ELECTRIC FIERO REBUILD: CHARGER DISCONNECT

Thursday evening my wife wanted me to run her to the store to get some shelving liner so I decided to take the Fiero, even though I had driven it about 10 miles on the interstate the day before, without charging back up. The car ran great and we made it to the store with out any issues. The new vacuum switch had arrived, so before we left, it was installed in the brake booster vacuum line and did kick on and off, sort of. After it pumped up, it would try and start and immediately shut off, so it seems the vacuum is bleeding off back through the pump when it shuts off. An inline check valve was ordered to install on the vacuum line right at the pump and this should fix the problem. It appears the pump will work fine without the large vacuum tank as soon as the bleed off problem is taken care of. While my wife was in the store, I stopped at a sports bar in Buckeye lake and had a PBR, that I must admit, tasted very good after a hard day at work. My wife finished picking up the shelving liners and a couple of new rugs for the new kitchen floor and we headed back home. Everything went well until we got almost home, as the 12 volt system dropped too low, causing the contactors to trip. I sat a few minutes to let the voltage recover and reset the controller and relays. This got me to about three houses away from my hours, so I finally decided to just walk home and get our other car to push the Fiero home. My wife finally got to drive the Fiero but it was being pushed by another car. Of course, the vacuum pump did not have enough power to run properly, so she freaked out when the brakes did not have any power assist. Finally we got the car backed in to where the charger could be hooked up and everything was good.

There is now a plug on the 220 volt cable that can be plugged into the car so I am getting closer to being able to just plug the car in and charge. The JLD5740 volt meter was hooked up to the ABB 220 volt contactor, so after a little messing around with the settings, was able to get the contactor to close so there would be power to the charger. The charger seems to be temperature sensitive because the last time I charged was during the day and it started cutting back at around 134 or 135 volts. By the time the battery pack reached 137, the charge was down to 3 amps. Not so last night, as the amps stayed at 18 all the way to 137 volts. The JLD5740 did it's job and the moment the voltage hit 137 volts, the contactor tripped.