Electric car conversion: Project ForkenSwift

[MetroMPG]

Originally Posted by SVOboy

Better not slow down unless you REALLY need too,

Originally Posted by SW

Blistering!

Blistering indeed. But on the upside:

1. It was still, um, "accelerating" when I let off @ 50 clicks. Given enough flat road, patience & battery charge, I bet the car would *eventually* reach/pass 65 km/h.
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2. The pack wasn't at 100% SOC for the test - so there's better acceleration where that came from.
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3. It makes the Flea seem extravagantly powerful by comparison. When I drove it up to the licence office to get my plates - first time I'd driven it in a month or more - I was actually a little taken aback

I heard back from a 48v CitiCar owner today. He told me their cars will briefly suck 800A out of the batteries on acceleration with the contactor controllers. Wow. Definitely have to investigate that controller bypass circuit.

[MetroMPG]

Somebody asked if the cost/km is still $0.02, considering the calculation error...

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Hi - yup, the cost calcs weren't affected by the error.

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Been working on the emergency disconnect. Did a couple of nice welds tonight - atoned for the last few... Probably another hour to finish that off. Then I will feel safe fooling around with a contactor bypass, should the urge strike.

Also, our DC/DC converter came in. I might have made a boo boo and not ordered one with enough power. The model number doesn't appear exactly in the manufacturer's documents, so we won't really know until we hook it up and see what it pumps out.

Also also, I shot a bunch of video on the weekend. More YouTube coming up in the next week-ish.

[MetroMPG]

The car has a new nickname: "the electric umbrella". It's been pissing rain (as anyone on the eastern part of the continent knows), so no Pirate Bike riding today. Exactly what the car was made for.

Except I need a heat source. High humidity, cool temps + no heat = visibility problems. Common approach is to scavenge a ceramic heater from one of those little space heaters and install it in place of the OEM heater core.



Motor compartment, currently.



Instrumentation

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Emergency disconnect isn't done yet, but it'll be wrapped up tomorrow.

I realized I would have disconnected it unintentionally this evening. Got in the car at the store and pressed the clutch and brake when I put the key in. Tired. Old habit.

[MetroMPG]

skewbe suggests either using a snorkel or fog-x....

I'd heard of rain-x before, but not fog-x. It's worth a shot. Also, at some point I pulled off the flexible duct from the blower motor housing to the hard ventwork. Even hooking that up to get air moving across the windshield should help.

2Ton: good idea about putting something on the pedal. Will give it a try.

The emergency disconnect is in place and works like a charm. That's the green light for playing around with a controller bypass circuit.

I was going to do some video editing tonight and put up another epic YouTube ForkenSwift presentation to celebrate its legal-ness, but Microsoft MovieMaker doesn't like the MPGs the borrowed vid camera is spitting out. Grr. They'll open & play in Media Player, but not in MMM. Apparently MS didn't want to pay MPEG 2 fees or some such. Something to work around tomorrow.

[MetroMPG]

Originally Posted by SVOboy

Too bad you're a goof for not using a mac.

More of a sheep than a goof, I'd say.

I should have something up soon. Tomorrow probably.

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Until then, admire the ForkenSwift's tachometer:

[MetroMPG]

ForkenTube:

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

Good point, Gearshredder. I'll have to look into options for hosting the higher quality vid files without killing my bandwidth allowances. Anyone know of a good service?

[MetroMPG]

Originally Posted by SW

ForkenSweet! Congratulations on your very laudable achievment.

<play_PompAndCircumstance />

Originally Posted by treb

Nice, congratulations

Thanks, SW.

treb: yep, the main motivation for getting the clutch disconnect in place was to fool around with a controller bypass (so I've got a parachute if I weld a contactor shut ).

But we've got to get a DC/DC set up first. It's getting dark up here, and running the headlights off a pair of 7AH alarm batteries doesn't give much run time

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At the risk of getting all gooey and sentimental: I want to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project via this thread. All the feedback, ideas, answers, questions & encouragement helped keep things moving along.

[MetroMPG]

Went to the EV meeting in Ottawa yesterday. Received 4 more used floodies - now have enough for 3 packs: one in the car, one at Ivan's, one at my place. Holy hot swap, Batman!

Also someone offered to lend me a LOT of aviation surplus NICADs like the ones Bigmouse is using in his RX7. Haven't done the math on the energy capacity or configuration or weight, but it's an interesting idea.

Originally Posted by SVOboy

Get them! If you don't use them for the car I'm sure you could figure something else out interesting for them...electric scooter!

Yeah - no shortage of things to do with a bunch of batteries... Just time!

[MetroMPG]

So... Ivan had the car last week & this weekend. Thus not much chatter from me about it.

But I picked it up this evening. We've got a few issues:

1) I found a pretty big rust hole in one wheel well. There's actually exposed insulation to the driver's footwell. Surprised it wasn't found in the inspection. So the car needs some triage style bodywork & rust proofing (oiling) soon.

2) We noticed pretty much right away when we started driving it that it's got a bad front wheel bearing. Most of the noise you hear in the video where I'm driving on a fairly long straight stretch is (a) the snow tires :P and (b) the bearing roaring away. Probably not good for efficiency eh? Probably ignore that until next year though.

3) A weird rubbery squeak/graunch type sound when the drivetrain is loaded up abruptly from a stop. It's either a motor/tranny mount complaining or the rubber spider in the motor/tranny coupler. Need to investigate.

Also: received from a fellow EVer in the UK a home-built 8-battery LED monitor. It'll give an at-a-glance picture of how the individual batts in the pack are doing relative to one another. Great for finding weak batts & making sure we're not unintentionally beating any up.

[MetroMPG]

Also: since last posting, our 24v charger stopped working.... and with help from an EVDL E.E., I fixed it! (It was a burnt out SCR on the circuit board, which I replaced/upgraded to a more robust component on his advice.)