Monday, February 23, 2009

Near completion

Richard emailed me last night with some exciting news:
"The car is basically complete."
There are a few details to iron out, but everything is in place and ready to test.


Here are the pics!

The front compartment:


On the back left, against the wall are the heater relays. The back right has the Delta-Q 72V charger and beside it, against the wall is the circuit breaker / emergency disconnect. The battery heater thermostat, white, is clearly visible. Each battery has power leads and fused instrumentation leads.


Here we can see the heating pad across the back of the back two batteries. The aux battery can be seen on the right, in the nose; beside it is the DC/DC.

The "plug":

There is a twist-lock for the chargers and a standard plug for the heaters


The rear compartment:

On the firewall of the rear compartment is the aluminum heat-sink/mounting board. On it can be seen from left to right: the inertia switch, the control relays, the potentiometer box (throttle), the controller, the contactor, the measurement shunts, the kill switch relays, the power-fuse and 12V fuses. Again, each battery has power and instrumentation leads, heaters and a thermostat, a charger, and of course, the motor with its RPM sensor on the back-shaft.
The instrument cluster:
We can see the pack voltage, battery or motor amperage and motor RPM. Below these is the programmable timer for cabin pre-heating.


The instrument cluster, heating plenum and wiring ducts:

Behind the programmable timer is the heater-box and the plenum which leads to the windshield defroster vents. In the corner, we can see the curved wiring duct which protects and isolates the driver/passengers from the high voltage wires which need to run between the front and rear battery boxes.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Controller has arrived!

The Logisystems controller arrived on Feb 5th. I drove down to Ottawa to deliver it to Richard and review the state of the car.

It looks great, the heating system is in, batteries are all in place, so is the front charger, DC/DC, aux bat and relays.

We reviewed remaining component placement and interactions, as well as front-to-back wire routing through the cabin; and instrumentation connectors.

I brought the old gas engine back to Montreal with me: it will find a new home as part of someones VW project.

Sorry no pics.