another milestone: first useful trip! & misc update.
Milestone! On Friday I actually used the car on its first useful trip. It was pouring rain, and I needed to get to the store before it closed. Only about a 4 km round trip, but that's pretty much exactly why I wanted to build it - for local trips when I can't/don't feel like using the bicycle. Gotta get it legal before I get busted though. This was my first foray outside the immediate neighbourhood.
- got some threaded rod and secured the front upper rack batts with some angle iron. Got to weld some tabs to secure the rod & it seemed to work out quite nicely (pics to follow when they'er all done).
- dropped the car off at Ivan's on Friday evening - he said he wanted to work on it. We talked about having him work on the rear rack. I'll find out tomorrow what he did.
- also this weekend: boiled some water load testing 4 batts. We have too many sitting around, so I decided to start weeding out the worst ones and recycle them. Used the
jumper-cable-to-coat-hanger-immersed-in-water technique. Of the 4 I tested, 2 showed significant voltage sag within 5 minutes under a 90A-ish load. The other 2 were still discharging more or less linearly after 15 minutes, so I deemed them OK (subject to further testing)