120: Sunday 14th February 2010

It's Valentine's day and I have just about finished the conversion now. Everything is working and I got a friend to take it for a drive round the block. It is as smooth as silk. The only sound you can hear is a gentle whine from the power steering. I intend to upgrade this later and fit the proper Toyota controller and steering angle sensor, then hook it up to the vehicle speed sensor and it will work the same as a Toyota and should be quiet when there is no steering going on and less powerful when travelling at speed. I have also got a circuit breaker and contactor on their way to me that I can fit later. After a bit of tidying up under the hood, and many runs up and down and round and round in and out of my driveway I moved to the back of the car and finished off the vent tubes for the batteries. It now vents very neatly through a rubber grommet in the floor of the trunk and the tube lays nicely under the carpet, so it can't be seen past the batteries. In the photo I have folded the carpet out of the way.
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Next job to make the hold down bracket for the batteries in the rear. It is of course painted the usual 'fire engine' red. This is the one of the few jobs I need to finish. Tomorrow I shall stick some soft bath edging tape on the underside of the bracket to make up the small gap and secure the batteries. The tape happens to be 40mm wide, exactly the same size as the bracket, cool.

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Another pleasant job was fitting the labels on the driving controls. In the photo you can find "Forward", "Reverse", "PAS", and "Heat". When I put the heater on I have it set up so that it will only work with the blower on speed 3 or 4, so it takes a long time to build up heat. I found that if I have the heater on and the blower on 3, then put the heat setting to cold, very little air gets to the heater core and it heats up in just a few seconds. Then putting the temperature back up to hot gives a lovely toasty blast of warm air, superb. I will revisit the control switch for the blower to install a new contact to make it work on blower speeds 1 & 2 as well. Another upgrade for later.

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I gave the plastic trim for the slam panel a clean with some spirit and fitted this back under the hood. It is just for prettyfication, and it does it's job. You can see from the photo that everything is neat and tidy, but quite tightly packed. It was a packaging nightmare along the way trying to get everything in. On a Ford Probe the front end is quite low, so height is always a problem. I am completely happy with the way it all fits in now. I need to make a hold down bracket for the 12v battery charger sitting on top of two of the drive batteries. This is a recent addition and charges the 12v battery at the same time the drive batteries are getting charged. So I shall make a clamp that just holds it down. You can see this in the photo, just to the left of the battery hold down bracket, front and centre. I am a happy bunny today I can tell you. Tomorrow I will be having a first test run using the excuse of taking it for repairs (put some air in the tyres). Thursday my friend is coming round to help me set up the rear brakes properly. That is his expertise and I will be much happier when the little bit of sponginess has gone from the pedal. So some adjustments and another bleed and It is ready for the ministry test. I should get an Engineers report at the same time. So I can then get it insured and get the registration tax class changed.