What is a hot spring?

[cdemaria87]

I have seen many references to this but idk what it is and all I find when I Google it is geyser type hot springs. Not real helpful.

I have a bolt clone and one day the spring got really hot Which caused it to stay compressed. I had to torch it to stretch it back out. At the time I was runny cobra clone at .4 ohm. Since then I got another (true mech) for the Genesis attys (.15-.7 ohm) and only use bolt with kayfuns (1-1.8 ohm) and haven't had trouble again. What caused the issue with this spring? I got cobra and bolt as my first set up and had ran them together ranging from .2 ohm to 1.5 ohm without issue. I checked atty on ohm meter and it wasn't shorting after this happened. I took both the cobra and bolt apart and replaced the insulators with 2 layers of that shinking electrical tubing.

I have 30 amp batteries for lower builds and a 10 amp for my kayfuns (I only have this one cause it's higher mAh so lasts all day at work)

Thank you

 

[itskohler]

The spring getting hot is caused by the conductivity of the spring. It's probably not as good as, say, a silver coated spring. Thus making it hot. This is the reason I only buy mods that have, or can be converted to, a magentic switch.

 

[Baditude]

A hot spring is designed to collapse at a certain temperature to discontinue the battery circuit within the mod as a safety feature. The idea is this "may" prevent the battery from going into thermal runaway in the battery tube after a short occurs in the setup and the battery begins to heat up.

A regulated mod whose processor has built-in protections against hard shorts, short circuits, over-discharge of a battery, reverse polarity protection, thermal protection, etc, shuts the mod down in a dangerous situation. A mech mod obviously doesn't have these protections, and may only have a hot spring and vent holes - protections which only kick in after the battery is in big trouble. These are there to hopefully prevent your mech from becoming a pipe bomb.

IMR batteries should only vent hot gas, but can also swell in size and possibly block off the vent holes in the mod. ICR batteries can do all of that, in addition to vent flames and possibly explode from all of the pressure buildup during thermal runaway.

Once a hot spring has collapsed its done its job and should be discarded and replaced with a new one. (Just like a 2cent for safety mod fuse.) But first figure out what caused the spring to collapse in the first place before continuing to use that setup. A hard short or pushing a battery beyond its limits can be a cause. This was a warning that there was something wrong in your setup.

Mechanical Mod & Battery Safety Guide

 

[itskohler]

I never knew that the springs were designed to stay that way for safety reasons. Hm.

 

[cdemaria87]

Okay. Thank you. I will replace the spring. Not really sure what caused it. As I said. I checked the atty after this and it was fine. All my batteries r imr. It may have been the 510 connection on the mod. That insulator was terrible. That is now replaced. I use may m16 clone almost solely. Only use bolt now when I'm building and using m16 to fire coils.