244: Saturday 23rd February 2013

I had a friend come round today to help load the rear bumper carefully onto my car. We caused a few minor pint chips that I will need to touch up at some point. I took it for a little drive and hit a speed bump too fast and caught the rear bumper. It made an awful racket, but only a tiny paint chip right at the bottom. It did pop the side fixings right by the wheel arches on both side, so I need to fix them again. The colour match is good though I think it looks cool, can't wait to get the side skirts and front bumper on now. The photo does not do it justice.

243: Friday 22nd February 2013

The new grille material arrived Wednesday, and it was my daughter Sydney-Ann's 17th Birthday yesterday. So armed with her provisional driving license and some insurance we went driving. She has driven at a closed driving centre many times before, so she knows how to handle a car, but this was her first time on the open road. She did really well on her first drive than had a driving lesson with an instructor later in the afternoon. This was a bit of a shock to her, but she didn't really like the instructors teaching style so now we are looking for a new instructor. Day 2 of her driving and she has calmed down a bit more now and I had time to go fit the mesh on my rear body kit bumper. I put the bumper face down on some trestles (with padding), offered up the mesh to the holes to be covered and marked them about 15mm larger than the hole with a red marker pen. I took some electrical cutters and nipped along the marked lines to get the general shape. I offered the mesh up the bumper and generally bent the edges over carefully. Then I took a small hammer and gently tapped the edges of the mesh. It felt soft like shaping lead, and it was easy to work. I then mixed up some P40 fibre glass and applied it below the mesh and then pulled it up onto the edges. When it was dry I could turn it over to take this photo. Everything is nice and solid and it looks really neat. Next is to fit the bumper on the car, hopefully for the last time, then I can put the wheels back on and get him back on the road.

242: Saturday 16th February 2013

Finally the rear bumper from my body kit is painted. It is not a fantastic job and I will have it done again along with the rest of the car. However it is not white and will look like it belongs on the car even though my painting skills leave a lot to be desired. It took me a long time because there was loads of blemishes and small cracks along with some nasty chips that I had to repair and finish. I am not very good at this so it took several attempts to get it right. The finish of the bumper is good, but the paint has orange peel on the red. I have tried to polish it out, but stopped as I could see the paint wearing through before I got a nice smooth finish. Fortunately this was a test area behind where the number plate goes. The black has some pin holes in it but shines real nice. Before it goes back on I need to put some stainless steel mesh behind the exhaust pipe cut-outs. The tiny cut outs will have ultrasonic parking sensors mounted in them (another project for later). So once I have some mesh mounted, it can go back on the car. Then I can put the wheels back on and put him back on the road. I also spoke to my battery salvage supplier and he may be getting some new (salvage) batteries in soon and I should be able to pick 15 good ones to run again. I have 2 duds on the car and 13 in my garage, so this should give me a good stock of spares for the future. Also I have seen a brief video of the battery monitoring system working, but it was done on a mobile phone and not very clear. It had a bit of a slow display refresh rate and my friend Ray said he can make some changes and get it fast enough that the eye won't see any changes. It was something to do with refreshing the display for each piece of data instead of refreshing it for a block of data. It should be about 10 times faster in future. The refresh rate was about 0.5 seconds initially. So we should be able to fit this on soon. Then this can be upgraded to display in different ways and then add a rear view camera to the system and ultrasound sensing to measure distances for reversing. This will ensure I don't damage my beautiful new bodywork...!

241: Saturday 15th December 2012

Not much to report at the moment. Sparkie has been parked up and on stands since September as I have slowly been getting the body completed. I have been re modelling my garage, so now it is a garage with a wall about 2/3 of the way along. If I took out the work benches I might just get a Smart car in here ( the 2-seater). We get a laundry room into the deal and more space in the kitchen to practice my new found love of cooking. Anyway, I have fixed the holes and chips in the rear body kit and fitted one side skirt panel roughly. I need to get this fitting better then I can move onto the other side before tackling the front bumper. This is probably my least favourite part of this project, but it will make the biggest difference to the car's appearance. To start with I shall prime and paint these new panels with spray cans just to get the right colour before going back on the road. All the panels are dull and need painting, so I want to give it to a professional when I have the money. For now though I don't want white panels on a red car, so I shall give them a quick blow over. Still no more recycled batteries, so can't get any decent range. I shall start converting to Lithium before long, but I believe it will be a few at-a-time. My friend and partner for the battery monitor system, Ray, has done a great job so far developing his range of modular boards. They are now approved for sale and CE marked. He is working out a few bugs with the CAN system settings, then should have an example running on the bench soon that will display 10 battery voltages. As this has a touch screen we shall develop a system where touching any one bar shall show greater detail of that particular battery or battery group (depending on the measuring points) including the actual voltage in large numbers.'+' and '-' buttons on the screen can select the next or previous battery, and touching the centre shall return to all 10 bars etc. Also when I select reverse, I want the screen to show a rear view from a colour camera. Now this bit I like.... Hopefully I can get back onto the bodywork again soon, but I still have a load of plumbing to do in the laundry room, move the boiler and install a downstairs toilet. Too much to do, not enough time. I am not in a great hurry, but I do miss my electric drive.

240: Saturday 29th September 2012

I have been having a lot of battery problems recently and been swapping batteries around to get the most from them. I have not been able to get any fresher ones as the battery recycling yard have not had the right types coming in. I ran a seperate pair of wires from the back and mounted a meter on the side of the bracket for the motor controller programmer so I could monitor a single battery. I was surprised to see one of the batteries (the suspect one) go as low as 4v when loaded under heavy acceleration.  So I decided to park him up for a while and work on the body.

 

So far I have been working on the rear end body kit. It comes as a moulded glass fibre skin. I have removed the structures from the original bumpers and there are foam blocks and an impact bar too. You can see these all in the photo below clamped to the new bumper.

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The foam blocks were cut to fit as the contours were different.

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The old sub structure was applied to the new bumper.

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Then I applied some Isopon P40 glass fibre mix to fix the substructure in place.

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I used more fibreglass to fix the other brackets in place too.

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I added some aluminium angle section to the tabs on the new bumper to re-inforce and strengthen the fixing point. This was drilled in many places to give better adhesion.

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I still need to do some adjustments to the fixing on the side by the wheel arches as they are sticking out a little, but no too much.

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I still need to add the license plate lights and the license plate itself. There are a number of scratches and a couple of chips that need repair. At this point in time I am not sure about the finish. I shall add some mesh to the holes for styling as well after the finish is done. I have ordered some red chrome vinyl wrap from eBay to try out on the sunroof panel. If this works out o.k. then I shall do the rest of the car using the same wrap. This has 2 factors; is it easy to apply and is the finish like a mirror? If it is easy to apply, but the finish is not like a mirror, then I shall use a gloss red wrap instead. If it is too difficult to do then I shall go for a paint finish and my brother will help with that.

239: Monday 23rd July 2012

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.