This seems cool but unlikely something I'd use. There's two types of people who will be building their own e-bike batteries:

1. cheap bastards hoarding broken tool packs to tear down and make a pack with mixed cells. The hard part here isn't welding it's testing and sorting the cells by ir and capacity.(edit: me)

2. People building very high performance bikes at 72-100 volts and very high amperage, likely not using 18650s.

In both cases I'd be curious to know if there's a difference in maximum current between a welded pack and your clamped design.

This is exactly what I was wondering when I first saw Guarch (great videos btw). Is this something that users of regular Bosch batteries would benefit?

I’m assuming that those commercial battery packs have a good BMS and temperature control, basically preventing most fires. Then, at the same time I saw those rugged charging boxes. Would regular customers benefit from a more sturdy battery design like yours?

The sturdiness of the housing seems important. My cell phone was run over by a semi truck and the only part not affected was the battery because it had a recessed aluminum thing for it.

Distrust any BMS that has a charging port that is separate from the discharge port. Handle undervolt/over current on the controller, or if you wanna be really bootleg a plain old fuse and a voltmeter you watch manually.

I'm still in the process of building a ebike battery, but these are things I've learned from disassembling a number of different packs. The exception is Milwaukee 20v seems to handle protection on board pretty well.

Edit: Grauch my only concern with it is the sturdiness of the contact with the cells with no spot welds. If this is intended to be used with recycled cells there can be some slight tolerance issues from removing previous spot welds.