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.





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.

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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).

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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.

233: Monday 18th June 2012

Wednesday morning I had a disaster on the way to work. I had been having some trouble driving and the motor controller kept cutting out with direction contactor open circuit fault. I managed to get some way to work and I pulled up to some traffic lights on a slight hill and it decided to stop completely. I had loads of cars honking horns as I was stuck. I rolled back a bit then got drive again and moved off the traffic lights, round a side turning, up a hill and into a lay-by. By this time the motor was making a loud whining noise and started smoking heavily. I opened the hood and smoke billowed out of the motor brushes. My travel partner got a taxi the rest of the way and I got a rescue truck. When I got home I went through the motor controller book and read about the fault code and it suggested a problem with the motor brushes not making contact. I stripped back some units under the hood to get access to the motor brushes and it was obvious when I looked into the motor that the problem was a little worse than just worn brushes. It took me another hour or so to get the motor out as I only had a trolley jack, some wooden blocks and some old wire. By tying the wire and dropping it down a bit at a time I eventually got it free. I took the motor apart and marked the pieces at the joins so it goes back together with everything the same. The photo below shows the commutator end of the motor armature. 

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This photo shows a closer view of the motor commutator and you can see heavy scoring, grooves, heavy pitting as the brushes must have been glowing to cause this level of pitting. I have found a local company that can undercut the comm for a reasonable price. Most of the brushes were completely worn down to the spring limits and the pigtails were making contact with the commutator.

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The photo below shows what is left of the some of the brushes. There is another 2 on my garage floor somewhere, but I can't be asked to find them at the moment. They will get swept up some time soon no doubt. I have found that it may be cheaper to get my brushes from USA as they are expensive here, even from a firm that only does brushes and knew my size exactly just by me telling them a little about them was very expensive. I would save half the price by getting them from USA.

As usual everything in the UK is twice the price than in USA. This is really biting me as I know people who have conversion businesses in USA that are making good money,  but when the parts are generally half price and readily available this is all possible. Over here it would be very difficult to make a profit even with a full order book. I believe the cause of this rapid wear of the brushes is due to the DC regen braking causing bad arcing at heavy loads. This is equivalent to going flat out in reverse on a motor that has the brushes advanced to the field windings. I have turned off all the regen controls now and won't be recommending them anymore, except on brushless and AC motors. The motor is only 3 years old.

232: Sunday 13th May 2012

Last Saturday I put the gear lever back in and I have driven it for a week now and it does make a very slight difference range, but not much. Usually I would be in 3rd gear only.
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I exploded a battery on Friday night. I had dropped my daughter off and was on my way back home and was hooning along to try for top speed. As I had kept the throttle pedal nailed to the floor, I was pulling max current for too long (800A) and I heard a bang and lost all power. I drifted off the roundabout and was parked on a small link road to another roundabout. After about 5 minutes the battery pack voltage had recovered and I was able to drive for a few seconds. I had called the rescue service and I was waiting. So repeatedly letting the charge build up then driving forward a few feet eventually got me off the roundabout. The recovery van turned up, but they had been trained recently in how to handle electric cars and told if they were not sure then just don't touch it. He towed me home then hung around while I swapped a battery. It was all running again after about 10 minutes work. These salvage batteries are o.k for now, but I now know that they can only tolerate so much hard driving. They were originally installed in a telecoms back up supply, so not really designed for these kind of heavy loads, at least not sustained for any time. There was no visible sign that battery was damaged, but the voltage did not even register on my tester. Another lesson learnt.

231: Wednesday 2nd May 2012

I made a new panel for the direction switch and stop switch with some hardboard and black felt. I glued some hard board on the edges of the pod so the panel had something to push against. I also painted the edges of the colour touchscreen black, as I could see an annoying thin white line down the edge of my mount. I re-used the old hole for the PAS switch. At the bottom of the photo you can see the panel with holes in it where the gear lever is going to go again.

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I had a result today as I found all the parts of my gear lever. It was raining so I thought that could wait for another night. In the photo below you can see this new panel is very neat this time as there are no fixings on show. I like the look of the black felt as it makes things hide.