200: Sunday 31st July 2011
I had a refreshing week in sunny Spain on an all-inclusive holiday last week. This mainly consisted of a few walks along the beach, but mostly swimming in one of the 4 pools, sunbathing, food and drinks all free and really nice. Spent one day in a spa having Turkish, Roman, Scottish bi-thermal and aroma bi-thermal baths as well as a hot and cold jacuzzi. Feeling quite relaxed now. Came back yesterday and today I have rebuilt the battery racks for the front end of the car. In the photo you can see the batteries in position on the new rack, but the hold-down bracket is not finished yet. That is a job for tomorrow along with the rear racks. I am going to shed loads of weight and gain my boot space back. I have to remount some other brackets too for the vacuum pump and other circuits. Some of the batteries that I have brought back have lost their charge in the week they have been left and I suspect they may be FUBAR. I shall contact the recyclers and see if he has some more I can do some swapping with. He is only interested in the weight of the lead. 
199: Thursday 21st July 2011
Not much to report at the moment. I have spent the last 2 weeks charging batteries up. I ended up with 2 chargers and my neighbours one died, so now I need to buy him a new one. My cheap charger is still soldiering on and I now have 14 charged batteries, at least charged enough to make them usable. Generally they are all above 12 volts now. I have decided to go with 10 batteries and not 20. I know this will give me a smaller range, but with my new battery monitor I can see a battery failing early and swap it out. In theory I should have 13 spare batteries now and if my source gets more I can swap them for a nominal fee for nice fresh ones. He is only interested in the weight of lead for recycling and not whether the battery has any usable life in it. The last batch he had in was about 100 batteries. I bought 23 with the intention of mounting 20 and having 3 spares. I think at 580kg this is just too heavy. I have also worked out a different way of mounting the batteries on their end and getting a large boot space back. There are so many advantages with having 10 instead of 20 on board. The sacrifice is range. I rarely go any large distances and I have my little Fiat if I need to. Now this is truly a hobby mule and I can do lots more upgrades in future. I am looking forward to giving the paint a freshen up as it is really faded now. I am going on holiday soon, so I shall be having a week in Spain and 1 week at home. I expect to have sparkie back running again before the end of this second week of my holiday.
197: Thursday 7th July 2011
Today my batteries arrived at 7:30am on the dot, 23 of them. Now I need to figure out how to get them all in the car. When I got home from work I popped the terminal caps off and tested them. I found only 2 batteries had any charge at all in them. They had been completely discharged. In the photo you can see I have taken the 12v charger off the car to charge these one-at-a-time. This is going to take a few weeks, so now I am asking around for more chargers. I don't want to put them on the car charger as this will deliver a large current and these need to be conditioned back up to a working voltage. However it will take about 24 hours to charge each battery and I need 18 more to get the car working. If I had 2 chargers the would take about 9 days, with 3 chargers I can do this in under 1 week. I have plenty of other jobs to be getting on with until the batteries are all charged up. I need to get to the metal supplier and get some angle section to make the new brackets. I shall mount 4 in the front and 16 in the back. I need some copper straps to make the connections as well as I only have a limited supply. I was hoping to take my car to the vehicle enthusiasts day on Thursday next week, but it would be too much of a rush job to get it done in time. As I have a "spare car" now, I don't need to rush. I want to get back onto electric drive though as it is a lot cheaper, especially if I get to charge up at work.
196: Sunday 3rd July 2011
Sorry for not blogging much lately. I have secured some more batteries from a recyclers yard and they are Enersys (Hawker) 12V92F that is 12 volts and 92 Ah for a 10 hour cycle. As they are physically quite small I have asked for 20 batteries to make 2 strings of 10 and this should give me 184Ah of capacity at 120v. They Are Lead Acid AGM technology. I shall phone tomorrow to arrange the delivery date. These were relatively cheap and I have ordered an extra 3 as reserves in case one pops and to give me more options when I run into problems.
So onto the recent upgrades:
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The photo below shows the bracket that holds the front indicator and side light lens to the front bumper. This has damage in 2 places. I made a plate to cover the section that was cracked so it could support the fixing screw and the surrounding plastic securely and one of the sides was also cracked by the screw mounting, so I glued some washers either side so when it is fixed to the bumper it will stay together.
This is the Aluminium plate I made to support the mounting screw. I first made a paper template, then transferred this onto the Aluminium and then beat a curve into the shape.
Here the plate is glued in place and painted matt black. I used a simple spray on contact adhesive to fix this in place.
Next was the hood latch. I took this off and brushed the rust off using a wire brush wheel in my pillar drill and just kept moving the latch over it. I took off the some of the parts that were rusted right through. It is now just the essential part to unlatch the hood. A fresh coat of gloss black paint made it look ready to go back on. I also worked some release oil into the latch mechanism to make everything move easily and freely.
I spent some time with a wire brush wheel in my drill going round the area of the supporting structure behind the front bumper. This picture shows the finished area all brushed up and painted with smooth red Hammerite paint to stop the rust.
This photo shows the other side before any work was carried out and this side was the worst as the slam panel support was rusted right through and not attached at the bottom. This needed welding, so it was left until the welding was done.
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Next I moved onto the indicator and side light clusters. The photo shows a row of ultra bright LEDS all glued in place ready for wiring up. Originally I did some tests to try to run the LEDs in groups in series to eliminate the volt drop resistors. I found a group of 7 LEDs worked well an were nice and bright. However when I connected them and tried it on the car, they would not work because the voltage was slightly lower. This made them voltage intolerant. I had all the resistors I needed to have a single resistor for each LED, but inside the cluster this would generate too much heat as each resistor is essentially wasting 10 of the 12 volts available so the LED can work and this worked out nearly 0.25 Watts for each LED. I know this doesn't sound much, but I was planning to have 63 Ultra Bright Amber LEDs for the indicators and 63 Ultra Bright White LEDs for the side lights. That makes 126 LEDs at 0.25W or 32 Watts of heat.
Here the lens is separated from the mirrored part. I found that if I had 3 LEDs in series with a single volt drop resistor, then this was 1/3 of the number of resistors wasting energy and they are all doing this at half the voltage, so 1/6 of the power or about 5 Watts and that is o.k.
Here you can see the Amber LEDs all lit up in the dark. I shall still keep the bulb as this is brighter and the fault detection does not "see" the LEDs load properly, so with the bulb everything works fine.
Making up all these groups of 3 LEDs in series was much neater if I made them up before gluing them to the plastic lens. So I made a jig to position the LEDS so they could have the connections trimmed folded and soldered together nice and neat in 3s.
If you can make out in the photo below there are two long rows of LEDs (white and amber) mounted on the lens. This was a real labour of love as it took absolutely ages and was very frustrating as one little slip when tested them would damage a group of 3 LEDs, then I had to chisel them off the lens and make a new set of 3. They were all held on with super glue (cyanolacrylate).
Finally today my friend took Sparky away and welded the front panel. I can now finish brushing up the rusty bits and painting before the bumper goes back on with it's new funky LED lights, cool.
The same friend has also sorted me out another car to use while I am completing all the upgrades and waiting for batteries. I had another run-around when I first started this project in March 2009, but I sold it when I got Sparky on the road. This was a mistake as the Lead Acid batteries don't last very long so while I save up for Lithium batteries I shall keep getting recycled UPS batteries for a relatively cheap price and if I am stuck then I have my run-around to get me out of a fix. I feel much happier and my wife is too as I can stop nicking her car now. The Toyota Previa is quite a big car as a run-around and more expensive. This car is a 1998 Fiat Punto 1.2L Petrol and Manual transmission. Very clean and cheap to buy and run.
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I shall not leave it so long between blogs now. I just was a bit short of cash and I ran out of batteries in my camera and could not power it up to get the photos off.
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