Archive for October, 2010

Louise did a performance at Poletential last Friday night. Poletential is a Pole Dancing Studio in Redwood City: I made the coffin last weekend for her performance and the whole show turned out pretty cool! Poletential is just starting to introduce aerial training to their repertoire and Louise’s act was a surprise announcement for it to get everyone excited about it. Here’s two versions of the video we took. There were a few other better cameras their and hopefully we can get their footage and check it out too. Click below to download the high quality version; 68 MB: Click... [read more]

More progress tonight. Here’s aluminum L angle pieces to mount the radiator on. I slotted the car with a 4.5″ angle grinder (plus a cut off wheel) to keep the L shape and make the mount stronger. Then there are stainless steel bolts to hold it together. The last one is only supported by one bolt, but it seems quite sturdy with all three supports: The reservoir tank with the pump mounted underneath. I later shortened the hose a bit: Mounted. The two mounting holes are also SS bolts since the back is exposed to the elements. The two are... [read more]

The project is moving along slowly. I was pretty busy with other things last week and didn’t get much time to work on it. I wanted a 1/8″ sheet of aluminum to back the motor area and mount the controller to. I went to Sims Metals in San Jose last Friday, but they only had some odd thin pieces of aluminum and zero 1/8″ thick stuff. They recommended Reliance Metals in Union City, so I called them up on Monday and they said they did have 48×48″ sheets that they sell. So I drove the truck up on Tuesday; unfortunately,... [read more]

I worked on the bug a bit yesterday but didn’t get much done; things go slow! I ordered a Heater Kit from Canadian Electric Vehicles – http://www.canev.com/KitsComp/Components/Heater.html — the easiest way to do a heater in a conversion is to get an inline water heater and just use the existing heating system in a traditional ICE car. The bugs are air cooled and don’t have any water heating system so a ceramic heater must be used. I was thinking about making my own by taking apart some cheap heating elements from Home Depot, creating a box to house it, and... [read more]

Last weekend was a big weekend for the project. My buddy Aaron, who has a lot of home-built EV experience and now works at Tesla came over to lend me a hand. He brought over a friend, Nate, who also works at Tesla. So two Tesla employees helping me put my car together; how cool is that? We set the adapter on the motor shaft, bolted on the lightened (and recently balanced) flywheel, and then bolted on the clutch pressure plate with the clutch disk inside: Then it was mated to the transmission. This is actually a picture from the... [read more]

A quarter shot of the bug with the painted wheels, white walls and new dome style hubcaps (from CIP1):

Not much to say, but I got a bunch of the rust off of the seats, fixed some broken parts, painted them and then put them back together with new foam. I got new seat covers and foam from JBugs.com and they look pretty nice. The foam for the seat backs is sort of awkward, and I may eventually try to redo it with some additional foam. I actually got some more foam and played around with it a bit, but I wasn’t quite happy with the results and just left it as-is. Seat back with burlap on: Rear seat... [read more]