Ben Nelson's Electro-Metro Build thread

[Christ]

Originally Posted by bennelson

I got a radio installed today.

OK, mostly it was Chris, one of the EV build buddies, who did almost all the work. I still have to get it physically mounted right, the wiring is all done up and working.

It was the cheapest stereo available at the big-box store, yet it has plenty of bells and whistles, including MP3 playback from CD, SD card, or USB.

You know the first thing I had to do was test some sound effects....
I already had some motorcycle sound effects handy, so I loaded those on a memory card and plugged it in. Sound effects were every bit as good in the car as they were on the motorcycle.

I am taking the car to the MREA energy fair in two weeks. Last year, I lost my voice talking to people about my motorcycle. Perhaps this year I make a recording of myself tallking about the car and play it repeating on the stereo?!

Looks like I will have to find the George Jetson flying car sound effect to use in the Metro...

Good call... try this one.

[Planecrazy]

Originally Posted by Christ

Good call... try this one.

That one's close, but I think Ben should use one where you hear the car go by without stopping ... this one has it kind of petering out ... not quite right for a "newfangled" electric car in my opinion.

I'll bet an excellent sample could be found on the Jetsons movie DVD (though I suspect there are plenty of good classic samples to be found on the web)...

Regards,
Steve

[bennelson]

More work on the car!

I pulled the power cables, charger cables, front 12V charger AC power, and a spare 3 conductor cable through the new 2" conduit to the front!



Instead of using wire nuts, I now actually installed an electric outlet in the back of the car to plug the charger into. The boat connection under the gas cap feeds power to the electric outlet. The outlet is GFI protected.



I wired standard AC power plugs onto both ends of one of the cables running through the conduit to power the 12V accessory battery in the front of the car. It automatically runs the charger as long as the gas cap connection is plugged in.




I got the carpet back in, and threw in the interior panels. The panels aren't all snapped in correctly yet, I still need to see where some things line up yet.



With the interior panels in, I was able to put in the battery box cover and even the the back of the back seat. With that, it more or less looks like I have a back seat, although it has no seat belts or padding, and is a bit high.

Having the seat back in there does restore a rear cargo area, which the local police officers might enjoy in case I am transporting any beer in with my groceries.



Still not done, but it LOOKS so much better!

I still have to get the charger bolted down (with good ventilation around it) Oh, and I patched up that hole in the back from the original 1.5 inch conduit which was removed when the battery box was put in.



It's starting to look like a REAL car!

Also, at the last EV Build Day, Tom gave me a two-screen car DVD player he had kicking around! (That guy can scrounge anything!)

I might be able to install it and run some of my electric car YouTube videos on it at the fair!

See the latest photos of the project at:
MobileMe Gallery


Ha ha! There are batteries hiding under there! Now I just need to hide a cougar under the hood!

[watt-a-mezz]

I like the conduit idea, I have some extra 2" plastic drain pipe, would that work? Car is looking good, keep up the good work! Take care, Watt.

[MetroMPG]

I like that you kept the appearance of the rear seat. Even though it doesn't look very comfortable any more.

And I have rear compartment envy. I don't think we can sink our batteries through the floor. They're too wide - we'd be cutting into suspension bits.

[Planecrazy]

Hey, Ben!

You reminded me of something I thought of when I did the initial "three-day-read" of the entire thread last month. When I saw the picture of the original conduit my first thought was, "That looks a bit risky, hanging under the car where it could get snagged or damaged by road debris..." My second thought was, "Plastic conduit may be a good insulator but it doesn't offer any substantial protection if anything gets kicked up and hits it..."

...So, without having seen the new two inch conduit I wonder why you didn't just run some conduit INSIDE the car from front to rear? If you had done so you'd still get the insulating benefit of a plastic tube (if you had still chosen plastic) but you'd have the additional protection (and ground clearance) of the entire floorboard to protect the wires from damage (and the elements) over time. I have no doubt this would be more challenging to accomplish than how you originally did it, but to my way of thinking the safety factor would be worth the additional effort.

...just a thought.

Regards,

[Planecrazy]

So now that I checked out all your photos it looks like you may have set the new conduit up to sit inside the center "hump." It's hard to tell, since you didn't take a new picture of the underside of the car, but if so it certainly seems to be a big improvement versus the seemingly lower positioning of the original conduit!

One thing you might consider doing, if possible, is to weld sheetmetal across the hump on the underside of the car so that you enclose and further protect the conduit. A side benefit would be additional strength to the chassis in carrying the extra weight of all those batteries! You would probably have to make the front section of the structure removable, so that you could remove the tranny linkages, etc. from the tunnel for service.

I still can't get over how nice of a job you've done (and continue to do) on the Electro-Metro in such a short period of time! Rock on!!

Regards,

[bennelson]

Hey Steve,

The cabling is fine inside the conduit. Insulation is unimportant. Wires and cables are fine at any temperature except hot.

Since this car originally had an exhaust pipe running right down the middle, I simply put the conduit where that was. That is HIGHER than the bottom of the car, because of the exhaust "tunnel".

Running conduit inside the car would take up extra space, and there is not good straight line to do it. Flexible conduit is a possibility, but it is very expensive, whereas 2" pipe was about $3 for ten feet. Also, I would have to fish everything through the firewall if I ran it inside.

Conduit makes it nice and easy to have everything together, without having to go around corners and through firewalls. Clean and simple, and out of the way.

EDIT:
On Tom's EV Neon, we actually talked about flipping over the heat shield in the exhaust tunnel to act as an undercover for the conduit. If your conduit, up UNDER and IN your car is getting whacked, you have bigger problems than protecting your cabling.

PS - somebody please remind me in a few days to fix the leak in my driver side mirror! It's letting rain into the passenger compartment!

PPS - Come to think of it, I could run the audio out from the DVD player to the audio in on the stereo and play YouTube video's audio through the car stereo.

[adamj12b]

Hey Ben,

I dont know if it is helpful to you now, but you can bend that pvc conduit to any shape and angle you want. Just heat it up until it is nice and soft, then hold it in the shape you want while it cools. Its a little tough with the larger stuff like that, but I bent some 2" Just last weekend into a 90 degree angle. You will need a heat gun atleast to heat it enough and fast enough to bend it. I used the Grill. Just held the section I wanted to bend inside the grill and closed the cover down on it and kept it turning as to not heat 1 spot too much, but the whole thing evenly. It worked very well.

-Adam

[Daox]

Wow, its looking really good with all the panels and stuff back in Ben! Nice. Now for the zip ties and engine compartment and it'll really be looking slick for the MREA!