The Super Batt-ery
1/4/2005
By: Roger Hewson
I was going to start this with a cliché “nobody likes dead batteries” statement, but any idiot knows having a dead battery sucks. For a motor to run it actually has to get going first and that is where the all important battery and starter come into the equation. Without them we would be rolling our cars to a start like a bunch of Citroen owners.
As we should all know, the battery is the heart of the electrical system. If you’ve got a bad ticker then it’s not going to provide the type of power needed when you’re trying to crank over a hot high compression engine or worse yet no power at all. Batteries are a necessary evil. They are heavy, take up a lot of space, but without them you might as well be driving a moped. Performance Distributors has a remedy to the space and weight issue with their Dyna Batt, a sealed battery that Performance Distributors says can turn over an engine with a compression ration up to 15:1 in a tight little package that makes Jessica Simpson look more like Homer Simpson.
An extra 13.5 pounds is a lot of weight. It might not sound like a lot, but when you are trying to shave every last ounce off of a car it’s a huge loss. I am willing to bet the backseat, door panels, and rear carpet those of you (and you know who you are) pulled out didn’t equal the 13.5-pound weight loss just by changing the battery. And you would still have a back seat to use.
Dyna Batt has taken the popular dry cell battery design and used new technology to shrink it to about one-third the size of a regular battery. This allows a weight savings of 13.5 pounds over a standard size wet cell battery. The small size and light weight come with no penalty in oomph either. The low internal resistance, high current flow cells allow energy to travel out of the battery more efficiently so it can easily do the work of a much larger one when starting your car, running your stereo and taking care of whatever else you need without even trying hard.
The Dyna Batt has several advantages on top of its light weight. Being only seven inches long, three inches wide and six and a half inches tall the Dyna Batt can be mounted almost anywhere. Because it is a sealed battery if you could securely mount it upside down on the roof it would still work properly. Placement of the Dyna Batt will affect the handling or weight transfer in a positive way compared to a heavy conventional dry or wet cell battery. How much will depend on how low and centrally it is mounted.
All of the safety and longevity advantages still apply to the Dyna Batt. Like all dry cell batteries it is impossible for the Dyna Batt to leak because there is no fluid. Any possibilities of battery tray or body panel corrosion due to an acid leak of zero. Any kind of component damage due to battery trouble is eliminated. Plus it isn’t possible for acid to spray all over the engine compartment during a collision if the battery breaks open.
Dyna Batt dry cell technology holds a charge longer than a wet cell battery. On top of that the dry cell Dyna Batt will take a charge faster and reach full capacity faster than a conventional wet cell will. This makes it ideal for a second car which doesn’t see a lot of time on the road. Around the shop we have found the Dyna Batt to be extremely helpful. It has always been there for a jump when we need it if the car it is in isn’t being used. It has gone from car to car on occasion when we have required it to without a fuss and has come through every time.
Our Dyna Batt’s first call to duty came when Overboost editor Chris Neprasch’s brother-in-law was caught with no voltage before a big four-wheelin adventure. Rather than join him in doing whatever it is groups of men that drive excessively lifted vehicles do alone together in the desert, we gave him the battery and asked us to report his findings. His response, “It was the best battery I have ever used out on the trails.” Considering how often he gets his Jeep stuck, we’re sure the Dyna Batt saw its fair share of the old turn-the-car-off-and-dig routine along with a bunch voltage sucking winch pulls.
Project Avenger has seen its better days. We were having a dust problem out in the shop so the once proud project car was called to duty as a large silver dust magnet. It kept the ground underneath of it nice and clean, but the battery died and the nearest parts store is like 200 feet from our office so getting a replacement was clearly too much effort. After losing an employee in one of the cobwebs, we decided it was time to wash the Dodge off before OSHA starting questioning us. Dyna Batt to the rescue once again because it was the only source of 12-volt energy in the office that we weren’t too lazy to lift into the engine compartment.
With the next football season only 364 days away we needed to pump up before next year’s tryouts. The advantage of building strength goes to conventional batteries, but the Dyna Batt was awesome for lots of reps and endurance. Endurance in the biceps and wrists are important, especially with our social lives.
We have been storing a couple of the Team Orange drift cars at the Overboost headquarters and conveniently enough, one of the cars was given to us with – you guessed it – a dead battery. You can’t just go to Pep Boys for a JDM battery to put in your 180SX and after pushing it up the trailer twice because the existing battery was so dead that it couldn’t even be jump started, the Dyna Batt saved us from more excessive work. The posts on it were able to be unscrewed and it just happened to be a perfect match to the threads on the 180’s battery terminals.
Even after being shoved into JDM cars, American cars, jump starting who knows what and just sitting for a few months, being started, run for a minute and shut off repeatedly, our Dyna Batt just keeps on truckin.
Sources:
Performance Distributors
www.performancedistributors.com
901.396.5782
