I got caught on video, mostly about the car conversion. Finnish only, I'm afraid.
The link to the video here has been removed due to the maker of the video becoming an antivaxxer and even harrassing children about it. I will not promote any of his work on any of my platforms.
Yesterday I spent the whole day working on the car. It was worth it though. I got the high voltage parts all wired up and the wheels spinning using the controller. Here's the proof.
I had the idea of putting the high voltage cabling inside some clear plastic tubing, but the cables didn't want to go in so I just gave up on that idea. The cables routed below the car doesn't look half to me though.
Plenty of room below the car now. Kind of makes me sad to have all that space that cannot be easily put to use. Oh well. At least I got a lot of crap out that could fail the yearly check.
I've been making all kinds of progress. The motor is mounted to the car and I also decided on a controller. In fact, I went ahead and ordered the whole lot, including the controller, a DC/DC converter and an assembly for the controller.
But first things first. I pieced together something to firmly attach the four points that needed attaching. The motor itself, the transmission, the drive shaft and one of the original motor mounts. The only way to get it done was to just try to position everything the way they seemed want to be and start welding together pieces of steel to keep them there permanently.
I think it came out quite fine. You can judge for yourself be looking at the pictures below. The little triangular piece attaches the drive shaft and the motor from below.
I was browsing the Kelly Controls website when I came across their KHD12600D controller, which they had on sale. I added the assembly for it and a DC/DC converter too. They had reasonable prices and also reasonable shipping fees, which is not usually the case. They came through amazingly as well. I put in the order on Sunday, got an email from Kelly on Monday and DHL delivered the package today, Wednesday. Ten out of ten for both Kelly and DHL.
As you can see the controller came fully assembled with contactor, pre-charge resistor, diode and fuse. Very nice. The only ugly part was the crap on the other end of the DC/DC converter. Not very professional. Tried to clean it up a bit myself to make it a little more bearable. That was after I had taken the photo.
Next up mounting the assembly into the car and loaning the battery pack from the kWsaki electric motorcycle. Obviously a box to put the batteries in must also be deviced. After that it should be time for a little test drive. If that goes well I'll need to tackle the nasty but important power brakes and cabin heating.
So I had a test fitting of the motor. Everything else went pretty nice, except my attempt in finishing the adapter plate contruction in place turned out to be a little challenging. In the end I also decided that I'll drop the flywheel and the clutch altogether and go for a direct coupling. It'll save weight and I noticed that the electronically driven tachometer didn't want to work anyway without the ICE in place. So after I had got the wheels spinning I took everything apart again.
As you can see it really is better to be lucky than to be good. One of the bolt holes in the drive shaft support just fits a hole in the motor. I'm not sure it's quite enough to hold the support in place and if it will still match after I've taken the flywheel and clutch out, which may alter the motor position.
Got my motor running, actually. A couple of times even. First with a lazy 12 volt battery and then connected to my motorcycle. Here's a video of the latter.
I was going to remove the batteries and whatnot from the motorcycle first and then bolt everything nicely to a test bench like I did with the motorcycle parts when I first got them, but then I got lazy and decided to just take the motor to the bike.
Next up: jacking up the car and removing liquids. Looking forward to it! Not really. I'll hate it.
Got my big new charger yesterday. It really is big. However it does fit into my tank bag which makes it small enough to take on the road for a quick top up in about two hours from empty to fully charged. I also installed a LED light strip to function as a daytime running lamp as now permitted in the EU. This way I don't have to turn on the head or tail lights in daytime and thus save my 12 volt system from extra load. The LEDs are always on and take so little power I wasn't able to measure it with my ammeter.
But first here are couple of videos of my friend taking a ride with the kWsaki electric motorcycle. First taking off and coming back and then the actual footage from riding around Finnish countryside.
The first short video was shot with my Sony Xperia Pro phone and the latter with a GoPro on top of the tank. Here are also a couple of shots of the charger, DRL installation and an emergency cut off switch I also added which you can use to disengage the main contactor if there's trouble.
So I built a new battery box. Sounds easy said in a single sentence. In any case CALBs are now in place and a quick kludge installation of the controller resulted in a big EV grin. At first the controller had just 33% power set, but once I moved the slider up to 100% it really took off. Video below. The rattle is from the chain and/or a loose connector I spotted after the trial run.
