[eq1]

Thanks a lot for your help. I decided not to pay too much attention to my internal resistance calculations, as I don't really know what a significant value is. For example, an average of 0.14 ohms for all sticks, with 2 sticks at 0.17 and 1 at 0.15; most at 0.14, a handful at 0.13. I don't know how large a difference matters, plus, I wasn't going to change any sticks anyway... I did use them as one indicator of stick health, along with other things, like calculations for self-discharge, and mostly graphs of discharge/charge capacity over the 5 cycles...

On the pairings, Ron at HBR responded to my question about that over at Insight Central. It seemed pretty clear he was saying 1 & 2 form a pair, 3 & 4, and so on... I went with that and paired up the weakest stick with the strongest, the second weakest with the second strongest, and so on... Most of the sticks were pretty similar, though. There was really only one pair with pretty much the weakest sticks, that I didn't want together. It seemed logical to me - that if the BCM monitors pairs of sticks, you should try to make each pair the strongest possible. But who knows...

I got the pack back together and in the car. Drove about 200 miles today. Seemed flawless to me. I pushed assist and it never wavered. The lowest the SoC dash gauge fell was 16 or 17 bars. It started at 19, took some regen and popped up to 20. I'd push assist on a hill, or a freeway on-ramp, and it'd drop to 19. If starting at 19 and doing the same it might drop to 18. With multiple, half-gauge assists on the freeway, on inclines, it dropped to 17 or so. I could hold half-gauge assists for quite a long time - as long as I needed to - up freeway inclines... One thing that seemed odd, or novel, was, on some of these longer assists, the SoC gauge might drop to 17 or 16, but it would pop back up to 18 or 19 - without having observed the charge gauge charging at all in the intervening time. It was as though, under heavy load, the voltage would drop a bit and the SoC gauge would reflect that. And then once the load was removed (i.e. no more assist needed), the voltage would pop back up, and so would the SoC gauge - just like the voltage readout does when you're cycling batteries - it drops under load but then pops back up...

I did some full assists and had no problems, no big drops in the gauge, no drop outs in assist power, just a good strong pull...

So, hopefully this will last for some time. I'll try to post some of the data later, maybe the excel spreadsheet I worked with, etc.

BTW, if anyone decides to do this, here's one tip: There's 6 colored wires going from the BCM to the circuit board side of the battery pack. They run along the corner of the pack. Two are red, one long, one short. These snap into channels molded into the orange plate on that side. You need to pull them out when you take the plate off - BUT, after the week or 2 of cycling, you're likely to forget that they snap back into the orange panel and connect to 2 of the 20 PTC strip screws. Ask me how I know. They're the only 2 connections that could easily be forgotten, or rather, that one can easily mistake as being connected to something left in the car, like the DC-DC converter side of things... I got the pack all back together and in the car, only to discover that these two RED wires dangling there should have been connected before I put the circuit board back on. Lifting the battery pack into the car once is bad enough; having to take it back out and put it back in again is a real bummer (not to mention having to remove the circuit board again)...

All in all, though, there's not much you're likely to miss, just taking everything apart, not labeling or taking pictures, and just putting it all back together as seems logical as you move along...

Final note: my pack has 168,000 miles on it. I'm totally impressed with what I've seemingly achieved with this cycling process... I started the pack having charged it up as full as it would go with the car charging system. The average initial discharge was only about 1500mAh. Taking self-discharge into account (i.e. only able to do one stick at a time, so by the time you get to the 20th it's sat for awhile), as well as the average amount I've been able to discharge (~85%), I estimated that the sticks were charged to about 2000mAh when they all came out of the car. My 4th cycle discharge averaged 4607mAh (the 5th was a little different procedures so not directly comparable). And my final cycling-charge averaged 6773 mAh (I did do a final final top-up of every stick in a short interval, a balancing charge so to speak, as I don't have a grid charger to do the whole pack at once). But anyway, if I could pull the average 85% out of these sticks, I'd be pulling about 5750mAh: compare that to the 1500 I stared with. I've probably at least doubled the capacity, maybe closer to tripled, while I've probably gotten rid of some ... aspects that limited performance (I don't know, voltage depression, nickel dendrites, whatever. Maybe just the increased capacity alone is enough)... Supposedly my pack was balanced to begin with, just weak, as the P1449-78 trouble code plus subcode is the 'lowest on the totem poll', to use Ron at HBR's description. He said the other codes would be reported first if they were a problem, and since they weren't they're not... But he also said that he's had to replace most of the sticks on packs with 1449-78 code. So, I guess only time will tell if my pack's revitalized performance will actually last...