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.