Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Apparently Late Night Math is Not My Strong Suit

Lots done today. Let's take a look at some of it.


This is the new location for the shunt. It's at the front right corner of the back battery rack. I had to cut and re-crimp a couple cables to get them the right length, but it worked out well.


Just to the left of that is the emergency breaker, or battery disconnect. I had thought that I'd mount it dead center on the back rack, but the cable for the positive feed to the contactor didn't reach the extra 2 inches. The symmetry in the engine bay will be off, which is kind of too bad.


Here's a shot of the new throttle assembly set up, installed and tested. It's difficult to make out what's what here, so I'll take another once the batteries are in. But you can see the cable anchor in the right side of the picture, and the pedal assembly just to the left of center.


And last we have a shot of the whole assembly mounted in place with the back row of batteries resting in their place as well. There's a bit more tie down work to do, then I can install the front row.

In addition to all that, I also got a few other things done. I re-installed the tray under the motor that holds the fan for the motor as well as the box that contains the new vacuum pump. I ran all the necessary power lines to the items and the vacuum line from the pump to the reservoir. I also installed the new cross brace that stiffens the chassis.

I don't think I mentioned it before, but the fellow that owned the car before me clearly ran it up on a curb or something. There was a bit of damage under the car, mostly cosmetic. However, the original cross brace took most of the abuse, and was a bit twisted. It still fit in place, but was very difficult to bolt in and was under stress once in place. The new one slipped on so easy, it was a pleasure bolting it on the car.

Which brings me to the odd title of this post. You may remember that I had 31 batteries up front in the original configuration. During the rework, I drew up multiple designs trying to get the cleanest install of all the batteries in as tidy a package as I could. Well one night, very late I came up with this design. It is the cleanest by far and I'm very pleased with it. There's just one nagging problem. There are 12 batteries in the front row, and then two rows of 9 in the back rack. In most worlds, that adds up to 30. Apparently for me, in the middle of the night, that sometimes equals 31.

For the life of me, I don't know why I never added them up again, but I didn't. (This is the part where you all laugh at me.) After standing and shaking my head in disbelief, I started laughing at myself. But eventually I started thinking about it objectively. This really was the cleanest design I'd come up with, and it's going to look great. I don't think I want to change it, or would have if I realized it at the time. There is room for one more battery in the trunk box. It will make the end of the box a bit cramped, and I'll have to redo some of the lines in there, but I think it's going to be worth it in the long run.

The worst thing is that it will delay my relaunch by a day or so.

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