Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Throttle Assembly II

Today I visited my accountant Bob. One year ago I told Bob about this project and he's been following it ever since. As I walked into the office, he was unwinding an extension cord saying "We've been expecting you." It was hilarious. Sadly though, I couldn't help but feel little disappointed that I wasn't driving the Z3. Bob was kind enough to help me get the ONE and ONLY tax credit that I can for this entire endeavor; $75 for the installation of the charging station in the garage. Buy an electric car and the government throws money at you. Build one and they have nothing for you. Of course that's not why I'm doing it, so on to the build

Once I got home I started working and got a few things done. Remember that I had to redo the charging port in the car to handle the higher current? Well the one part I hadn't done yet was upgrade the connection from the plug under the gas cap to the charger itself. I took off the connectors that were there and installed proper 50 amp Anderson connectors. Easy work, but important.

Next I installed the first of the smaller battery boxes up front. Not difficult, just time consuming working in the tight space. Once that was in, I was able to do the final work on the throttle assembly.

In the picture, the firewall is off to the right. The throttle pedal is sitting in the newly installed smaller battery box, and the bracket you see to the right is mounted to the larger box I was working on last week. The pulling distance on the pedal is perfect. When I push the pedal in the cabin all the way to the floor, it pulls this pedal it's full throw. I built this Rube Goldberg device because it just seemed better than cutting up the factory pedal assembly and trying to rebuild it and fit in the new pedal. I just couldn't envision that going well.

The rest of the day I worked on cutting, bending and fitting some of the aluminum straps I'll be using to anchor the batteries. I'll work on getting the last box in tomorrow and finishing up the straps. I'm waiting on some ring connectors to come before I can start running all the interconnects between all the batteries.

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