It's been nearly a whole year since I last posted. I haven't had much to say as everything has just been working o.k. I cannot stress enough about how much better the the Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries are than Lead acid. Yes they cost a lot of money, but now it is easy to buy a second hand electric car and get the battery from it as well as the drive motor, controller, all the connectors etc. I want to try and transplant a Nissan leaf into a Jeep Wrangler TJ. I want to keep as much of the Nissan as possible including the instruments. Nice project and used Nissan Leafs are quite cheap now relatively. This is much cheaper than buying all the parts. I paid about the same price for my latest batteries as I could get a whole car for now.
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I have added a tow hook that was originally from a VW transporter. Chose this one as it has a particularly long hook so the bracket is well behind the body kit. My friend cut the cross member so I could get the hook and the thread for it to go into. I ended only keeping the thread itself and making the rest of the bracket from 6x40mm angle section.
I took a grinder to the front cross member to get some bare metal and welded the new bracket to it. Now if I get a problem I can get a simple recovery. The last few times I had to get a low-loader truck out to get me home. All those were due to problems with Lead acid batteries.
I went to pick my Daughter up last night and I had to do a U turn at the bottom of the road and the fuses blew on the power steering. I had to drive home without it and the steering was very heavy as I have quite wide tyres. I had a circuit breaker to replace the fuses, but never got round to fitting it, so today I rewired the power steering and put the new circuit breaker in. All is working again now.
Now the towing hook is done and I have the USA type headlight covers, I am ready to revisit the bodywork to get ready for paint. Before that happens, air suspension is going on so I can avoid speed humps and kerbs, and slam it down when I park for a bit of extra coolness. Plans for the instruments include a new battery monitoring system that works via Bluetooth and an Android app, so I want to mount an android head unit. and also move the JLD 404 instrumentation and hence the forward/reverse switch and stop button.
