Sunday, January 11, 2015

Milestone: We've got motion !!



Hallelujah! After installing the motor, transmission and the torque bar, after fiddling with stuck brakes on the rear wheels, after sitting around for hours and hours thinking where and how to place the batteries in the engine compartment, I thought "What the heck, let's not wait any longer until all the batteries are installed and until all the cables and switches are ready, let's install the inverter with the mains rectifier and spin up some wheels!". A bit doubtful because of my last experience with the transmission, I hooked up everything, connected the mains and the laptop, let the motor spin in neutral first and then punched in 3rd gear. No explosions, no grinding, no blown mains fuse - only wheels spinning happily. It was so quiet that at first I thought "heck, why did the motor stop now?". :) But everything was all right. Only the wheels were spinning backwards. But that's not a problem with an AC induction motor anyway. Let it run "backwards" and the wheels were spinning like they should. Shifting from 1st to 2nd and to 3rd went pretty well with the wheels in the air. The other gears needed a bit more juice on the shift knob - too much for my taste - but I think that's only because the wheels slowed down significantly while shifting. Under real driving conditions, the wheels will still be spinning through the inertia of the car. So also 5th and 6th should be possible without a clutch. (yes, I'm going clutch-less).


Still, I need some Nord-Lock washers for the batteries: Why? There's a lot of vibration in a car and I don't want the battery connections to become loose.


Unfortunately the wood shed I used as my garage caught the dry rot - that's a really nasty mildew. The entire area where it becomes visible, plus at least 1 meter of the wood has to be removed and everything else desinfected. It grows 1-4 cm per day (!) and destroys the wood so it gets soft like carton within days. All the wood and also the wall visible on this picture had to be removed in a very costly purification procedure. So half of the floor in the shed is gone now. It was renewed 1.5 years ago for 6k so it could carry the load of the car and the lift.
Bummer!