Replacing dead Jornada batteries

Batteries for the Jornada 720 are increasingly hard to get new at a reasonable price, particularly the extended batteries. Has anyone tried opening the casing to replace the actual cells? I have a source for 3.7v 2000 mah cells at $1.50 each that look to be the exact size replacements for the ones in the standard battery pack (and possibly the extended). Can anyone provide instructions (preferably with pictures) as to how to safely open the casing so that the cells can be replaced? Or, does someone have a dead battery that they could ship to me so that I could experiment on it? If I am successful, I will gladly post detailed instructions on how to replace the cells.

-Daniel Marsh

Nice idea, and there is already a thread on doing just that for the NEC 700 series here on the forum.

Did you see the front page new posting dated January 16th 2005. If not it may interest you.

Gee ... if only I had known your source before!!
Care to share that source?

I managed to pry the casing open as carefully as possible and replace the cells with the ones I found. There is almost NO space to spare inside the casing, and I had to resolder my rebuilt pack several times to get it to fit. It was NOT a fun 5 minute project. I was never able to get the casing to snap back together as firmly as before, and had to use packing tape to keep the two casing pieces firmly together. In the future, I think I will buy new batteries as long as they can be found, even if they are a bit pricey. If you still want to recondition your own pack, I bought my cells at Vetco Surplus in Bellevue, WA.

I bought a NIB Diamond Mako on ebay last year, and despite its shrinkwrap, the batteries wouldn't take a charge (must've sat on the shelf too long). I had to rebuild the pack, and it was no small feat, given that the pack was buried deep within the Mako's tiny frame.

The trouble is, users learn such procedures on-the-fly, and usually only do it once. I have a couple of questions about your battery source. I went to their site, but saw no pictures. Are their batteries "tabbed," I think the word is? Meaning that they have no nipple, hence easier to solder? Though from your post, soldering didn't sound easier one way or another.

Jake

Hi there,
I found these two pages a while back which go through the process of re-celling a Jornada 720 battery. Pages have been passed through Babelfish so the text needs a few reads to make sense.
Pictures are handy although I never had to do as I found some secondhand batteries that were ok.
Stevie

Page1
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=ja_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww1.linkclub.or.jp%2F%7Ekenfuji%2Fjornada.htm

Page2
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=ja_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww1.linkclub.or.jp%2f%7ekenfuji%2fjornada2.htm

If anyone is interested, I have a few second hand batteries for jornada HPCs in a very good shape, please take a look on this thread for more details:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=621

Thanks,
Claudio Neves