Yep, more work yesterday on the battery boxes.
I was helping both on
Swee's trike, and on Tom's car, having fun hanging out with Doax too!
I know that Tom got a couple other things done on the Neon, but I was mostly helping running conduit under the car.
Two weeks ago, we drilled a hole into the spare tire wheel well in the car. Now, there is flexible conduit (hot-tub piping!) running from the engine compartment, back directly into the spare tire well. It runs in the channel where the exhaust system (now gone!) originally did.
Tom noticed that the exhaust heat shield was attached pretty simply with some threaded bolt holes that went directly up into the frame of the car.
He located some hanger clamps that were the right size for the hot tub tubing.
Those were simply run up into the frame of the car, the tube goes into them, and then we locked the clamps with 1/4 inch bolts with nylock nuts.
The very front end of the conduit (just past the firewall in the engine compartment) didn't have an existing bolt hole to hang a clamp from.
Good thing we have a small guy we can cram in the engine compartment, even with the motor already in there.
We drilled an extra bolt hole straight through the car, coming out as far as I could reach behind the console/radio/dashboard. Just enough room there to get a nut and fender washer on it.
Once the end clamp was set, it was cake to bolt up the other ones, although the other far end did require a custom hole as well.
In the mean time, Tom was also working on a support for the back. Since the rear tow trays go OVER the spare tire well, he though it a good idea to have a middle support for those trays.
Tom cut two pieces of unistrut and notched out a short section of pipe for them to mount together. There is a side-to-side support under the spare wheel well already, so he had the bottom unistrut transverse, but the top unistrut longitudinal to take advantage of it.
The battery boxes have been a lot of work, but are going to be VERY nice when all done. We are hoping that Tom will get some time to clean them up and paint them in the next two weeks, so we can get them in to their final installation, and continue on to installing the controller....