Found this beauty the other day:

Good news: the camcorder was fully functional when plugged into its DC power supply.

Bad news: the battery it came with was dead as a doornail.

I tried a variety of techniques to revive the old battery, including:

• Using alligator clips in combination with a 20Ω resistor to safely discharge the battery down to 4V, followed by recharging on the battery charger. No luck.
• Using a 9V battery to "zap" the dendrites in the old battery, which also failed.

At this point, I was down to 2 options: ordering a modern third party replacement (which was roughly $25) or creating my own battery pack. Luckily, I was able to find these Sub C Ni-Cd batteries from Amazon that would A) serve as a suitable replacement and B) provide a slightly longer runtime than the old battery (2200 mAh for the new batteries, 1800 mAh for the old batteries):

Thus, I ordered them and got to work. Here is what my workstation looked like during the repair process:

It's sort of hard to tell based on this image, but the new batteries (green battery on the bottom right) were not an exact replacement for the old batteries (tan ones in the center) due to differences in size. ALWAYS CHECK BOTH MEASUREMENTS!!! The new batteries were the same height as the old cells but were slightly larger in diameter. Rather than ordering ANOTHER set of batteries, I decided to go with a "brick style" layout (3 on bottom, 2 on top) rather than the flat pack layout used by the original battery pack.

Luckily, the matching battery heights allowed for the new cells to be inserted into the base of the old battery pack that sits flush against the camera. After some careful soldering, wiring, and hot glue, I had a battery pack that was working!

Everything is carefully soldered and properly insulated with hot glue, resulting in no hot spots on the battery. While this worked, I didn't want to list a camcorder that looks like part of it was ripped out of the Terminator's abdomen so I decided to come up with a case for it.

I had initially used electrical tape to wrap the battery pack like a mummy. However, this was an ugly solution and made it much harder for the battery pack to make proper contact with the camera's battery terminals. Attemping to remove the tape from the base of the battery pack for a better fit resulted in an even uglier solution. Kinda glad that I neglected to take photos of that attempt.

My final solution? Vinyl wrap. I had bought a couple of smaller rolls for my car but was disappointed with the color so I never used it. While unsuitable for my car, the dark blue carbon fiber wrap made for a much cleaner "shell" for the batteries. A couple wraps of vinyl, some quick work with a heat gun, and careful trimming resulted in this:

Pretty happy with how it turned out. Best of all, everything works as intended and I no longer have issues with the pack not making contact with the camera's terminals. Should have this one listed soon!