Baton Sopmod Lipo Adaptor - Internally lousy

[Aod]

Evening all!

 

I recently upgraded a TM NextGen HK416 with some new gears, bushings and stiffer springs. I tested the gun with the nearest Tamiya'd LiPo I had to hand, a Turnigy Nano 1300mAh 7.4v, tested at about 7.7v, making it about 65% charged.

Testing the gun with the original, lousy TM NiMH battery saw the gun lock up occasionally, but I never experienced that with my 1300mAh LiPo, I asked the owner who said he usually used it on LiPos, so I gave it back to him confident that all was well and that the lock ups were due to the lousy NiMH.

 

Unfortunately, the owner of the gun experienced more persistent lockups when he got the gun back, so I had him bring it back to me for fixin'. This time, I was left with the LiPo Adapter and the batteries he was using, teeny-weeny 800mAh Vapex sticks, these poor little batteries are only rated to 16A continuous discharge!

Looking at the LiPo adapter, the first one I've had the opportunity to fiddle with, I was disappointed to see that while the adapter was capable of accepting two battery packs, it was only wired for one. Given the meagre size and current capacity of the LiPos the guy was using, I asked if he'd be happy with my modifying the LiPo adapter to run two batteries in parallel. I'm glad I only checked how much these things cost after I started working, as at a mind-blowing £34.99 I'd probably have left it well alone!

 

Poppoing the adapter open, I was extremely disappointed by what I saw. As any Airsoft tech should know, minimising the number of contact-based electrical connections is paramount, and in a TM Recoil M4, with it's battery connections and sliding stock contacts, this is more important than ever! Inside the LiPo adapter, the deans connector was connected to the central connector with miniscule little brass bars, not soldered at either end, fitting just loosely over the contacts. Measuring the size of the brass bars with my callipers puts them at 0.3mm by 1.53mm, equating to a cross-sectional area of only 0.459mm^2, which is only just larger than 21 gauge wire, only one step above the tiny wires on balance connectors.

 

This is what I ended up making of the adapter;

At the bottom you can see the TINY original connector bars, with their friction contacts at either end

 

See the wiring I replaced them with, it's 16 gauge Alphawire EcoWire. There's more than enough space for it to fit if the needless internal separator is removed, as I have done.

 

 

 

The final result is a gun which will experience more than double the runtime, with quicker trigger response and a faster rate of fire to boot.

If any of you have these adapters, I'd look at having them similarly modified as in it's original configuration, this adapter presents a significant bottleneck to your guns performance.

[TheEgo]

Great information, and a nice little mod.

I was always surprised when they released the Baton Sopmod Lipo Adaptor that it wasn't setup to take 2 batteries in parallel. Seems like it wasn't the only thing they skimped on.

 

And your spot on with the observation of the Sopmod's locking up with the standard 8.4v nimh batteries. I modded mine to 9.6v and haven't had them lock up since (in a couple of years owning them).

[TheEgo]

Thought this might be of relevance here as well.

 

[Aod]

Thanks very much.

 

Also, thanks for the info on the lock ups, I'll make sure that if I can't find any cause of lock ups I'll let the guns owner know that it was probably the batteries.

[Richard Y]

Nice guide, this is why i switched over from stocking the baton to the Trigger talk adaptor for next gens as it is much simpler for the average joe and more efficient than the baton which we found constantly we was having to split and rewire.  internally when we wired it to both sides on the original copper it practically melted which i suspect is why baton never made it both sides, and since we stopped the workshop, this kind of mods not possible for me with my time constaints now so i continuously have to search for ways to help players by just selling products which work out of the box or giving advise.

 

The trigger talk adaptor is just a tamiya or deans if you chop the tamiya off, and then wire and the push in quick change plug, then a plastic cover for looks on the sopmod to cover the wires.  Becuase of its size ive squeezed in a 2000mah down one side once.. but i had to lose a lot of the excess wire from the trigger talk adaptor.  still ultimately for someone looking to plug and play lipo its simply easier.  IF we can keep stock, the prices are crazy as they they simply cant be arsed to sell to us.  If we was allowed stock more than 50 - 100 it would be a lot cheaper haha, apparently japan computers say no.

 

http://eagle6.co.uk/shop/accessories/tools/triggertalk-battery-adaptor-for-m4-recoil-shock-series.html

 

The original sopmod packs have high resistance cells, they suffer when fast charge and actually can cause the auto detect feature of modern chargers like imax to beep saying full, and show a charge put in of 1300mah but nothings actually gone in to the battery..   The little 2/3a cells need to very slowly charged at 0.1 - 0.3amp .. i ask the question when fault finding, have you charged your sopmod pack all night.. 14 hours? if they havent then odds are there original tm battery pack lock up issues are there own cause.  But theres a reason nimh is being ditched for lipo, you cant but a price on easy no hassle charging even if the lipo packs are a little small.  

 

You can also remove all of the original TM sopmod pack cells and install all new VP cells 2/3a and obviously add and extra one.  the new 9.6v 1600mah pack will be very powerful and easier to charge.  still requiring a slow charge but will take a bit faster up to 1amp.  Someone sent back a modded pack to me ones that i made and said its not working and sure enough it wasn't.. i asked how fast on his imax he charged it, and it was set to a 5amp charge .. he wanted both packs ready for a game he had.. well thats why they got hot and thats why the colour of the cells internally where now black and not red.

 

If you don't mind when i get chance i may link this to my info section which unfortunately never gets the attention it deserves.  For those willing to do the mod i think its a solid power boost for the original system and like you say double the capacity.

[Pdubyuh]

Ah this explains a lot I use the batton addaptor on all 3 of my recoils with 8ooMah batteries and I get a bit of lock up on semi, i'll have to find a friendly electrician (or someone who can solder) and get mine modded as you have described, nice one Richard!!!

[Aod]

Nice guide, this is why i switched over from stocking the baton to the Trigger talk adaptor for next gens as it is much simpler for the average joe and more efficient than the baton which we found constantly we was having to split and rewire.  internally when we wired it to both sides on the original copper it practically melted which i suspect is why baton never made it both sides, and since we stopped the workshop, this kind of mods not possible for me with my time constaints now so i continuously have to search for ways to help players by just selling products which work out of the box or giving advise.

 

The trigger talk adaptor is just a tamiya or deans if you chop the tamiya off, and then wire and the push in quick change plug, then a plastic cover for looks on the sopmod to cover the wires.  Becuase of its size ive squeezed in a 2000mah down one side once.. but i had to lose a lot of the excess wire from the trigger talk adaptor.  still ultimately for someone looking to plug and play lipo its simply easier.  IF we can keep stock, the prices are crazy as they they simply cant be arsed to sell to us.  If we was allowed stock more than 50 - 100 it would be a lot cheaper haha, apparently japan computers say no.

 

http://eagle6.co.uk/shop/accessories/tools/triggertalk-battery-adaptor-for-m4-recoil-shock-series.html

 

The original sopmod packs have high resistance cells, they suffer when fast charge and actually can cause the auto detect feature of modern chargers like imax to beep saying full, and show a charge put in of 1300mah but nothings actually gone in to the battery..   The little 2/3a cells need to very slowly charged at 0.1 - 0.3amp .. i ask the question when fault finding, have you charged your sopmod pack all night.. 14 hours? if they havent then odds are there original tm battery pack lock up issues are there own cause.  But theres a reason nimh is being ditched for lipo, you cant but a price on easy no hassle charging even if the lipo packs are a little small.  

 

You can also remove all of the original TM sopmod pack cells and install all new VP cells 2/3a and obviously add and extra one.  the new 9.6v 1600mah pack will be very powerful and easier to charge.  still requiring a slow charge but will take a bit faster up to 1amp.  Someone sent back a modded pack to me ones that i made and said its not working and sure enough it wasn't.. i asked how fast on his imax he charged it, and it was set to a 5amp charge .. he wanted both packs ready for a game he had.. well thats why they got hot and thats why the colour of the cells internally where now black and not red.

 

If you don't mind when i get chance i may link this to my info section which unfortunately never gets the attention it deserves.  For those willing to do the mod i think its a solid power boost for the original system and like you say double the capacity.

I know what you mean about the Japanese being funny with exporting things like this wholesale. I can't go into details but I've experienced what you guys are getting and it's dreadfully frustrating.

Thanks for the information about the Triggertalk adapter, I'll remember that if ever I meet someone in the market for a TM recoil who wants to use LiPos. When I worked in an Airsoft shop I used to simply solder fly-leads to the ends of the contact-bars which worked a treat, albeit looked a little rough-and-ready.

 

Thanks for the good info on the TM NiMH packs, I did a full NiMH refresh with my iCharger 106B+ with a 1.3A charge current limit, but set to auto, where the charger gauges the charge current against the rise in pack voltage and adjusts the charge accordingly, I think it took about 2 hours to charge. It's a shame the NiMH cells TM used are so poor because NiMH technology is actually much better than that, and can be better even than the VPtech cells, but with low demand, the technology doesn't really show up in these niche cells. I'm not surprised a 5A charge killed those packs of yours stone dead though, my mantra has always been a 2C charge MAX when it's urgent, 1C when I'm in a hurry and 0.5C to 0.8C when I'm not. My technical documentation does suggest that charging NiMH cells really slowly (but faster than trickle charging them) can lead to overcharging as the dV+ can be so small that the charger doesn't detect it, and that was certainly the case with my old imax charger.

 

You'd be welcome to link to this guide on your site if you wanted

 

Ah this explains a lot I use the batton addaptor on all 3 of my recoils with 8ooMah batteries and I get a bit of lock up on semi, i'll have to find a friendly electrician (or someone who can solder) and get mine modded as you have described, nice one Richard!!!

If you can't find anyone local, drop me a PM and we'll see if we can work something out

[TheEgo]

With the whole charging Nimh thing.

 

With decent chargers that have  "delta-V," or "delta peak" detection

The extra resistance in the quick charge battery packs seems to mess with some chargers. My charger default setting is usually 5mV my brothers iMAX with the same setting would false peak. I think we had to up the delta-V to something like 7mV.

 

Most decent chargers show how much you get into the battery pack, so if you cycle charge them (discharge then recharge, you can tell if you got a decent charge)

[Megalomaniac]

In the end on my TMs I did away with the stock contact system and ended up running Teflon wire in the buffer tube channel with standard Deans on it, much less resistance which equates to much better performance. It does mean that I can only run it in one or two positions which is fine for me as I generally run the stock all the way in.

[Aod]

If this were my gun I likely would have done something similar, but is isn't so I didn't

 

The performance of the gun after modifying the adapter and installing an SHS high torque motor was more than satisfactory to both me and it's owner.