CONNECTING THE CONTROLLER

The Synkromotive controller comes with a pre-wired unterminated assembly that plugs into a 23 position AMPSEAL Connector on the side of the case. It looks like spaghetti and has wires for forward and reversing contactors that are not needed in my build. I considered removing the unused wires but was afraid I would break the connector, so will just hide them in split loom. The placement of wires in the connector do not group the wires going to different components very well causing them to tangle but I believe I finally got all of them straightened out pretty well. 

CONTROLLER WIRING

AMPSEAL CONNECTOR

Hopefully, next weekend I will be able to install the main battery connectors and charge the pack. I have also been working on contactor and fuse placement and am looking for a place to put the shunt, so I can measure pack current. I don't want to cut the battery cables in the engine compartment as battery packs will eventually be installed there and I don't want to have to splice them, so may leave them a little long for now. With the transaxle and motor cradle installed, it is a bit awkward getting to the motor compartment wiring.

Reading the controller manual and prearranging the wires has slowed me down quite a bit but I hope to pick up the pace in the coming weeks.

Until next week,

Randy

WEEKEND OFF

I have been working on the Fiero several nights a week and almost every weekend since March, so I kind of slacked this weekend.

We took my wife's sister to the airport for her return flight to Florida after a weeks visit, then I picked up my son and his girl friend and we went to National Plug In Day Columbus.

They had the Tesla Model S, and Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Chevy Volt well represented but none of the local converters brought their builds. They also were not giving any rides when we were there but I guess they did give rides later in the day. As you can see in the picture below, there were quite a few people showing interest in electric cars.

 TESLA MODEL S

 NISSAN LEAF

TESLA MODEL S

TESLA ROADSTER

CHEVY VOLT

After about an hour at the car show, we decided to get something to eat. I work in Columbus every day but never just walk around the city, so my son suggested we to to Dirty Franks on 4th St. Our plan was to get something to eat and go back to the car show but when we got there, we ended up having to wait almost 45 minutes to be seated, had to walk a block to where the car was parked to feed the meter, and by the time we were done eating, the show was over.

DIRTY FRANKS

 When we got back to the car, we had over an hour left on the meter and noticed Uncle Sam Pawn Shop across the street from where we were parked, so decided to go in. (Been watching too much Pawn Stars on the History Channel)

 

One of my coworkers, Tony,  moved to Columbus from a small Ohio town and the first year he was here, his friends in his hometown put on a surprise "Martini Party" in his front yard, to commemorate his move to the big city. It became an annual party and the second year Tony decided to burn down a pine tree that he no longer wanted in his front yard. The tree is gone but burning something is his front yard has become a Tradition of the Martini Party. Tony even had a projector and large screen for all the Buckeye fans to watch the football game.

MARTINI PARTY

Sunday morning I got my weekly fix of EVTV and it was a pretty interesting show. They are fixing rust an a Karmann Ghia that sold for a premium price on EBAY because it was supposed to be in great condition, only to find out the under body was very rusted. Then Jack introduced a new golf car project, and a new concept of bottom balancing and not worrying about how low the batteries are discharged. There has been many documented cases of the batteries going to nearly zero and coming back to full capacity when charged. All of the OEM charging equipment will be used and the battery pack will be adjusted to keep the pack from going too high. This is a neat concept, as when I sold the lead acid batteries out of the original Fiero build, I had a bunch of interest from golf cart owners and I believe that the HiPower batteries I have now would be of great interest to them when I am ready to put in the CALB pack. I have always thought that it would be fork lifts and golf carts that will help increase volumes battery sales to the point the prices will start to come down for EV converters. I don't think there is much motivation for traditional battery companies to change to a lithium chemistry because they like the business model of a battery going bad in a few years, so they can sell new ones. It will take a shift in consumer demand to change that.

Hope to have more EV stuff next week.

Regards,

Randy  

JASON HORAK'S EVCCON 2013 VIDEOS

A couple videos of the shop during EVCCON.

JASON'S DAYTONA EV BUILD BLOG

HONEY DO !

My wife's sister is coming for a visit next week, so I have been busy cleaning carpets, weed eating, and doing maintenance around the house, Needless to say, not much work was done on the Fiero. My sister in law lives in Florida and they don't get to see each other that often, so a little delay in working on the car is a small sacrifice. My wife has been pretty understanding with all the work and money I have put into the Fiero and a little payback is in order.

 

 MY WIFE AND HER SISTER

The night before I left for EVCCON, I tightened the bolts holding down the toilet and when I opened the valve back up, the packing was leaking. When I tried to tighten the packing, the nipple broke and I had to rip out some tile to get to the fitting, so most of Saturday was spent cutting and mortaring tile to fix the hole. The flange was also broken on the toilet hold down screw, so off to Home Depot to get a new 2 piece flange to tighten everything down.  When I got done, I decided to get a growler of Buckeye Lake Brewery's new Autumn Ale to try during the Buckeyes game. The beer was good and the Buckeyes did not disappoint in the game against CAL.

I was able to manage to hook up the shifter and it feels pretty smooth. Probably after I am able to drive the car, there may need to be some final tweaking, but it shifts good just sitting there.

TRANSAXLE LINKAGE

Also, the pot box was painted red and I have started to plan how to mount it in the motor compartment. This is another  item that would have been much easier to do with the motor cradle out of the car but I wanted to have the cradle in so I could see where the wires had to go.

 POT BOX AND BRACKET

I don't like the way the controller looks on the mount I originally made, so am working on something different to get the controller in the middle of the motor and away from the motor cooling air intake. I am also working on communicating with the Synkromotive Controller so I can set some initial settings.

SETTING UP THE SYNKROMOTIVE CONROLLER

Ratcheting straps were ordered from EBAY and will be used to hold the batteries in place until I get around to making the battery boxes.

BATTERY STRAP

BATTERIES STRAPPED

An email was sent to Keegan at CALIB inquiring when the 51mm connectors will arrive from China. I am ready charge the batteries and am just waiting on the connectors and bolts. The car is getting close to a test drive and I am getting a little anxious.

My son came over Sunday and helped mow the grass, so that freed up some time to work on the car. After he left, I noticed he left the driver's side door partially open and was afraid the 12 volt battery ran down but after checking the voltage, it was sill over 13 volts. He just landed a job at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, OH and I am excited for him, as the economy still has not recovered and even with a college degree, good jobs are hard to find.

Ok, I was almost done with this week's blog and decided to go out and work on the pot box. I cut a piece of flat iron and laid out the bolt holes for the pot box and bracket. Then I drilled and tapped the holes to 1/4 20 and drilled two holes to mount the plate to the side of the frame. I marked the holes on the frame and drilled holes to install nut rivets. Once everything was painted and the paint had dried, I bolted the plate with the pot box and bracket to the frame. It turned out pretty good and will be out of the way.

POT BOX MOUNTED

Still trying to get the gui for the Synkromotive controller to load on the old laptop I have in the garage and believe it  is a .net issue. I am trying to repair the .net set up but the old laptop is so slow, thought I would just come in the house and finish this week's post.

Until next week,

Randy

LAST POST BEFORE EVCCON

Tuesday around 4 am I am going to leave for EVCCON. That should get me to Cape Girardeau, MO
by 11 am central time when the shop opens. My Hotel room should be ready by early afternoon so I can check in and rest a little for the open house that evening. Al Gajda's 39 Dodge ev conversion was at the EVTV Shop over the weekend and you could see him installing the batteries on the EVTV WEBCAM . He must have got them in and the truck running because it is off of the lift and no where in sight now.

Getting the 12 volt power hooked up has been my main priority this week and I cleaned and installed the new C500 right half connector.

 

C500 RIGHT SIDE CONNECTOR

The battery was connected so I had my wife turn on the key so if there were any shorts, I could have her shut off the power and could quickly disconnect the battery if needed. She turned the key and nothing happened. I plugged in the IOTA DC-DC converter and the lights came on so I was a bit confused. From inside the engine compartment I could not see the top of the battery and when I stood up, found I had not hooked up the negative  battery  terminal and was out of crimp terminals, so finishing the 12 volt connections would have to wait until the next day. As there is no starter on an EV, I probably got a little carried away on the battery and battery charger cables, but I had them already and figured, they won't hurt anything.

The next morning I was off to ACE Hardware to pick up the crimp terminals and got the battery hooked up. The little Ballistic battery was able to power up the headlights and all of the 12 volt systems seemed to work just fine, so I went to the wires on the C500 connector and checked voltage on them.

LIGHTS POWERED UP

C500 CONNECTOR PIN OUT

Just as I suspected, pins B! & E3 were connected to the pink wire that had been spliced in the wiring harness and are 12 volts when the switch is turned to the run position.. Pin A4 is connected to the purple wire that was spliced in the wiring harness and is 12 volts when the switch is turned to the start position.

The basic 12 volt wiring is done and all that is left is to put loom on some of the wires going to the terminal block on the front firewall and to tidy up the main battery terminals. The ground terminal is an aluminum nut rivet and I picked up a stainless bolt and washer to connect the terminals to it. Also I put one of the solid trunk panels in that is from a 1884 Fiero, to see if it was going to provide enough protection from the elements for the DC-DC converter, battery and contactors; It appears it will.

COVER FROM TOP

COVER FROM BOTTOM

The wires coming in on the left harness go to the AVC2, the one on the right is the positive and the one on the left is the negative. The harness coming in from the bottom is coming from the Zivan Charger. The left wire coming out of the loom is the positive to the common terminal on the charger contacts, the one coming out of the loom on the third terminal from the left is the normally closed contact and the on furthest right goes to the normally open contact. The terminal above will go to the relay that controls the main battery contactors. The two wires on the top left are the positive and negative.

 

CHARGER CONTACT TERMINAL BLOCK

CHARGER CONTACT CONNECTIONS

   

The original build had a wire running under the car to power the brake vacuum pump so I will look for a switched 12 volt wire  in the front of the car to turn on the pump when the key is switched. on. There is also a wire to turn on the heater contactor running underneath the car that I will try to power form an existing harness wire. If I don't need the starter wire, I may run it to the heater switch under the dash and use it to operate the heater contactor.

The battery bottom balancing continues and I have about 25 to go. The capacity information will be good when I start putting the pack together as I may just leave out some of the lower capacity ones. Since I am bottom balancing, I think real low capacity cells will keep me from fully charging the good ones.

As I said last week, I will try to do a post or two from EVCCON and will post some links from some of the other converters who are posting from the show.

Thanks for  viewing,

Randy   

 

FINISHING THE MOTOR COMPARTMENT

This week I finishing cleaning up and painting the engine compartment. I tried to use the MIG to fill the holes that had been drilled in the trunk to mount the lead acid battery trays but do not have enough adjustment to get the current low enough to not blow through the thin sheet metal used on the trunk, so I just filled them with fiberglass resin filler. I also mounted some new clamps to hold the brake line to the rear wall of the engine compartment. The entire motor compartment has been coated with truck bed liner and new split loom tubing has been ordered, to clean up all of the wiring. The DC-DC converter was painted red to match the Warp9 motor and Synkromotive controller, so now I am looking for a place to mount it. A diode will be added to make sure the caps do not try to back feed to the main battery pack.

DC-DC CONVERTER

I also ordered a Ballastic EV02 12 volt Battery. I have not heard of anyone trying one of these but it was inexpensive so hopefully I can bottom balance it and set the DC-DC converter to kick on and off to keep it in the middle of it's range. When I drove the car with lead acid batteries, there were times if the pack voltage went too low, the main contact would kick out because the DC-DC convertor was under 12 Volts. The battery should give me a little bit of a cushion.

 

BALLASTIC BATTERY EVO2

 Then the J1772 AVC2 control board was installed and wired. Additionally, two wires will be run from the normally closed contacts in the AVC2, in series with the main battery contact 12 volt control circuit, to disable power when the car is being charged. 

 AVC2 MOUNTED & WIRED

 Finally, on Sunday evening I was able to start working on the mounting brackets for the Synkromotive Controller to mount on top of the Warp 9 Motor.

 

BRACKETS TO MOUNT CONTROLLER

 There are so many little things to do while the motor cradle is out and I can get to everything, I want to make sure to not get in a hurry and miss something that will be hard to get to after it is installed.Quite a bit of time this weak was spent working on the yard and I had to do some repair work on my weed eater before I could trim. Then my wife wanted some bushes planted requiring a trip to the garden center to pick up landscape materials, so I didn't get as much done on the car as I would have liked to. Also, my air conditioner is acting up and I had to mess with it to try to find the problem but I did find a solution, call a repairman. Anyway, the bottom line is there just aren't enough hours in a day and days in a week to get everything done that needs done. Hopefully I will be able to make more progress on the car next week.

Until next time,

Randy

PLUGGING ALONG

Saturday morning I put the wiring in plastic bags and taped them up water tight, then power washed the engine bay. While it was drying, I went to the new Advance Auto in Hebron, OH to pick up some primer and truck bed liner paint. I believe this will give me a nice rugged coating and the finish will help cover up any imperfections in the surface of the engine bay. I then removed some partially attached metal on the firewall, that was left from the original build. Some of the firewall metal pulled where the spot welds were made so after grinding the area, I applied some body filler to smooth out the area. Finally a coat of bed liner was applied to the inner fender walls, engine bay side of the wheel wells, J1772 bracket, and area around where the junction box will be mounted. After drying, the paint looks real good and proved to be a good choice for the engine bay coating.

 With the 220 volt plug wired up last week, the next task is to wire the J1772 plug, so I started stripping wire and getting all of my soldering tools ready. I made up 2 pins before realizing that the piece holding the pins in place had to go over the wires first, so I proceeded to undo what I had done and started over. With the retainer slid over the wires, the pins were assembled again. When soldering, I had to be careful because the flux and solder tended to overflow the wire socket and flow down onto the outside that has to fit in the retainer. I kept a wire brush handy and kept the solder from building up by brushing it off before the pin cooled down and the solder hardened completely. When I tried to put the retainer over the pins, there were a couple of them that needed the solder filed and with a piece of fine sand paper, I was able to get the pins completely cleaned up and the retainer over them. Because of the 10 gauge wire, I had to do some modifications to the outside housing of the J1772 plug. I was finally able to get the cover over the wire, mated with the plug, and the plug assembly was bolted to the bracket.

220 Volt Terminal Box Installed

220 Volt Box with Cover Installed

There are some holes that need welded where the battery trays were mounted in the trunk on the original build so I got out the mig. After striking one arc, the wire ran out, so I will need to get more wire before I can get the remainder of the engine bay prepped and painted.

I have been looking for a piece of metal to use for the front motor mount and came across the table that the controller and contacts were mounted to. I got out the template I had made a couple weeks ago and cut out a section with the wafer disk. The picture below shows the open end but the other end has the edge bent at 90 degrees. I may bend a 90 degree edge on the open end also and weld the bolts to the bottom flange so the nuts can just be removed from the bottom. The bends on each end should give the mount plenty of strength.

METAL FOR MOTOR MOUNT

 

 The motor cradle has been covered for the last 2 weeks while I have been getting the engine bay and 220 volt charger power ready, so now I will be able to get the motor mounting finished up and test run the motor finally.

I would have liked to have installed the motor mount but had to review a proposal for work Monday morning, so had to quit early.

Until next week,

Randy

Meter Problems

Over the summer I have been working on the batteries and have been using the EV Fiero for local errands. The car now has close to a 25 to 30 mile range and I am feeling more comfortable driving it
.

I hooked up the JLD404 but am having problems getting the amps to read accurately. It seems like it is multiplying the amps as the controller is only 500 amps but the jld404 is reading -650 amps at full throttle, then displaying an error. The JLD404 is pretty easy to set up and I am fairly certain it is configured correctly but although Jack Rickard at EVTV says that you can use a 500 volt/50mv shunt, if you set the maximum range to 750, Marco at Light Object, where I purchased the meter said it would not work unless I put in a 75mv shunt.  Even though I believe Marko is incorrect, I purchased a 500V/75mv shunt and set the maximum range to 500 with the same results, high amperage readings. The mV reading from the shunt on a volt meter never exceeded 52.5 mv, so the JLD404 should be reading around -350 amps at 52.5 mv. Needless to say, the amp hour counter is not going to be accurate until I get this problem figured out so I just have to keep track of my miles when driving. The EV accelerates quite a bit slower when the batteries start getting low, but will still operate, so you do have some indication that you need to head for home before it actually runs out of power.

The 1970 John Deere 110 Garden Tractor that I have been restoring is almost completed, so I should be able to spend more time on the Fiero EV real soon. Hoping I can sell the garden tractor to help pay for LiPo4 batteries but my next investment is going to be a video camera so I can start posting some video. My son has offered to be my videographer and editor, so I am looking forward to getting him involved with the project. 

It is getting close to EVTV’s EVCCON and I am getting excited. I came home from the convention last excited about getting started on a conversion, so hopefully by next years EVCCON, I will have the Fiero converted to Lithium and be able to take it to the show. For anyone interested in attending you can check out the following link.

EVCCON