64: Sunday 8th November 2009

My wife did a search to see how my blogs etc. were proliferating on the web and came across an article that I submitted to The Open University some time ago about the United Nations Climate Change Conference. I was reading an alumni email and they were asking for articles, so I told them I was converting a car to electric and they wrote back with some specific areas they wanted to highlight in the articles. I wrote an email back and now it has been posted at:

2009-10-05 09:35: 9 weeks till COP15 - OU student converts Ford Probe to electric

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So back to the probe....
Before I can put the gearbox back I had to clean all the drive shaft parts as some had been on the floor and picked up dirt. I didn't want any contamination of the constant velocity joints. All the parts had the grease wiped off, then brushed with spirit and wiped dry. This will all be greased again as I put it back together. The photo shows one of the CV joints without the balls, ready to go back together. I used white spirit to degrease the parts. This is normally used for cleaning paint brushes and is like turpentine.

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Ran out of daylight, so I used the time to adapt the car engine coolant temperature sensor to measure the motor temperature. I think I mentioned before that the ADC FB1 4001 DC motor has a blind 5/8 UNC thread in the side. In the photo you can see the engine coolant temperature sensor and from the top is the electrical terminal, the hex for fitting it, the threaded part and a straight part. The thread was 10mm and the straight part also 10mm.
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The threaded hole in the motor was measured at 16mm deep, so I fitted the nut to the bolt and then measured along 16mm and cut 1mm longer so the nut can be tightened once the bolt has reached the bottom of the thread. I tidied this up with a file, so it would thread easily.

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Next an 8mm hole was drilled 20mm into the bolt head to take the straight part of the sensor. The same hole was drilled out to 11mm and 10mm deep to take the sensor thread.

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Next the sensor was glued into the hole in the bolt head with 'Super Steel' epoxy this is the same as 'JB metal'. This has many of the same properties as metal, so it conducts heat to the sensor from the motor, through the bolt. This is now ready to be fitted when the motor is mounted in the car. So it just hooks up to the temperature gauge connection and then the original temperature gauge shows the motor temperature. I will need to make a circuit to monitor this sensor and when the temperature gets high it will switch on the fan relays that were for the radiator originally. I shall use the original radiator fans mounted to blow through the area around the motor and controller heat sink. This will keep everything from overheating. The motor also has a switch fitted in it with 2 wires hanging out. I shall use this for the motor controller to limit the current and again this will prevent the motor from overheating in Summer.