Anyone Rebuild the battery in Vostro 1500 yet? / Questions

My battery in my Vostro 1500 lasts 8min running full power now so it is mostly dead. I have been unemployed for 11 months now so funds to buy a new battery are very low. I have soldering skills and I upgraded the CPU in this thing so this should not be a problem. I just have a few questions...

Does anyone have any tricks on cracking the weld on the case? Besides scrapping away at it with a knife for 3 hours.

How much would the replacement cells be (estimate)? Has anyone done one of these batteries know what is going to be inside of mine?

From my understanding if it were to explode it would be because I got the battery to hot when I am soldering it. Is this correct?

 

I'm not at all an expert on this, but I've observed that the professionals who do this sort of thing use spot welders on batteries - not soldering irons. Just do some quick searching online, and you'll find a number of results about this. There are a number of things you need to consider besides just exploding the battery. These batteries are volatile enough, that I sure wouldn't want to take a soldering iron to one!

 

This guy is using a soldering iron similar to the one I have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqRvAu71Gw

lol... maybe I should wear a fire suit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepvT0txrkQ
(best video I could find using a battery similar to the one I would be soldering ignited by heat)

Still any information would be helpful... depends on how much money I would save I guess... not like I haven't done things more dangerous

Edit: Ah I notice there are tabs on his batteries... so not much heat is directly on the battery.

 

Don't know about the Vostro 1500 specifically, but whenever I looked into rebuilding the battery on my D830 and D630 -- the cost of the raw batteries, versus a complete Chinese assembled battery pack was within $10 of each other. So didn't make a lot of sense to attempt a rebuild.

 

Thanks everyone,

I will take your work for it and pass on this project.

/thread