Success... Kind of...

I started the car today. For safety's sake, I moved my wife's car from in front of the garage, and opened the door before attempting to start. Pretty good thing I did too, as forward was fine, but 30 seconds in, the controller exploded, jammed the car full speed in reverse (thankfully I had put it in reverse moments before) and, tires screeching, slammed the car into the rear of the garage, destroying two garbage cans, poking a nice hole in the wall, and annihilating a wooden rack containing among other things about 40 pounds of nicely sorted nuts and bolts. These promptly went into the back of the car with a huge crash. The circuit breaker tripped and stopped the 10 seconds of madness. The good news is it all works! Now to start putting it back together again while I wait for the new controller...

Wiring

The main wiring is almost finished - all the small pieces are in place and the two main runs are in place - just not tied down yet. It should be movable by the weekend!

Vacuum System

I boxed up the pump today - I stuffed the box with insulation to dampen the noise, and the pump sits on rubber feet as well. Hopefully it'll be very unobtrusive. The vacuum cutoff is in and wired as well. I put it close to the pump, hanging off one of the battery boxes. It's large, so finding a spot was tricky. The vacuum check valve runs underneath the accessory box to connect to the reservoir by the firewall.

Wiring to the pump cutoff switch

The pump is in place, the cutoff switch is in place, the ground wires are in, the accessory battery is in. The little red key in the lower right corner of the top box is a main battery cutoff switch.

The console back in - it still looks like vikings have been at the cockpit, but it'll snap together soon... I hope...

It's Alive!

I spun it today for the first time. Two bad sets of jumper cables made it a much harder job than anticipated. Forgetting that I had hooked up the driveshaft and left it in gear would have been really exciting if I hadn't just been using a single 12v battery. Running myself over is an old Monty Python skit; wouldn't want to explain that to the Paramedics...

I installed the inertia switch as well today - this will shut the motor down, killing power to the pack in the event of a major collision.

The Instrument Console

Done. Six hours, but it's done.
It looks pretty much like it was always supposed to have a voltmeter and ammeter, which was the whole point, of course!

The cluster getting prepped for the hacking

After the hole saw


Done!
The old fuel gauge is now the voltmeter, which give me battery life; the temperature gauge is now the ammeter which tells me how hard I'm being on the batteries.

Batteries, Round 2

I put the batteries back into their newly insulated boxes - I have decided to wrap them in plastic, then seal 'em up using expanding foam insulation. That will help anchor everything, and will provide the maximum heat transfer and insulation for the batteries... The component box is done - it's not pretty, but it's functional.

Four batteries are up under the front of the car, one are down each side of the motor.

More and more...

I've had to spend some time figuring out how to keep the batteries warm, as the weather is cooling down and I'm expcting to use this car for as many months as possible. To that end, I've insulated the boxes with industrial carpet and rubber, followed by a heating pad with a .050 piece of aluminum on top. Hopefully, when the boxes are sealed up, I should be able to keep about 15-20 additional degrees in the batteries.

The vacuum system is also coming along after a few delays. I should be installing it shortly...