Hand made 3x 18650 battery pack charged but voltage says 3.87v

I'm with you on this. Get a common RC connector and a matching battery and stop flirting with danger.

Even the battery recyclers have issues with them! Lithium-Ion Batteries Are a Literal Trash Fire, and Getting Worse

@danj The other issue is the crap knockoffs. Back when 2 people here had a S3, we went through so many knockoffs I can tell from the label. A lot of the fakes are too good to know right away unless you have a small sample of known fake cells.

One of the S3's I have that doesn't work and is in poor shape (the one with a battery) has one I think is genuine, but I'm leery of it because of how many knockoffs floated around where they openly used them with case inflation and runtime issues. The dead giveaway was faded print for the serial number.

Sometimes you have no choice (Ex: Older laptops like the T61) or the OEM is far more expensive then the actual device. I don't have an issue with those devices with a knockoff, but at least use a good one. In some cases, knockoff is the way to go - especially with 2005-7/8 laptops on eBay. A lot of those Sony packs are part of the many battery recalls. Some sellers even get rid of the battery if it's dead or barely functional because of how common the recalled packs were. It's frustrating because they somehow made a cell that doesn't die easily, but I understand because I'm aware of the problem. I've seen some of them go for 10+ YEARS at reduced capacity normally; my nc6000 came with one that ran for 1 HOUR and it was from ~2005 and I got 6 months out of it. I miss those batteries since we lost them due to the Sony recall :(.

I’m stupid, I didn’t see it