I had a good drive to work and found the battery level to be about the same now that I am not using regen braking. It was comparable with the lower readings that I had on previous runs. I guess if I start hooning a bit more then it will go down, so I have lost a bit of capacity through no regen, but not a lot. It is easier to adjust driving style than refurbishing the motor. Next time something so drastic happens it would probably need a rewind or replacing (I fancy a Warp 9). Today my next project donor arrived (ZEN), a 2004 Mitsubishi Pajero. Now need to source a manual transmission and a few other bits to get started. I have a motor sources and I have spare batteries to test with. I hope to get these replaced for fresh ones some time soon. I am going to run a separate blog for this and have already started.
http://www.zen-ev.blogspot.com/
Check it out. I have one post from April that describes how I got the glider and another from today when it arrived at my house.
238: Sunday 22nd July 2012
Friday evening I borrowed an engine hoist from a friend and yesterday another friend came round to help me get the motor back in the car. As I had hurt my back and was not fully recovered I needed some help with heavy lifting. The motor with the clutch and flywheel fitted is too long to go straight up and onto the gearbox by about 6 mm. The motor goes up at an angle to get the clutch and flywheel in the bell housing and over the end of the input shaft. then we could lift the back end up while pulling the whole lot across. There is about 50mm to spare from the end of the motor to the body when it is all fitted. Once the top bolt was in then the rest went in easy as we could remove the hoist and get to everything easily. We put the charger and contactor plate back in place and then re-connected them. I made a couple of silly mistakes with the wiring so initially the main contator wouldn't work, and the brake vacuum pump wouldn't stop. A quick trace of the connections and both problems were solved. I dropped the car off the stands and went for a quick drive round the block. All was well, so I went a bit further, then put it on charge. I went and picked up my daughter's friend for a 15 mile round trip, again all was well. The motor is running very smoothly, but where I have switched off the regen and motor braking, the power steering contator starts its countdown as soon as I lift off the throttle pedal and coast, this meant that after 5 seconds of coasting I lost power steering. So I just changed the setting and now it is 20 seconds until the contactor drops out. Touching the throttle brings it on again, and the brake when in economy mode also brings it back on. The economy mode now just limits the power to the motor to half, whereas before it gave me extra regen, but that is switched off now. I do not want to use regen as this caused my brushes to wear out prematurely, so it shall remain switched off now. Also I am going work on getting hold of the Toyota power steering controller and connecting it up so it works as intended by Toyota with speed control and proportional steering power etc. This should save me a little bit of battery power too.
237: Tuesday 17th July 2012
Since I hurt my back there wasn't much I could do, but my friend offered to help and together we re-assembled the motor. I gave the motor a test run with a single 12v battery and it was fine. We assembled all the adapters, flywheel and clutch etc, and now it is ready to go back on the car. Cheers John for the help.....
236: Monday 16th July 2012
I fitted the new brushes in the end of the motor ready to go back on. As I had hurt my back and I am still recovering I thought I would do something that would move it along a bit and not hurt. In the video below I fit 2 new springs and show how to fit the and prepare to take the rotor. Also I tried to show how to fit new brushes when the motor is still on the car etc. So long as you can access all 4 openings in the motor end then it is not too difficult. They are all ready now for me to put the motor back together and give it a run on 12v. Hopefully my back will feel better tomorrow.
235: Sunday 15th July 2012
Today my back is really sore and last night it was worse. I don't know what caused my back problem, but I have not been able to do anything today. So I edited the video that I made. Yesterday I re-cut the grooves in the motor commutator and it should be ready to go back together. I made a special tool by grinding the edges down on a Phillips screwdriver using my bench grinder. I was using a junior hacksaw blade and it was taking forever and making my fingers sore. The new tool was much quicker and less likely to slip out of the groove. The ends of grooves were easier to finish up to. The photo below shows the finished commutator. I am not sure how to test this as all the com segments measure 0 resistance to the next one. I can see the grooves are clear right to the ends. I cannot trace out the coils as they disappear inside the rotor and I cannot figure where the come back out. Am I doing something wrong? It is like the rotor has one continuous winding that exposes all the loops at the commutator.
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This video shows the process I used and the tool to clean up the motor rotor grooves on the commutator.
234: Friday 13th July 2012
Today I got my motor rotor back. I had a look at it when it was in the lathe and it needed some more skimmed off. In total 1.6mm had to come off to get past the pitting where the brushes had burnt. This picture shows the rotor when I had just started to re-cut the grooves in the commutator. You can see how the cooper is overlapping.
In this photo you can see the junior hacksaw blade I was using to re-cut the grooves between the commutator segments. I have re-cut one groove here. About 50-60 more to go (I haven't counted them).
I started just using the hacksaw blade, but it was taking forever to get the slot right and to start with I was slipping quite often and scratching the copper. For me, the best way was to tap a palette knife (thin paint scraper) along the groove to lift the excess copper out, then use a Stanley knife to trim the edges and finally the hacksaw blade to finish up. The hacksaw blade gets a good size, slot nice and uniform. The knife was good for hooking the copper out at the end of the slot. Hopefully I won't have too many segments still electrically linked when I test them.
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