Probably the best plating to use would be Alodine (AKA Bonderite). Not terribly difficult to do. A bit pricey, but you would only have to coat a tiny area. Alodine is the conductive, gold/brown plating used on aluminum aircraft parts. Great for corrosion prevention. Conducts very well (unlike anodizing.) Abrasively clean the aluminum surface, slightly etch with AlumiPrep, rinse with distilled water, dip in Alondine, (or brush on,) rinse with distilled water. You could do it yourself, actually. I have done it myself with aircraft parts. Unfortunately, Alodine is a chromate solution, which must be carefully contained. (Erin Brokovich became famous for suing on behalf of chromate pollution victims.) As I understand it, they make non-chromate Alodine-like plating solutions. Might be worth looking into.
You buy Bonderite from Aircraft Spruce:
http://www.aircraftspruce.com/categories/building_materials/bm/menus/cs/metalprepsupplies.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromate_conversion_coating

Bill D.

On 2/6/2018 11:44 AM, Lee Hart via EV wrote:
Bill Dube via EV wrote:
Did you lightly sand (or Scotchbite) each terminal and apply a thin
coating of NoAlOx before connecting? No? Then you have to redo all the
connections. They will give you no end of grief. (Ask me how I know. :-) )

If you don't do this connection treatment, the dissimilar metals will
corrode, over heat, and behave badly in general. Often, the cell
terminals arrive with a lot of corrosion formed during shipping.

Bill has it right! I've had Thundersky, CALB, and GBS cells, and *all of them have at least one aluminum terminal. It is devilishly difficult to make reliable low-resistance connections to aluminum.

I've even wondered if there is some way to plate them with copper or nickel; or spot-weld some easier-to-connect metal tab to the terminals.


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