Teardown Tuesday: The Lowly 9V Battery

Here's one that you probably wouldn't expect to be interesting at all. The simple 9-volt battery.You would probably expect something that looks like the insides of a normal battery. Maybe a stick of carbon and an electrolyte. But you would be wrong.

Here's the first step I took -- remove the bottom of the battery. All I did was use the pliers on my Leatherman to start to pry the seal off. Obviously it didn't leak or blow up when I started to do this.

You can finally start to see the magic.

The insides are a block of smaller batteries!

...and they are all wired together:

As it turns out each of these cells is nothing more than your [almost] every day AAAA battery. It's very much like the normal AA and AAA batteries, but just a bit thinner for the most part. A lot of times they are also called pen-light batteries.Each cell is your typical 1.5V (like the normal AA) -- and since you have six of them wired in series: 6 x 1.5V = 9V.

So, there you have it: something that would normally be considered horribly boring actually turn into something interesting.There's more pictures as well if you want to explore this in any more detail.[smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=19353884_4T5W9t&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="lightbox" captions="false" sort="false" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]