[geekmaster]

Battery charge complete (using external LiPo charger). USB cable disconnected. Inserted LiPo into PW3. Booted to diags (because ENABLE_DIAGS remains from low-battery CRP boot loop problem). Luckily, touchscreen is working at the moment, so disabled diags. Rebooted to main. Frontlight LEDS are dim but not off (directly visible without bezel). Started KUAL. Launched my frontlight control extension. Pressed "Frontlight OFF" button. And the LEDs turned completely off.

Yes, it is running on my repaired PW2/3 battery, with the LiPo replaced with a 500mAh quadcopter battery (with its own thermal protection circuit). Such LiPo batteries can be purchased for just a few dollars, and much larger ones for not much more.

So, this thread proves it can be inexpensive and relatively easy to repair a dead kindle battery, for probably any kindle (certainly a K2 and PW2/PW3), for just a few dollars. This may well be how those cheap Chinese "aftermarket" kindle batteries are made, or perhaps another way, but certainly available as simple DIY method for beginning hardware hackers.

EDIT: Now I need to take the time and effort to migrate my pictures from the albums to an external website (because many folks reported they cannot see most of the embedded images in this thread, even signed-in members). I strongly believe that creating a second account for the wiki probably also falls within mobileread guidelines, which is forbidden (but I find the guidelines more than a little confusing, and other members here have told me the "rules" are confusing to them too). So even wiki images are probably off limits. Anybody have suggestions for what external website I should move my mobileread images to, to stay within our stringent guidelines here?