Chevy Volt and Electric 3 series BMW (Ev-36/46)

I'm hoping by end of christmas break at the latest to have the EV moving on it's own power even if on ony 7 batts. Progress so far. Most of the high voltage lines are done. I need to make 3 more. Still haven't finished the return lines on the PS so that's left and then wire up the Hair ball. See how much longer that takes. Here are a few more part#'s and stores I bought from. Contactor: Kilovac EV200 Contactor. Purchased from E-bay Crimping tool: Lengo Swedg-on Tool Model 840 From E-bay Fuses and Heat shrink: purchased from EV Source LLC www.evsource.com 1ft Length, 1in Normal Adhesive Lined Heat Shrink Tubing, Red Item# 600-HSA-001-RE-N 3ft 1ft Length, 1in Normal Adhesive Lined Heat Shrink Tubing, Black Item# 600-HSA-001-BL-N 3ft 500A 300VDC fuse, Up to 1000A Controller up to 276V Nominal System Voltage Item# 201-A30QS500-4 qty 2

I added the supports for the batteries on the tray that goes above the motor. That finished of my Argon gas for welding and had to get a refil. I think I'll use less now that I know what i'm doing. Started making battery cables. I played with soldering them on. I had thought of soldering AND crimping. However the fit of the lug to the wire was snug so inserting the wire with a heated lug didn't work well. So I'm just crimping. Using the hammer crimper in the press works very easy. Seems to be working well but I have no other experience with this type of work to compare it with. I also cleaned up or rather filed off some of the ugly welds. I need to re weld some of the bad ones. I'll also add some gussetts and some minor touchups. A real nice part is I won't have to paint it

More progress on the front battery tray. Added most of the upper tray above the motor. Spent most of saturday on it. Seems like I should have made more progress but it takes time. Also learning a new skill of welding aluminum does slow me down some. Some welds are great and some are horrid. I'm having a hard time telling what makes the difference. More practice is needed. Took a picture of my helper standing on the battery rack. Thought it would make a funny picture. Of course he reminded me that he only weighs what one battery weighs. So I stood on them. Seemed plenty strudy and so far the rack weighs less than 15 LBS. The mail man dropped off the fuses and heat shrink tubing. The wire lugs arrived earlier this week so I now have enough parts I should be able to make the car drive around the yard. Just some assembly required. Thaniel

Since I wanted to build battery trays out of alumiunm I purchased the materials needed to convert my MIG welder over to weld aluminum. After an evening of frustrating attempts at welding I did some more reading and found I had the heat setting all wrong. Today I managed to actually join some metal. Made a little progress on the front battery tray. There will be 4 batteries on the lower level. 2 on the passenger side of the motor one on the driverside and one inbetween. I need to add a tray to hold three batteries above the motor and more car to tray supporting structure. The lugs I ordered are suppose to be here monday. The fuses I ordered I have no clue. Maybe in a few weeks it can move under it's own power.

Got the clutch working today. Apparently to bleed this clutch system the slave cylinder has to be removed from the trans and tilted to have the bleed valve up. Weird. Did that and the clutch now works. Am behind on ordering things. Lugs and welding equiptment for welding aluminum are finally now on order. Looking at what guages I needed and found that the zilla will Display motor current on the tach. Interesting. Do I even need a battery current Ammeter? I think for now I'll go sparse on guages and add later but before it hits the road. My Goal right now is to put it together enough it'll drive in and out of the garage. So a lot of the guages and such can wait. Next steps will be: 1. Make front battery trays 2. Mount Controller and wire up hairball 3. Wire up front batteries Ok you tube is done. Video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiOYDu8Rk3M

Well here is the motor mount. It attaches to the 2 side bolts on the motor and 2 of the front bolts. I'm attaching it to the crossmember using using 2 existing holes. I used 2 rubber transmission mounts instead of motor mounts as they are smaller and this motor is lighter than the gas engine. I also didn't go with the ICE engine motor mounts and locations as I wanted to leave room on the side of the motor for another battery. I think it turned out well. Location is good being Dead center and level. Oh wire arrived today. Looks nice and beefy (4/0) and is quite flexible. I need to select and find a place to buy the fuse, circuit breaker and shunt. The motor mount I think will work out great. I am a mechanical engineer and use to design weldments as a job years ago. Did not do any analysis on this structure, other than rough numbers for the force that'll be applied at the mount points, but it should be plenty strong. And small is light and more room for the batteries. Oh...

I was looking around and found some tinned lugs with the right bolt hole in them for a reasonable price. Think I'll just order them. I have my motor mount bracket just about done. Painted it last night. will have to get some pictures and post it. Went a little different way than what I have seen most do.

I ordered the main wiring. After some reading I realized that 4/0 wiring is probably overkill and should buy 2/0. Cost difference would probably be about $100. Then I thought to myself.....if this were a gas car and I could get a few HP for an extra couple of bucks would I do it? Sure I would. Ordered 4/0 wire. I also ordered a hammer crimper. I have a hydrolic press so I'm thinking I can just put it in the press instead of whacking at it with a hammer. I haven't ordered any lugs. I'm wondering if I can make some out of some copper tube. Prices seem to be a ripoff and I didn't see any with the through hole I needed. I'll give it a go after the wire arrives. Manged to get a battery in my fuel tank location battery rack. I was able to test the clearances in the front and rear location. Looks like it'll work out great. Getting it up there with the batteries in it is going to be a trick but I'll worry about that when I get that far. I'm sure it can be done.

Finally had a saturday where I wasn't travelling, there wasn't another car repair I had to do, the kids didn't have a scoccer game etc. so I got some work done on the EV. I'd really like to get it so it'll move under it's own power so I can move it out of the garage during the week. Started on the gas tank location battery rack. Made some good progress so far. Here's a pict in the middle of construction.

Installed the Hall effect sensor Pedal. I keep wanting to call it a GAS pedal but obviously that's not right. My boy keeps correcting me with "Accelerator" pedal. Pic attached of the pedal installed. Have also connected the wire. I reused the firewall fitting/gromet that the cable had used. Just drilled it out a bit larger for a nice snug fit on the wire. Makes for a nice clean installation. I also finished the high pressure and low pressure brake fluid lines. The 92-95 BMW's had low pressure brake fluid lines going from the fluid reservior to the ABS unit (see the picture). So I did a remote mount of the BMW fluid tank to the Mustang master cyl and ran new lines to the ABS. Doing some research I found that EPDM style rubber hoses are recommended for use with brake fluid. Looking around locally I found that hose made for farm fertilizer etc sprayers are made of the same thing. So I got some at tractor supply. So far it looks like it will work good. The metal for mak...

Forgot to mention that on the MR2 pump I realized that the reservior could be rotated so that the return fitting could point another direction. However the bump on the inside of the reservior hits on some of the parts of the pump. I took off the plastic reservior and took a picture. See attached. So you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. So to orient the outlet at a very different angle it may require removing the reservior turning to the direction and refitting. sadly there are a few angles where it just can not be placed but that's not to big of a deal. Also shown is the braided steel hose and fittings I used to make the custom AN style High pressure lines. Like what is common on race cars. It is easy enough to do. In my set up I have one line going from the PS pump to the hydro boost and one from the hydro boost to the P/S Rack. I need to finish the return lines then I could give the hydrolics a try. Adapter fittings purchased from pegusus parts www.pegasusautorac...

Ok things are busy and I'm not in a big hurry to finish as I enjoy having a project. So after some family vacations and more repairs on my ICE cars I did get back to the electric car. Update: The Batteries I decided I wanted to use were Deka 9A31. Nearest dealer for them was 90 miles from my house in NC (I live in the middle of nowhere). I called them to see if I could come by and pick some up and they referred me to the dealer that "covered" my area. Well the dealer that "covered my area" was in TN and I'm in VA. So I don't see how that worked. But after some discussion they decided to let me pick them up at the closer site in NC. Thursday I took my SUV and trailer down. I had to pick up the wife and kids at the Charlotte airport that direction anyway. Well on the way down my trusty trailer, that I've had for years and towed thousands of miles, decided to start shedding parts. After being signaled by another motorist I found I'd lost ...

Progress is slow as my ICE powered cars are taking a bit of my time. Wife's maxima is crossing the 200K mark and decided it needed some maintance and repairs. But that's another story. I completed my adaptors to mount the Hydroboost into the car. Turned out rather well. I've been trying to purchase some batteries. I contacted the 2 battery dealers that were shown on the main website as closest to me. Asked them for their best price on 14 batteries and that I could come pick them up. It became very obvious that they have a HUGE margin on these products as they were more concerned about undercutting their other dealers AND making sure they were getting their commissions correct then they were in actually selling the product. In the end it seems they decided that my area is actually covered by a dealer in TN which is not even close to me and I won't be driving there to get them. Especially when I will be driving right by their north carolia store multiple times this month....

Not a ton of progress. Working on installing the hydrolic brake booster in place of the factory brake boster. The factory booster is the one with the larger dia cylinder on it (rh side on the pic on the right). The booster I am using is from a 97 Cobra mustang.

Thank you for the interest. Yes, with luck the hard part is over. We'll see how it goes from here. I don't think I mentioned the exact batteries as I'm still a little up in the air about which ones. Right now the needle is leaning toward Deka 9A31. It's an AGM battery with 100Ah. Thinking I might as well go with 156V the max voltage for the controller and use 13 batteries. I still do not feel confident I know enough about batteries but comparing the cost and weight of some similar batteries they seem pretty good. I still worry it won't be enough Ah as seems trying to predict the exact range is difficut. Guess I'll have to make a decision soon though.

With the rover out of the garage the electric car could FINALLY be brought in. Thought I'd take a couple pics of it first "drive" into the garage. I also loaded the motor and trans into the car. Still deciding on engine and trans placement. I'll probably go with the factory placement for the transmission but I have been toying with moving it back 8". Makes for a lot of extra room in the front. The driveshaft from an automatic car is 8" shorter than the manual car and bolts up so that would be no issue. However customizing the shifter seems like a big pain. My time is probably better spent elsewhere on the car. Other task was to remove the tank. This was actually quite easy. Remove the boot from the e-brake lever. Remove the nuts on the cables. Pull them out from under the car. Take out the three bolts holding the tank in and volia. After I had it out I found it still contained gas. I was under the impression it had been drained. So I pumped out 4 gallons ...

Progress was delayed a bit as my rover needed some love. Here is the sparkly clean engine after re fitting the heads and rocker arms Of course a good helper is the key to a successful job (torquing the head bolts)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjhz9f9WXA8

Here's a screen grab from the cutting process. I have it in movie form but it pretty much looks like the picture with the noise of the saw going I put the bolt holes into the transmission adapter plate by bushing the trans bolt holes with some thin metal then drilling through the bolt holes. Then enlarging them to the right size. On my trans the locating dowels are in the same location as a bolt hole so I drilled that through the bolt hole. Counterbored with the closest standard drill size to the dowel hole. Then used a rotary file (round dill bit like attachment with a flat bottom. Kind of like and end mill) in my drill to enlarge them slightly and I mean slightly enlarge the hole and cut a square edge at the bottom of the hole. Worked great. As others have done I then put the motor spacer plate on and the trans adapter plate and assembled them so they were against each other but not bolted together. I then spun the motor to center the trans. Drilled and doweled the two plates tog...

Nothing really new to report. Just thought I'd add some pictures since pictures are fun. Notice how close to the trans I mounted the motor. The larger plate is .5" thick and the smaller one about the dia of the motor is 5/8" thick. No modifications to the transmission side were required. The extra space may not matter. Have to see but either way a thinner spacer is lighter. By the way I cut out the plates myself (exception being the precision hole in the motor spacer plate) using a simple hand jigsaw and an with an aluminum blade. What I thought made it go well was to pour water on the blade/plate to keep things cool. To do the motor spacer plate I'd say it took just under an hour and a gal or so of water.

Update. I reassembled the transmission and I cut out my adapter plates. The trans now mounts to the engine and spins without the rock crusher sound Thinking seriously about mounting it into the car. Adapter plate cut out Assembled Stacked and bolted

Ok after about 8 months of waiting it arrived!! The zilla's here. Pretty exciting. Surprisingly I didn't just tear open the boxes. I had a Sim racing league race that evening so i just put them aside. However as fate would have it my computer hiccuped after qualification and I wasn't able to race. So I opened the boxes and basked in the glory of having more EV parts. Let's re-live the box opening for those that haven't done it. Here is what it looks like when it arrives. Just Like Christmas. In side the box is 2 smaller boxes. The controller in one and the hairball and cables in the other. Of course included is the handy dandy notebook...or manual. I also purchased the hall effect pedal (in it's own box) so I can do the full drive by wire. Here it all is right before I reboxed to put on the shelf. . Guess I need to get to work on it all again.