[thingstodo]

I'd like to go back to testing the maximum torque that the 5 HP motor will put out, with my newly acquired and larger output current VFD. But I need to power up my DC to AC inverters, and use them to power up the VFD.

So I will need to have some batteries charged to run the inverters for a reasonable period of time. I have some old NiCd batteries that were retired from an electrical substation. They are nominally 1.2V, so 11 of them in series is 13.2V. This is a good solid input to for a DC to AC inverter. If I can use three strings in parallel, I should be able to drive the amps that the inverters will require.

I need to find a convenient way to charge them, fairly quickly and with little manual input from me. When I have some batteries charged, I can get the motor mounted on a frame, strap it to a large pulley, then use a linkage to measure the output torque. That's likely be next weekend since I still need to figure out how to charge 71 NiCd batteries