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I used three of these so far. The built in battery is pretty small, at about 3 watt hours. I'm in the Army, and find myself without power for days while in the field or overseas. By itself, it really is not worth it. You get maybe half a phone charge. But...if you remove swap the internal battery for a larger external one, it becomes awesome. You will need a soldering iron and some solder, a bit of wire, and a ton of electrical tape. 1) Pop the case apart. Easy to do with a screw driver. Solder out the old battery. Careful not to short the old pack. Solder in some wires to the two contact points. I used red and black tinned 16ga wire. Keeps you form accidentally reversing polarity and making a hand grenade. Cut a little notch in the bottom for the wires to come out. 2) Take apart your doner battery pack. I used my old Gateway laptop battery. The laptop died, but the battery was good. Inside I had 6 panasonic 16850 cells, for a total of 54 watt hours. The number of cells does not matter, as you will wire them in parallel, so they run 3.7-4.1 volts. Be careful not to cut and short the cells. 3) Solder the leads to the cells. I put mine in a 3x2 six pack, and electrical taped it. Then soldered the tops together, and the bottoms. Mind the + and - ends. A shorted LI-ion cell makes for a nice pyrotechnic. Tinned copper wire helps the solder stick to the ends. I used a simple 7w iron. 4) When you have it done, tape the hell out of it. I used half a roll and taped everything so only the end of the white case stuck out. It is not safe for water contact, so don't leave it in the rain. Normal morning dew in the tent does not affect it. The last one I build for a buddy we put the pack flat in a water tight tablet case, so he could charge his phone inside the case with the Frankenbattery. Nice for if you are backpacking (or dismount with infantry). Performance: It takes about 21 hours to charge the pack at 54 watt hours. Kinda slow, but hey, I build the whole thing for under $20 in parts. It only puts out 500ma, so it will not high speed charge phones. I get about 8 phone charges out of it with my Samsung S4 and it's 1800ma battery.Read full review
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