a swollen discharged battery which one might be weighing to bring the mental excursions full circle back to the original thread topic. So ending the story on that comical note provides an appendix connection to the origin of the mnemonic device effort.

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thewildotter