It's brilliant news that the motor has been purchased and is on it's way. Marvelous news in fact!
But that doesn't mean I can relax. I've found a big bunch of things that still need doing.
The car is filthy for a start. It needs a good wash and then a cut & polish.
Then there's some rust in the bottom of the passenger's door which needs fixing. Not sure how it escaped me but it won't be there for long.
Also, the driver's headrest flops about too much, I've checked it out and found the foam inside it has split in half. Some flexible glue should fix that nicely.
Last but not least, the left side steering rack boot (the rubber flexy thing that covers it) has a split in it and needs replacing before a giant electric motor gets in the way.
So, first of all, I rolled that thing out of it's cave and gave it a serious wash with anti-rust car wash. I soaped it quite strongly and washed everywhere, even under the wheel arches. My sponge has lost a lot of weight in the process but it's worth it getting rid of all that dried on dirt.
I cleaned out the doorframes and the boot (trunk) and dried it all ready for the rust killing and repair on the bottom of the passenger door.
I drove down to the auto parts store for some more rust killer to start on that passenger door. I still have plenty of filler and sandpaper but this is a smallish rust spot so it didn't need much.
I'd forgotten just how much I hate sanding but it didn't take long for the memories to come flooding back.
Next step - connect that stereo! Now I know it may seem a bit silly to connect a stereo to a car that doesn't actually go, and you'd be right. But I did it anyway. So there.
I had an old stereo lying there in the garage and I thought I may as well fill up the hole in the dash. Besides, it was going to have to be done at some stage - why not now!
A few minutes later I'd installed new speakers in the dash (the old paper ones had disintegrated - as they do) then I had my first successful stereo power-up and I moved on to installing a new Steering Rack Boot.
The Steering Rack Boot saga was uncharted territory for me as I'd never done anything like it before. What a Pandora's box of treats that task was... The first problem was trying to decipher what my Haynes manual was saying. Castellated Nut this, Split Bearing that! Argh! I also discovered I needed a ball-joint "separator" to get the steering rod free from the... other rod - whatever it's called. Luckily I found one for $22 at Super Cheap Auto and it did the job nicely.
After separating the ball-joint, I then had to take it off the car in order to get the new rubber boot on. That wasn't as easy as planned. About 15 minutes of swearing, straining and sweating later, I finally broke yet another Korean spanner from my Super Cheap Auto toolkit - the name says it all really - and gave up.
A few days later I bought a new bunch of spanners (Don't worry, these ones are Indian, not Korean) and attempted it again. But this time I had an ace up my sleeve! I used my flame torch to heat up the nut near the ball-joint for 5 minutes. After that it came free! Twenty minutes later I was lowering the car back down after a job well done.
Next on the list was polishing the car. It's one of those things that has to be done if I want the car to look half decent. Sadly my paintwork has guaranteed it never will!
I polished the whole car regardless using Kitten Cut & Polish (marvelous stuff!) and started assembling my power plug idea.
As you can see by the picture on the left, the charging system I'm going to use has many pins and looks really complex.
Believe me, it's not complex or I wouldn't be using it!
I won't go into too much detail of how it all works as there will be plenty of time for that when I start building the charger system but let's just say it's going to be very simple and cheap. I first read about this idea from Dr. Larry Tillman and his Geo Metro EV conversion.
Instead of using one expensive $3000 charger to charge all batteries, he has an individual charger for each battery installed in his car.
I like this idea for three main reasons:
1: It's cheap.
2: It's simple.
3: It's cheap.
I won't install 12 battery chargers in the Tredia because A: It's too much extra weight, and B: I'd have to get the car electrically certified if mains power is going to be connected to it. So, in keeping with the K.I.S.S method (keep it simple, stupid!) I'm going to have 12 small chargers on a shelf mounted to the wall with one charger for each battery.
Not only will this method cost about $400 instead of $3000, but I can charge and monitor each single battery separately, something you can't do without an expensive battery monitoring system.
This method sounded too good to be true at first so I asked lots of stupid questions on Dr Larry's EV Page and found that it actually is very possible. And very easy! Sound's like my kind of charging system. Still, that part of the construction is a long way off yet so we'll get to the charger setup later in the conversion process.
So, after grabbing some chunky multi-pin plugs from a help-yourself wreckers yard in Auckland over the Easter Weekend, I bought a plastic chopping board, started super- gluing and filling the sockets together and mounting them to a piece of the cutting board I cut up. A few minutes later - hey presto! Check out the photos above for a close up of how it looks.
Next on the list of things to do was tidying up the wheel arches. After 20 years of stone chips and dirt the paint under there was starting to look a bit chipped & scuffed. Having already washed the wheel arches a week earlier, I grabbed a bottle of wax & grease remover and got the surfaces ready for a quick spray of matt-black finish.
The end result looks quite good and it makes a difference when you stand back and look at the car instead of seeing grey/brown dirty wheel arches, you see new-looking black wheel arches.
Have a look at the difference in the photos above - not bad for a 5 minute job.
The only thing left to do was to replace the CV Boot on the passenger side. After 3 days of swearing and sweating and broken tools, my mate Rob and I eventually both gave up trying to replace the CV boot on the Tredia. The existing one has a small split in it (about 1cm long) so I want to fix it before it grows but I'm going to have to find a professional to do it for me.
Still, we had a lot of fun trying! Now where's that motor?
