There are three components to the high voltage lines that I need to find a home for. There's the rather large push button kill switch. If things go horribly wrong, or I need to work on the car and I want the battery pack disengaged, that switch will allow me to take care of that. There's the 500 amp shunt for the instrumentation. It allows the Link 10 meter to monitor the pack without "seeing" the full amperage, which would fry the meter. Last, there's the fuse. And that thing is big. It's about 5 inches long and the diameter of a half dollar coin.
I had originally thought that I'd put each of those in the trunk near the back battery box, but after thinking about it, I realized that would be kind of stupid. All 48 of the batteries will be wired in series, starting at one end (the trunk) and moving to the front. In order to put the disconnect and the shunt in the trunk, I'd have to run a line from the negative terminal up front all the way back to the trunk for those components, and then run it back up to the front again to the controller. A better answer was to find a place up front.
I put all the battery trays and boxes in place, just looking for extra space somewhere around them. While doing that, I remembered that the way the new batteries will be laid out in the two small trays means there will be some space left over on the ends. It had never occurred to me that I might use that space in a tray for something other than a battery, but when I got to looking, I realized it would work just fine for the disconnect switch. Some quick fabrication, and I had it mounted. I still need to locate the shunt, but it's small. The fuse can still go in back because it only needs to be inline on the positive side.
Can't miss that sucker!On top of that, I found a location for the throttle pedal. The pedal is meant to be a direct replacement for the pedal that came with the car. But Trust me, if you saw the new pedal and the car's pedal assembly, you'd say the same thing I did, "Oh, there's no way..." Well, not without taking the whole assembly out of the car, cutting it up, welding new bits to it at odd angles and refitting it. Well, I realized that extra space in the second box may work out for me, and it did.
Obviously it's not mounted up yet, just propped into place. But you can see that it fits nicely in the space, and you can see the car's existing throttle cable just peeking over the corner of the tray is in perfect alignment to mount to the pedal. Basically what I'll do is lop off the pedal part, and mount a swivel harness to the remaining stump. When I press on the car's accelerator pedal, it will pull that cable and activate the new throttle assembly. How great is that!? Well, it excited me.
4 comments:
Button? BUTTON? You have one of the few legitimate uses for a giant Frankenstein switch, and instead you're using a button? I'm so disappointed.
Hey, trust my experience on this one, make sure there is a case over that button that has to be very intentionally opened before the button gets pushed.
Believe me, I looked for giant knife switch like the good Dr. used, but I couldn't find one that could handle the voltage or amps. I found ones that handled as much as 120 Volts AC and 20 amps. Then the choices sky rocketed to ones that could handle 5 Kilo-volts. Slight over kill, not to mention very large and expensive.
I am thinking of trying to find a good location for a cool Jacobs Ladder.
Now that's the kind of bling an EV needs. Tesla coils and jacobs ladders. You could make a whole Frankenstein Mobile.
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