Recently I had the Spitfire off the road for some much needed repairs and maintenance. One of the features I decided to finish up was a hang glider rack for carrying my glider to and from the beach.
Sparky carries my hang glider
The glider is much longer than the car, and it looks a little silly, but it works. I built it in such a way that the rack slides into some telescoping tubing underneath the frame of the vehicle. Cotter pins hold them tightly in place. The rack can be removed and stored with the glider for later.
I need to make sure I can make it back and forth to the beach and/or mountain, but I think I can, and confidence is half the battle.
It’s almost been a year. I apologize for not posting more about the crazy stuff I’ve been up to. Hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of things again soon.
On Friday last week, a fellow Spitfire converter helped me pick up the next big change for my EV. $7200 in lithium batteries.
2/3rds of the beasts, loaded up and ready to go.
I bought them from CALB’s warehouse in Pomona, CA. They’re close enough that I could drive over with my helpful friend and pick ‘em up. This also means that if I find something wrong with them I can more easily get service. Well, I’ll at least have someone I can yell at.
Last night, another friend stayed late with me after work and helped me set up the batteries for testing. He set me up with a battery management solution and helped me wire everything up. We hooked it up to our in-house testing equipment and started the first charge.
Filling the tank for the first time.
Connecting all of those wires is quite a bit of work. It’s also a bit dangerous, as one slip of the ratchet could turn the batteries into a ball of plasma. We wrapped our metal tools in electrical tape for good luck.
Once we debugged our monitoring software we started a 10A charge. Things were going pretty smoothly, so we stepped it up to a 50A charge. We took the time to feel the heat of our connections to make sure things were properly hooked up. Sure enough, many of the connections were getting warm, but only on the positive side. The way the batteries are constructed, the positive terminal is aluminum and the negative terminal is copper. Aluminum isn’t a horrible conductor, but Aluminum Oxide is a disaster. The tiny bit of Al2O3 that forms a layer on the metal is enough to create a resistive barrier. It’s just milliohms, but that’s enough to heat up the connectors on a modest current draw. Luckily, we found that it’s relatively easy to sand off. A great lesson to learn before installing the batteries into the car. We’ll also apply a product called Noalox to the terminals, which prevents further corrosion.
Full testing will begin on Sunday. We’ll exercise the batteries and determine their true capacity and internal resistance. I can’t wait to drop them into my little car!
My company, AeroVironment, is in the business of designing and building a multitude of electric vehicle charging solutions. It’s joked that if it moves, we charge it. Even though our company makes the chargers, we did not have them actually installed in our parking lot, despite the few EVs owned by employees (myself among them).
Well, just recently this changed. A trench was dug in the parking lot and a bank of 4 chargers was installed between the spaces. I couldn’t wait to wire in my J1772 inlet and get to charging! Right now it’s wired up, but the inlet is dangling by its wires and not mounted correctly. I’ll finish that up soon enough.
This summer I decided to work on a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a few years: a backyard chandelier. The backyard of the BWMA had a perfect tree overhanging it, but my petty and negligent neighbor decided to cut down all of his trees. The legality of this tree slaughter was questionable, but the stupidity was not. But, now that I’ve moved to Orlando House in San Marino, we’ve got the perfect backyard for a chandelier. Large oak trees overhang our wooden deck, but there is not adequate light at night. A big rusting chandelier is just the trick!
I wanted to create something that would weather the outdoors for a few years while rusting beautifully. This chandelier won’t last forever, but sometimes art is temporary. It will certainly last a decade, and that’s longer than I’ll be living in this house for sure. I also wanted to bring something awesome to Burning Man this year, as I wasn’t going to be working on the art car like usual. Having Burning Man be a deadline for the project was a great benefit. I have a habit of putting things indefinitely if I don’t create a deadline for myself.
I bought all of the steel at Industrial Metal Supply. It included twisted steel cables, hammered square tubes, and ironwork for decorative fences. I laid it all out and created a 6′ diameter bacteriophage, in style of our Burning Man camp: The Phage. I cut the pieces, and welded them together. This wasn’t my first steel phage sculpture, so I knew what I was getting into.
There were two new obstacles that I had to tackle. I had to make the chandelier so it could be dismantled for storage and transportation, and I also had to hide the wiring as best I could. I couldn’t find too much in the way of decorative tubing, so many of the wires were going to be visible. But, I think I did a fairly good job of keeping that to a minimum. Both of these problems weren’t insurmountable. I created the legs so that they could be individually bolted onto the torso of the phage. The electrical connections were wire-nuts, which could be stuffed inside of holes in the torso.
I also found a great set of 60W antique bulbs at 1000bulbs.com. There are 12 bulbs, so that means a power draw of 720W. I’m not thrilled about that, but it really does light up the entire backyard very well. They weren’t cheap, but the steel wasn’t either. Sometimes art costs money. The bulbs themselves are amazing to look at up close. I sure hope they stand up to the temperature swings of outdoor use. A legitimate concern is falling acorns and branches which might break my bulbs. I bought a few extra just in case. The chandelier is heavy and strong, and its destined for a decade of beautifying my backyard. I can’t wait to entertain friends at the next party.
It’s been a while since I completed some maintenance on the Spitfire. The batteries needed some maintenance and cleaning. I finally found the time between some other projects to tackle this long neglected job. With the help of some beer fueled friends, I started to pull all of the batteries out of the car. They’re not light, but they’re pretty easy to disconnect.
That ugly white powder means corrosion.
The real threat was some corrosion that was beginning to form on my battery mounts. Apparently the battery acid that sprays out slightly during charging was shorting the batteries to the vehicle frame. I cleaned everything up as much as possible with baking soda and water to neutralize the acid. Luckily most of the corrosion wasn’t on the body.
Water, water everywhere.
We filled all of the cells with distilled water and washed the batteries with the same baking soda and water solution. It was interesting to see the top of the batteries bubble and sizzle with the chemical reaction. We were clearly doing something right. We put the clean batteries back in with enthusiasm.
I also spent some time searching for a short that was draining my small 12V battery that I use to close the contactors. I was able to determine that the DC-DC converter has something wrong with it. There is a short inside of the unit that wasn’t there when I installed the thing. The solution might involve opening up the unit and looking for something that has failed. It’s going to be tough to trace.
All we need is glue.
While I was working on the car, I decided to finally install the electric inlet into the gas cap, where it logically belongs. I had to run the wires and epoxy the inlet into the gas inlet. I just need it to not pull out when I try to disconnect the unit.
I had been popping the trunk to plug in my extension cord, but it’s so much better to use gas cap.
The place I moved to in San Marino has a swimming pool, a deck, a grill, outdoor couches, and a kegerator. Everything one would need to throw great summer parties. But, whenever we throw a party, few people jump in the pool. Why? Because it’s much too cold! The beautiful oak trees that shade our deck, also do a great job of shading our pool. So only in the warmest summer months is our pool decent to swim in. I’m not a big fan of personal swimming pools in general. But if we have it, and are paying for the weekly maintenance, we might as well make is usable.
Things were cheaper back then.
I decided to solve the problem in the most environmentally friendly way I could: a solar water heater. Solar water heating has a strong history in Pasadena. In 1897 30% of all homes here had solar water heaters installed. Sadly, they’re not common today. I can’t change the public behavior, but I can put one on my own roof!
Simple, elegant, inspiring.
I was inspired by a story of a guy building his own home, and constructing a make-shift solar water heater so he could shower after a day in the Florida heat. It seemed very straightforward to build. I started pricing things out and discovered that copper was just a little too expensive. However as I priced it out, it seemed that this plastic, store bought solar water heater would cost about as much, and will work right out of the box. It seemed like a no brainer.
The solar water heater claims to raise the temp of the pool 5-10 degrees. The warmer we can get our pool the better! It also requires a pump. I didn’t want to tie it in with the existing pool pump, as that only runs a few hour during the day. I found a surplus dishwasher pump which claims 10gpm of flow. After a little plumbing, it could be just the thing. I liked the idea of only pumping if the panels were warm, and leaving it off at night. For at night, the solar heat collectors would act as radiators and give off heat instead of taking it in. I have plans for an automatic relay that turns the pump on only when it’s needed. But, for now I can make do with plugging it in manually.
After 4 long months, I finally got the EV back on the road. I apologize for not keeping this blog well updated. In the meantime I’ve done so many small tasks, that it was hard to blog about them.
Here’s a short list of the things I completed:
Fixed the driveshaft
Connected the transmission housing to the motor
Mounted motor
Mounted reversing contactor
Destroyed reversing contactor’s diode
Hooked up reversing contactor between motor/controller
Rebuilt steering column
Replaced steering wheel with later model wheel
Fixed wiring for blinkers
Re-mounted batteries
Test-drove new direct drive set up
2 miles into test drive, noticed speedo failed
Finally leaving the stuffy garage.
There are tons of things to do cosmetically: little small things that I will hopefully get around to fixing. At the moment, I am content with how she’s driving, and I’ll likely work on some other projects until Burning Man is over.
A few weeks ago, Syyn Labs, drove out to the desert to complete a project for Die Hard batteries. It was the culmination of a month’s preparation work. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t actually do most of the work until we got out to the location. The setting was a dry lake bed an hour East of Victorville. There were 24 white and black cars parked, waiting to be set up. We got to work, and in a couple of days arrived at this:
While the setup looks simple and straightforward, it was indeed a lot of hard work. We were working with 20 unique cars, with 4 of them being repeats. We were busy wiring them up so that their brights and horns would sound with a press of a keyboard key 100ft away. Each car required it’s own solution. Some cars we used the fuse box to interrupt the brights. Other cars we ran our own lines to the brights. And even other cars we had pigtail plugs that we were able to snap onto the existing bulbs. Some cars were a dream to work on, easy to get to things, and simple connectors. Other cars required contortionist hands and had tricky wiring.
We had to disconnect all of the batteries inside of the cars and run cables so that all of the cars could run off of a single battery, which was 60 feet out in front of the line of cars. I thought I had brought extra cables, but we used up all 1000 feet of the 1/0 welding cable I hauled out to the desert for this shoot.
To top it all off, we suffered a huge set of problems, right as the production crew was ready to start filming. The EMI from the cars starting and running during testing had knocked out our control schemes. Luckily, Eric Gradman was able to construct an entirely new control layout and recode his computers to get everything to work. I’m fuzzy on tech details, but he basically had to change the command signals through about 4 different protocols between the keyboard and the lights/horns. Once he finished we had an amazingly robust system, despite the kludge of a solution. Eric solved the problem, but there were some tense moments where we weren’t sure it was going to actually work at all. We were all scared of what would happen if we had to abort the project and go home empty handed.
In the end, we were very happy with the result. It really worked and we really made it happen. Congrats to the Syyn Labs team.
After a few weeks of being much too busy to work on the Spitfire, I decided to warm back up with a cosmetic fix that has been nagging me for a while. I decided to tackle the windows, seals, and door trim. While not important to getting the car back on the road, I feel much better about having part of the car in a finished state.
The first thing I had to get the window mechanism working. I greased it up with plenty of white lithium grease and a spritz of WD-40. I then had to figure out how to seat the glass into the mechanism. The original solution was rubber, but that rubber has long since rotted away and replacement parts aren’t available. I made an attempt at using layers of electrical tape and a couple of lengths of an old inner tube to solve the problem. I later found a better solution, but more on that later.
The last time I install waist seals. They look so easy...
I temporarily fit the window in place and began to fit the waist seals. These are the rubber and felt seals that are in the door slot that seal against the window on the outside and inside. The waist seals are held in by clips that grip onto an edge of the door on the inside. They’re notoriously difficult to install, and deceptively unassuming. But, with a homemade hook-like tool and some patience it’s possible to get all of them in place. It only took me three hours to get 4 seals installed.
Silicone and Grease, old friends
With the waist seals where they should be, I ran the windows up and down. The rubber was gripping so hard against the glass that it kept the windows from going down. The glass just pulled out of the mechanism and hung up dangerously. I needed to find a new solution. I asked around on my favorite Spitfire forum and found the solution: using silicone to seal the glass into the mechanism. This provides just enough grip, but it’s also not permanently affixed.
Next I put the door trim back into place and reinstalled the door and window handles. They fit back in with out any difficulty.
It feels great to get another part of the car finished. There is so much more to work on, though. Next I need to figure out the solution to the motor mounting and alignment. I’m going to ask some experts at work for advice.
