The battery balancing continues but is almost done. The Powerlab 8 is a great tool but actually provides a little too much protection and logs a safety code at the drop of a hat. The regenerative charging into a 12 volt battery is a great idea but the 12 volt battery has to start at just the right state of charge or you get a safety code that the voltage is, too high, too low, or the voltage is rising too fast, and either shuts down or shifts to internal discharge mode. If you discharge into a battery, you can do it at up to 40 amps, but if the Powerlab 8 switches to internal mode, it only discharges at 10 amps. As I have a dispute filed through the credit card on the purchase of the HiPower 100AH batteries, I want to log the capacity of all of them; So that keeps me from just rigging up the JLD404 to bottom balance the cells. Out of the 40 cells, probably 20 of them have at least minor swelling but surprisingly, some of those are actually showing pretty good capacity. The cell in the picture marked Bad was at 0.091 volts when received and will not take a charge. It was probably in a string and went to reverse polarity when the pack was discharged too much. This is how all of the last 12 cells arrived and it is no surprise that the USPS did not want to ship them. Chase deposited the payment for these cells back into my account and I got a letter saying the dispute was settled, so I guess the seller is welcome to pick up the batteries at their convince.
SWELLED BATTERY
MELTED POSITIVE TERMINAL MARKER
ZIVAN CHARGER MOUNTED
I have also been able to finish up some of the tasks I wrote about in previous posts. The charger is mounted and wired up to the 220 volt and J1772 plugs.
All of the wires on the AVC2 board have been connected, loom installed, routed across and attached to the firewall.
J1772 AND AVC2 WIRING COMPLETED
The DC-DC converter is finally mounted and once the 12 volt battery is connected, will all be wired up. I made a tool to install the nut rivets but broke down an bought an installation tool. It does a much better job and makes installing the nut rivets much easier.
THREADED INSERT TOOL
I am going to shut off the power to the DC-DC converter when the key is switched off, so the main purpose of the 12 volt battery will be to run the AVC2 board when charging from the J1772 plug. I will also have it switch on the DC-DC converter while charging.
DC-DC CONVERTER & BATTERY
There are a couple wires in the wiring harness going to the battery connection that have wires spliced into them. I believe the purple wire that has one of the wires spliced into it, is from the starter switch and originally went to several relays, and the pink wire that has a wire spliced into it, was the power for the distributor.
The wiring diagrams are not very clear but those are the only purple and pink wires I can find on the schematic. When I got the car, it was wired so you had turn the key to start to engage the main battery contactor and when you turned the key back to run, the contactor stayed engaged. The precharge resister was connected all the time, so even when the contactor was off, you had power to the controller through the precharge resister. I found this out the first time I reconnected a battery connection and got a pretty good spark. There was no maintenance disconnect so I will need to install one. Also, I picked up some conductive zinc paste that is recommended for aluminum connections that I am going to try.
I am also going to reroute the battery cables from the front battery pack through the duct and out where the computer used to be.
PINK WIRE
PURPLE WIRE
The wiring diagrams are not very clear but those are the only purple and pink wires I can find on the schematic. When I got the car, it was wired so you had turn the key to start to engage the main battery contactor and when you turned the key back to run, the contactor stayed engaged. The precharge resister was connected all the time, so even when the contactor was off, you had power to the controller through the precharge resister. I found this out the first time I reconnected a battery connection and got a pretty good spark. There was no maintenance disconnect so I will need to install one. Also, I picked up some conductive zinc paste that is recommended for aluminum connections that I am going to try.
NOALOX CONNECTION PASTE
Front Battery Pack Cables
I received the new terminal crimper I purchased from EBAY. so will now be able to properly put the terminals on the 2/0 cables when connecting the battery pack.
8 TON HYDRAULIC WIRE TERMINAL CRIMPER
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Thanks for viewing,
Randy
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