Battery Boxes for the Adventure EV<\/a> – a 1971 Land Rover, with nice boxes.<\/p>\n I knew I wanted to make my boxes out of steel, similar to Travis’ bug<\/a>. I wasn’t sure how thick of steel to use, so I asked on diyelectriccar.com with this post<\/a>. That also was a great way of seeing some other boxes that I hadn’t seen before. I also learned that 1\/8″ steel was probably thick enough. I was originally thinking 1\/4″ was way too thick, but I was pondering 3\/16″. Since others used 1\/8″, and said it worked well, I decided to use it. I also settled on 1″x1″ angle iron.<\/p>\n Now, I designed battery boxes months ago for the 160ah size cell. However, my 200ah cells turned out to be bigger, so I had to rethink things. With the 160ah cell, I was going to put a bunch behind the rear seat and the rest in the front trunk. Here is the 160ah battery design sketchup file<\/a> and some screen shots.<\/p>\n This is the rear pack of 31 cells — it was going to sit quite high, but it wouldn’t obstruct the rear window at all. I was going to secure the cells in the x direction by using the same strapping stuff that I used to secure the cells together. The cells would have been mounted horizontally, which is okay but not ideal. I had emailed Thundersky batteries and they said mounting horizontally is possible, but vertical is better — mainly because if the batteries vent (due to too much heat\/expansion), they will vent out the top and spill.<\/p>\n The front pack, 17 cells:<\/p>\n The real 200ah size was quite larger, so I had to rethink things. I finally realized the car was going to be fairly heavy with all these cells (a post on that is coming soon), so I decided to just nix the rear seat. I rarely have a second passenger, and I even more rarely have 3 or 4 passengers in my current car. More often than not, I use the rear area of the Prius to carry unicycles. I decided that I could nix the rear seat and cover it with Lexan and toss the unicycles on top of the batteries. It should work out great!<\/p>\n So, here’s the 200ah size design<\/a> I’m working on fabricating. Note that I leave off some details, like side braces that I (might) add later depending on how strong it feels.<\/p>\n The front pack, 15 cells (each cell is 16 pounds, so that’s 240 pounds in the front trunk area — much heavier than the gas tank normally would have been):<\/p>\n The blue area above is roughly the available floor area that I could use to put the cells.<\/p>\n The rear pack (33 cells), which will sit where the rear seat was, along with a small set of horizontal cells sitting on the rear luggage area. The entire area should be about level, and will all be covered with a few big pieces of thick Lexan plastic.<\/p>\n![\"160_rear_pack.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/160_rear_pack-tm.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"160_front_pack.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/160_front_pack-tm.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"200_front_pack.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/200_front_pack-tm.jpg\")
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![\"200_rear_pack.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/200_rear_pack-tm.jpg\")
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