In volume 16 of my favorite little time wasting magazine, Make, there was an article on how to build a ‘USBattery‘.  This involves taking a standard AA battery, gutting it, stuffing a USB flash drive into it, and making it show 1.5v on a multimeter.  It sounded like a neat little project, I had a spare hour, and the right parts laying around to build it.  My optimism was quickly shadowed by frustration, and my spare hour turned into a full day of work.

The first step of the project is probably where I should have known it wasn’t going to be easy.  The author, Andrew Lewis, started by cutting off just the tip of an alkaline battery.  He used a primitive hacksaw to accomplish this goal.  I decide that my Dremel could do it quicker, easier, and cleaner than a hacksaw.  I slowly started cutting through the discharged battery.  As I broke through the thin metal skin and my small rotary disc made contact with the goo inside, the speed of the Dremel tool picked up the black sludge and sent it flying in all directions.  Thankfully I was wearing goggles, as that was the only part of my face that was spared of the not-so-pleasant feeling of the battery acid.  Sometimes primitive tools work better than their modern equivalent. (more…)