Wire wrapped

A few days ago, I took my boys to play in the local woods, and my PRC-320 as well so I could have a play. Sat on the top of the hill watching my boys playing, I threw out the 5m wire as a counterpoise, and a quick over a tree branch end fed for 18MHz.

Sadly, on retrieving the antenna wire, it snagged on a split in the branch. Now, rather than my two 'new' antenna wires, I was using a much older one, which had no throwing cord. This meant that I had to throw the actual wire over the branch, and this had snagged on one of the length markers (a big black disk) just a few feet from the end. Unfortunately, in the attempt to free the wire, which was too high up to climb to, the wire snapped.

Im stuck now trying to work out a repair method for this kind of wire! As this is an old roll, Im tempted to remove the length markers and just use it for a random wire when needed. Whats awkward is that the break is at the plug end, i'll need to find a suitable plug that I can attach. I might cut a few meters of this wire off and add a crocodile clip to it to make a ground wire.

After a few recovery attempts, ive decided the 1.2Ah 24v and the 15v batteries are to be dismantled.

Opening the 15v battery is trickier than the 24v, as the top is a thick plastic with a thin rim. Drilling out and punching through the rivets was easy enough, but actually prising off the lid is difficult - ive already broken a small bit of the rim off!