Ground straps came in today. OEM Honda parts. About half the wire on each end of each ground strap was exposed, so we wrapped it with electrical tape to secure it from the elements.
Here's what the old ground straps looked like:
Installing the ground straps took longer than anticipated - about an hour rather than 10 minutes. Not due to lack of know-how, but rather the age of the bolts. The chassis-to-electric-motor ground strap ends (that was the broken one) unbolted fine, however the chassis bolt for the transmission ground strap snapped when we tried unbolting it. There is another threaded hole right beside the one where the transmission ground strap was attached to the chassis, so we ended up using that one instead. Due to how easily that bolt snapped, we didn't attempt to unbolt the ground strap from the transmission, for fear of breaking it. Instead, we removed the wire from the connector and used steel wool to remove the grime from the connector, and connected the wire from the new ground strap to it. After installing the lower one, the upper one went on fine. Replaced all bolts with newer, unrusted bolts.
New ground straps shown below. On the second picture, toward the upper right you can see where the old bolt broke off.
Results from ground strap replacement later in this post.
Removed the rear wiper and radio antenna today. Both were quick DIYs that can be undone in a matter of seconds. Both removed parts are in the car.
I quite like the flow over the top of the car now:
Sorry about the pictures being angled...
After that I took a look underneath the car. The Insight does not have a pretty underside without all its panels. Only the middle two panels are in place; there was nothing in the front (Scott's belly pan is on it's way!) or the rear. Noted that the rear bumper was being a little bit of a parachute as well:
Cut out a 3' x 2' piece of coroplast and zip tied it in to make a rear belly pan. Will try to post pics of the completed pan tomorrow. It fills in the messy rear aero in the picture below as well as the rear bumper parachuting:
Weird angle from taking the picture under the car, that's why it's upside down...
As you can probably tell, the car is dirty from the dirt road I live on. It doesn't help that it's been raining quite a bit lately as well.
Dreamsight did its first round of pizza delivery tonight, and I'll say it did quite well. On the way there on a cold engine I managed 64.6 MPG for the 6.7 mile trip. However, during pizza delivery trips, with almost zero hypermiling besides upshifting early and general smart driving, Dreamsight averaged 64.6 MPG again over almost 70 miles of stop-n-go delivery driving, with trips no more than 9 miles in length.
And...no IMA light!!!!! All the stop-n-go definitely worked the IMA hard; at one point the IMA did a negative calibration and went down to 1/4 full and force regenned back up to just under half, and then positively recalibrated to closer to full. When it went down I thought the IMA light would turn on, but it didn't! After the drive the IMA finished at 3/4 full. The ground strap fix is looking good; we'll see if it lasts!!!
Here's the weird thing though. The Civic averaged 35-40 MPG doing delivery, and I eeked ~60 MPG on the trip back home. The Insight averaged 64.6 MPG doing delivery, but I only got 70.2 MPG on the way back home!
How?? How did hypermiling only return less than 6 MPG better than non-extreme-hypermiling driving over inefficient routes? I was hoping for at least 80 MPG on the way back home....my record trip is still only 73.5 MPG over 28.8 miles...
Still love the Insight though...albeit maybe slightly frustrated that I can't break over even 75 MPG for a trip...75 MPG in a Gen 1 Insight should be easy.... thoughts on brake reduction clips? Insight seems to have a lot of rolling resistance, but RE92s are at 60 PSI and brakes aren't dragging any more than a typical car's..
Civic also sold today! Silver Aero was a good car, but it was time to move to more ethereal transportation....stuck with the Insight for life now!
