Milestone

I have reached the 1000 mile mark of 100% electric driving. This is equivalent to about a month of commuting to work which took place over about a 7 week period. Thank you to those who have commented and given thoughts about the coupler/alignment situation. At this point I know there is a problem, and I have done what I can to remedy it without major expense. The best solution is to get a proper coupler and adapter plate made at an expense of about $1000. I would also need to open the tranny and fix whatever bearing is making noise. If the tranny or coupler fails again, I will probably sell the vehicle or all the parts, since I can not put any large amount of money into the project without harming things that are more important to me, like my family.  I have not heard the problem get worse, but that does not mean it is not slowly getting worse.

In the meantime, I am driving to work on a near daily basis and the car is performing well. Based on the numbers I am seeing on the Expert-Pro meter, I think the car has about an 80 mile range at 65 mph. I have gone about 66 miles on a charge a couple different times, but that is as far as I want to push it until I get my pack bottom balanced. I have also taken it up to about 75 mph, but since the wheels are not aligned and balanced yet and I don't have the vacuum system installed to give me power brakes, I don't really want to push the car to see what it can do. I have not had a chance to tweak the controller setting to see if I can get better acceleration from the car, but hope to soon. My transmission was built for super efficiency, so there may not be much more power I can get from it.

I had one issue that stopped me for a week. About a month ago, I was charging at home and checking various cells near the end of charge to see what voltage they were climbing to. I decided to check the battery connections to make sure each bolt was tight, so I just started checking them by hand first. I put my palm on the battery box and checked a bolt with my fingers and got a small shock. This baffled me for a while since the high voltage system is closed and should not be getting to the frame of the car or battery boxes at all. After some investigation the next weekend, it turns out one of the high voltage cables going from my controller to the motor was touching a piece of angle iron and the outer layer had either rubbed or melted enough to allow the inner cable to come in contact with the angle iron. My hand completed the circuit and luckily it was a very small amount of current able to make it there. I have been very vigilant about safety when working on the car and never thought there was a chance that the high voltage would be getting to the frame. I wrapped the section of cable with electrical tape, put plastic split loom tubing around all the cables going to the motor and glued some heavy bike tire rubber to the angle iron where the problem occurred. I also re-worked how the wire is run so it will not touch any surrounding metal.

This incident has re-enforced the rules of EV maintenance. Don't touch anything unless the battery pack is disconnected, the Controller capacitors are discharged, you have checked the area you are working on with a volt meter, you are wearing rubber gloves and you are using insulated tools.

Next up - I need to bolt down the charger since it is just sitting in the trunk and moves around a bit. I need to install the vacuum pump for the power brakes and also need to replace the seat belt buckles which are tough to get latched. The wheels need to be balanced and aligned. My meters are just sitting in a dash compartment and are not installed properly, so I need to figure out how and where I am going to install them.  I have a couple struts for the rear hatch that need to be installed so I can take the long stick I use to hold the hatch open out of the trunk. Hopefully I can get some time on it this weekend. I also need to check mounting bolts, battery connections, etc. to see if anything has wiggled loose or moved around during the last couple months.