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 below to download the small quality version, 39 MB:
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 between the tank and the pump:
Wire routing details. The wires are from left to right: Canbus (an Cat 6 ethernet cable) for the Interface Module, the throttle cable, the main cable — left half is stuff on the left and the right half is stuff on the right (the contactors):
All of it hooked up together for a nice tight package:
The bottom wires are a little close to the motor, but I don’t think it will matter. If it becomes an issue (due to heat), I can move the whole controller up a bit.
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, they didn’t tell me it is advisable to pre-order so I can just will call pick it up, and I had to wait around an extra 30 or 40 minutes for the people to get back from lunch to get the piece for me. Oh well — now I know the process and will pre-order next time. However, they are 40 miles from home, 80 miles round trip. At 10 miles/gallon in the truck, it cost me 8 gallons or 8*~$3 = $24 to get the piece. Shipping from onlinemetals.com would have been about that much, so next time I might just order it online (however, the price per square foot was cheaper at Reliance).
I sized up my cardboard template and cut the aluminum sheet. Unfortunately, I scratched it in a few places — I initially thought the plastic bottom on the jig saw wouldn’t scratch the metal, but it did. So, I used the backside, which had some scratches from me tossing it in the truck.
Here it is installed:
I mounted it with four allen cap head bolts around the edges, and then also used the top two bolts all the way through for the controller to securely mount it and provide more strength. It feels solid! The bottom two bolts for the controller don’t go to the inside of the car; they are attached right above the motor underneath the car body. It looks super-cool:
My plan is to mount the controller cooling on the right side of the motor bay, and put the two contactors on the right side of the 1/8″ plates. The DC-DC converter will be on the left side.
Yesterday Aaron came over and helped me figure out the horn; it wasn’t grounding right at the steering column. Aaron also helped me verify my layout, and tossed me some great ideas on how to do things cleanly. He also helped me locate the key-on and power-on lines that I’ll need to hook up to the controller; luckily they were already in the rear compartment for the generator and starter!
My blinkers are still only blinking the interior light in one direction, even after I replaced the emergency blinker relay switch (which was falling apart!). I think the blinker regulator itself is bad, but I don’t know for sure.
Today I worked on mounting the coolant reservoir on the right. I mounted it on some of the 1/8″ aluminum plating to give it something flat to mount to. The plating is tapped for 1/4-20 threads and it is just screwed into it with cap head bolts. I now put blue tape on the plate to keep it from getting scratched. Here I am tapping the piece:
There are two bolts that secure the plate to the frame — they are just drilled through and have a nut on the other side:
Later I mounted the pump underneath the reservoir, also screwed into tapped holes on the plate. More pictures/details coming in the next post. Other stuff done: canbus line pulled from the Netgain monitor to the back of the car, and the throttle cable spliced to an extension to get it from the front to the rear. Left to do: lots of wiring, attaching the contactors, attaching and wiring the DC-DC convertor, hooking up the heater (once it arrives — hopefully tomorrow). And..I’m still waiting for batteries!
What else did I do last weekend? I did a muni ride on Saturday with Kevin and Chris, and then Kevin came over and we powder coated his KH36 unicycle translucent green — it turned out awesome! I also built a coffin for Louise:
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 adding a blower (along with a switch and speed control). However, I decided that would take too much time, and the Canadian EV one seemed like just the right fit.
I needed something to surround the motor to protect the electronic parts, and I also wanted something that looked a little nicer. My plan is to use 1/8″ aluminum sheeting to cover up the areas and shine it up a bit. I made some mock ups with cardboard to get the sizes right:
I was hoping to have picked up some 1/8″ aluminum from SIMs metals in San Jose, but they didn’t have any on Friday. On Monday I’ll try another place up north and if they don’t have any I’ll have to order it online. That will set me back a few days as I need to put this thing in before I can mount stuff to it. Oh well..I’m still waiting for batteries.
I also installed the Netgain Interface Module. I just used some sheet metal screws to screw on the plastic base to under the dash:
Last week I also ordered a crimper from: EVSource.com:
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 next day after I made a better jig to hold the motor (more on that a bit):
The jig is just a few pieces of wood screwed together. I then found the balancing point with the motor on it (which took some trial and error), and marked the locations so I could easily get the motor on and off by using the jack to lift it into place (or out of the bug).
Now, the WarP 9 didn’t fit. I didn’t ever think I was going to use the tail shaft, so I made the decision to cut it off. Sure, it might have been nice to have to run A/C off of, but I would have had to cut even more out of the bug to make that happen. Here’s me grinding it off:
It still wouldn’t fit in the back, and it was clear that I’d have to cut the apron. I had seen other conversions that had to do this, so I wasn’t surprised. I did see a few that didn’t have to do it, but they use the slightly smaller (and weaker) Impulse 9 or some other older GE electric motor.
I made rough eyeball cut marks with a sharpie marker and cut it out using a grinder, sawzall, and dremel. The sawzall was the most effective, but also the easiest to potentially have it get away from you.
To actually get the transmission to slide into place I had to take off the CV “ears” on the side of the tranny to get it to clear the mounting arms. That was a great idea by Aaron as it simplified a lot of things. I should have drained the tranny gear oil at that point, because I ended up spilling a lot of my floor. After the last trimming we pushed it up and bolted it on.
corbin: “Hey look, its in!”
Detail of it and my head for scale reference:
Then, what else to do but hook up a 12 volt car battery and spin the tires!
Here’s another close up of the apron cut out; I haven’t cleaned it up yet:
So…we got it in, but the clutch didn’t appear to be working. In hindsight, I think we were wrong, and it did work and just needed adjustment. Anyways, Aaron and I dropped the motor/tranny combo out and moved the whole clutch/flywheel/coupling slightly forward on the shaft to let the clutch disengage better. (NOTE: that was a mistake — it was better to match the position compared to the original engine).
We had the car on jacks, instead of the solid orange feet seen in the above pictures, and it wasn’t quite high enough to get the motor underneath. We had the single hydraulic jack already in use to hold the motor/tranny, so I figured we could just use the regular spare tire car jack to jack it up a little and sneak it in. HUGE MISTAKE! Never leave a car on a janky car jack and work on it. We hit the car and pushed it off the jack. The jack was bent on the side, and the left of the car was in the air, supported by the rear apron sitting on the motor! I didn’t take a picture of that, but here’s the damage it caused:
You can see the slight push out where the apron sat on the motor, and there is a bit of paint missing. I’m not too worried; it is hard to notice, and I can touch up the paint. Oh well…live and learn, and we were glad no one got hurt! We managed to get the motor/tranny out and get everything restable and setup right, without any more damage. We put the motor back in, and apply power again; the motor made a small sound but wasn’t turning…that seemed like really bad news.
We called it a day, and on monday evening I made a better motor/tranny support system (the wooden thing at the top) so I could easily and safely get it in and out by myself. Previously we had balanced it on a piece of plywood. I quickly got the motor out, pulled it apart and saw that the clutch was too far forward and the pressure plat was hitting the housing. I reset it back to where it should be (compared to the ICE, based on positions from the mounting holes using calipers), and put it all back together. It didn’t take long, and now I’m a “pro” at it.
This time the wheels spun again, and the clutch seemed to be working. Yes!
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 bottom:
Foam was then put on top; I used the foam from Jbugs, and followed what their video said (great video!)
After covered:
Front seat:
The problem with the front seat is the back rest part feels “airy” and not quite as full as it should feel. You can also see how the foam rests based on the backrest shape.
