AA Spacers

[pinetree89]

Does anybody recommend or know of any good AA spacers? Either commercially made or home made?

I could see how having a few might be advantageous in a disaster type scenario where one might be forced to scrounge cells and you have a 2AA light. It seems most 2AA lights support 1AA no problem as most have boost circuits. An AA spacer could give you more flexibility should you have cells at differing states of charge or heaven forbid you're down to your last AA cell.

Anybody have or use AA spacers?

 

[Shadowww]

http://www.cpfmarketplace.com/mp/showthread.php?103143-Dummy-CR123A-AA-5-each-Shipped
If you can afford those, it's your best option. For me, $5 per dummy cell was too much, so I made a few myself out of few old dead NiCd AA's by shorting their positive and negative with a blob of solder (negative is whole cell's body, it reaches to the top of cell).

 

[weegidy]

$2.00 spacer, $1.00 shipping. http://www.ebay.com/itm/AA-SIZE-BAT...636?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a073d9854

 

[AnAppleSnail]

Cut off lengths of quarter twenty bolt, metal bar, or whatever and wrap tape or paper around them. You can't get much cheaper than that. Be sure to polish the ends for good contact, and cover the whole side of the spacer, for bad contact.

 

[uk_caver]

For something half-way between homemade and commercial (and fairly cheap), one option might be cutting some AAA-length pieces of suitable metal bar and then inserting them in cheap AAA->AA adapter shells (something like 4 or 5 for $2-50 from various oriental suppliers).

 

[Yamabushi]

+1 on the AAA adapters. That way you can use scrounged AAA in a pinch.

 

[Quest4fire]

I bought aluminum rod stock close to the diameter of a AA cell at Lowe's, cut it to length, sanded the ends and covered it with AA size shrink wrap (I'm sure electrical tape would work just fine). A very cost effective solution if you need several dummy cells, or have other uses for aluminum rod, like heatsinking.

 

[uk_caver]

Having found a need for some AA dummy cells myself, I just made some fairly neat-looking ones from AAA->AA adapters and pan head 4mm stainless bolts.
The head of the bolt fits perfectly in the base of the adapter, and using bolts means that cutting to length doesn't have to be to high precision.

I put two nuts on the bolt, placed so the end nut is just short of where I want to make the cut, tightening the nuts together to keep them in place while cutting, and afterwards the end nut can be used to precisely adjust the overall length, and then locked with the other nut again.
The nuts keep the bolt well-enough centred in the adapter, but a turn or two of tape around them would stop any rattling, if rattling is an issue.
In practice, rattling is unlikely when the cell is under even a tiny amount of compression, as it would be when fitted into any equipment.