More work on the car today.
Mostly, it was designing and building the "Tie-Downs" for the batteries.
After more moving everything around, it looked like three sections of vertical threaded rod would work well. The middle threaded rod would be easy to drill a hole for. Oh wait, there's already a hole there, so I just put the rod through and added a nut.
The trouble with the end two rods is that I wouldn't be able to drill through and put a nut on the bottom end of the rod - there was a car frame member under there.
So, I thought maybe I could just WELD a nut there instead.
I cut sections of rod to about 10.5 inches.
I drilled a hole where I wanted the rod to go through. It couldn't go all the way through and have a nut on the other side, but it let me center the rod, and keep it from moving around while working on it.
I ground down the paint off the frame, and then practiced welding nuts to some scrap metal. Once the nuts no longer popped off when I wacked them with a hammer, I was ready to try welding the real ones.
Here is the nut after getting welded in, hit with some paint, and the rod locked in with another nut.
The middle rod was easy, as that one was through-hole, and bolted in place.
Now, before I put all the batteries back in, I was noticing that the motor really was never that level. Scroll back up and look at the first photo. See how the motor isn't level? It's kinda low on the left. Now seemed like a good time to fix that.
I unbolted the motor bolts (with a jack under the motor) jacked the motor into position, and removed the custom mounting plate.
This is something that I always referred to as "The Q".
It has its distinct shape because the end of the motor originally had a tailshaft and has vent-holes as well. The end of the motor can't be covered, but still needs at least two bolts going in to hold it. I originally free-hand cut this shape to fit around all the odd shapes of the end of the motor.
Overall, what was needed was to remove the weld of the Q to the stock motor mount, reposition it, and then weld it back on. It actually went pretty well and fairly straight forward. The worst that I could say was that the welding got hot enough that the rubber in the mount started melting. I had to take the bracket to the men's room and run it under water in the sink to cool it down! Otherwise, just the metal being so heated from the welding would have kept melting the rubber.
I put the bracket back in, ran the motor mount bolt, and the two motor to Q-bracket bolts, and that was it. The motor now sits nicer than it did before.
Back to bolting in the batteries.....
I had some flat steel stock that I wanted to use to span the tops of the batteries. The only trouble is that metal is conductive, and I don't want to ever accidentally short a battery removing or installing the tie-down. I knew there was some extra large heat-shrink tubing around. I checked, and the tubing was just a little too small to slip over the 1.5" wide bar.
Hmmm.... If only there was some other inexpensive/recycled/salvaged material around that was non-conductive and would shrink to fit for a nice appearance. That's when I remembered this old bike was sitting right there for use as scrap material.
What am I looking at? The tires. Specifically the inner tubes.
I removed the front rim, took off the tire, and pulled out the inner tube. A quick snip or two, and I had a rubber tube.
The hard part was stretching this over the bar. It was a bit of a struggle. I would show you a photo of the process, but I fear it would encourage too many dirty jokes...
Here's the inner tube stretched over the bar. The ends were left long, so they could be folded under.
The rubber cover looks nice, is grippy, and non-conductive! Not bad for an inner tube that never would work on a bike again anyways!
On the right hand side, the spacing was a little different, so I put the rest of the inner tube UNDER the bar as a nice rubbery spacer.
That's it for now.
Next, I need to make up some additional short battery cables for the interconnects between the new batts.
I may also try to design some simple cover/guard across the front, just to keep the batteries from getting all gunked up from the road. I have some black coroplast that I may just run straight across the front.