Battery pack dead

After 3 1/2 years the battery pack couldn't make the 15 mile round trip to work anymore. I think I would have gotten more but last fall they tore up the road in front of work and rerouted it so I drove the truck to work for 6 months.

I'm thinking of going the LiFePo4 route with 60 - 180 Ah cells/ 192 volts.If anyone has a good suggestion as Ross Perrot said "I'm all ears"

The exterior was finished and the car washed and waxed this weekend. I realized that I wasn't going to paint the hood & trunk after 2 years so I gave it to the pros. Glad I did they did a nice job!

Still ticking along

I just thought I'd add a quick post on how the car is doing, GREAT! My commute is 14 miles round trip and the car gets driven daily unless there is wet snow on the pavement with salt. Hoping to make the body last. The DC -DC converter failed and a couple of relays but never left me stranded. Second year of batteries and still doing well.

Running

As some of you know the car has been running and I'm going to try to get this to a real time - so here goes.

I had a bad potbox, here is the the replacement ready to go in. The extra piece of aluminum is because I couldn't mount the potbox as the instructions because the brake regulator is in a different location. The neutral relay was bad and needed to be replaced. The second relay for the charger also was bad and like Tim K. I didn't use it. I intend to go back and replace it but it's not a problem right now.

The motor ran about 30 RPM full throttle. After a couple of emails with Beth @ Azure and switching the encoder direction the car was up. The first test drive was poor. I turned around and changed the parameters that Ross posted on his blog. The cars performance still is poor but I drove it to work a couple of times ( 7 miles each way ) and was working with Beth trying to get the car to keep up with traffic, when I had a battery terminal melt. The lead melted around the bolt that was cast in the terminal. The store claims the terminal was not tighted and I believe the lead broke off with the bolt. I will post pictures next time of the repair.

The problem with the lack of power seems to be the controller cuts the voltage allowed when the voltage in the pack goes down to 138 volts. The battery pack completely charged will drop the first time it is floored to 133 volts. Beth said this is done to get the most out of the pack and based on 12 volt batteries. I didn't see this parameter and asked here to send me a new .ccs file that includes this and the one Tim used to hook up his tach. I'm goig to use one of the regen wires the go to the cabin and hook it to the tach rather the find the wire in the engine compartment. I'm thinking I can move the pin at the controller and crimp a connector--done.

brakes

The brakes were upgraded to the 911 master cylinder and BMW calipers. Here the caliper is being cut to size.
Painted and installed with new disc. One note make sure the caliper is not already the 19 mm master cylinder like mine was!

conversion part 2

The controller and bushings installed.
The engine wiring done after Tim helped me figure out the problem with the AC instructions. The brown is dust from the sanding primer and will wash off. The relays have the stickers from the bags on them so I don't mix them up. The shunt is above out of view.
The transmission had a lot of oxidation so I scuffed it with scotch brite, cleaned it with brake clean and painted it with Aluminum cast high temp.
Installed!
The front batteries installed and wired up. Two thing to note; the batteries have no posts and I believe this works better. The other is the bitchin prop for the charger.

Conversion

This what Christmas looked like in July. I placed my order in May. I was on vacation when it came. A friend of mine tucked it in my garage untill I came home.

When this came I still had to paint the main body then the trunks to put in the battery boxes but I could wire the engine compartment and the motor/controller will be here in a couple of weeks.

The instructions for the AC kit are sent email. If you don't have Microsoft word you will need to convert the file to PDF. The diagrams showing the connections will not show in word pad. Tim K. was able to help me figure out the problem when I was unable to get help from Electro. Thanks Tim.

The pipe and the big hammer method on the firewall in the instructions for the middle battery box became the sawsall and mig welder on my car. I like my way better but I missed the photo op like Tim and mirror the picture in the instructions.The middle battery box had one of the battery hold down "buttons" in the wrong spot (the one on the left).The "button" is cut off with my trusty sawsall........and reglued with JB weld.The fan mounting threaded inserts weren't installed. I found some for thicker material and after drilling the holes bigger installed them.After grinding them flush I'm glad the fan covers up the mess. In late August the adapter for the motor came. The motor and controller came the month before so we can put the motor and transmision together.The motor mount holes don't line up and need to be elongated to work.New clutch kit and resurfaced flywheel. At this point all the bolts are bought because the hardware kit and several other "hardware store" items are not here that are included in the kit. The customer service part of Electro Automotive is shit. The AC kit is new and the issues with that I can deal with like the instructions being sent in a format that won't open on 50% of the computers and pieces called for not in the kit ( the controller/motor and high current wire hanger or regen switch) but they don't reply to emails about questions about them and much of the basic stuff was not received at this point. They use the phone to screen calls and don't reply to emails, you don't talk to them unless they want to.