My experience has been that for the short runs we use there is not any appreciable difference between silver, copper, brass and aluminum, and past 20 kcmil of cross sectional area stainless steel. I gained .01V with a .7 ohm load on a 4.2V battery changing a part from brass to silver with 25mm length and 1.5 kcmil cross sectional area and .005V from BeCu to silver in a part 13mm long with 1.6 kcmil cross sectional area. The contact point is a larger concern in terms of voltage drop. Pure silver is not the preferred contact point material, but isn't a slouch either. Main concern is tarnish and pitting. Silver alloys are used for electrical contacts that greatly decrease the loss of conductivity encountered.
I was thinking the same thing Mundy, but I'm more just doing this for fun, and to see how far I can "push the limits". Thank you so much for your useful input
. I know there isn't a huge difference unless your cross-section is the diameter of a dime haha, but I'm interested to see how much of an improvement it will have if everything is drastically improved on paper.
Ideally I plan on having a thick pure silver contact point exactly as wide as the negative/positive terminal diameter, instead of using the
actual body as the negative part of the circuit, I'm going to run the 12ga silver wire (which will be wrapped/shielded against tarnish, and the contacts will be cleaned often until they wear down anyway) directly from the thick negative contact to the negative threads of the 510 connection (which is also silver if the parts site is telling the truth
), I aim to have the 12ga wire as short as possible (and as thick as I could afford) so-as to decrease as much resistance as I can. But here's where I think I'm on-to something. I have a copper spring that is the perfect size running from the 510 positive contact, that widens to about the exact width of the
batteries positive contact, and I plan to coil the silver wire as much as possible in contact with the battery, and it coil up and along the copper spring to attach to the 510 + (I will basically hammer the end of the soft silver wire to be the perfect diameter of the 510 + contact). I'm using the spring because the silver is too soft to actually be the spring, and this will act as my actual button spring as well (I think this is pretty clever since I basically came up with a design that will not have to be adjusted to fit your battery, the spring does all the work).
~So in a nutshell, all of the connections in this
mod will be as thick, and short as ultimately possible to make the connections (without using the mod body as part of the circuit). It's all .9999% pure silver contacts the whole circuit (besides the atty itself, which I'll be using a tobh atty with a copper positive post
to help with that end of the circuit), and this silver will be coated/wrapped in something heat-resistant to prevent oxidation, and whatever ultimately can't be protected I'll simply clean myself. So I think I've just about made it as efficient as possible, I've punched in some number and with a 4.2v vtc4 (not including the atty's resistance) it'll theoretically come out to a .04 volt drop. (I'm not getting my hopes up for that though, because I'm bound to make something that isn't quite perfect in the scheme of things.)
Thanks for commenting Mundy! I'm still in love with your magic twisted ribbon wire, it's currently in my "flavor machine" right now which is a drilled out immortalizer
rda, with your magical coil in it.
Anything else you can add to this will help all the more, I'd be glad to hear it, two brains are better than one!
