92 replies to this topic

[Anchoright]

Looking great. Such a nice clean installation.  l've been enjoying the read.

Thanks!

[Anchoright]

The Curtis Controller needs to be programmed before driving. Michael at EV West sent me over a loaner programming device and I plugged it in and gave him a call. He walked me through the programming as if he had done it a few times before with other customers!

Then I fired it up and took it for a spin! It's a really, really weird feeling when after all that work and launching out into the unknown, you hit start and the thing just works!

And this begins the part that I like to call the debugging stage - where I find everything wrong with the car! My first drive was down to John Stokes Tire to have them tighten up and check my suspension. Well they didn't want to touch the car because it wouldn't fit on their lift. So I went around the corner to another guy who could get it on the lift, and he checked it all out and tightened everything.
He also told me that I had way too much movement in the motor - and it was moving a lot!

I gave him the torque specs from the Mini manual, which said 60ft lbs for the crown nuts on the wheels. He tightened my KAD disk brakes to that spec and it turns out after 100 miles driving like that I fried the bearings. I need new bearings now!

Anyway, getting home it was time for more battery attention.

[Anchoright]

Have I mentioned before that the batteries are complicated?
They're far more complicated than I care to care about, and for this job I basically just did what the EV West guys told me to do. I'll leave the study of batteries up to scientists.

At any rate when we get stuff like phones or computers or other devices, we plug them in when the battery goes down, and use it when the battery is full. That is because the charging cycle has been figured out by the manufacturer. Usually if you drain a battery beyond its lowest point you fry the cells and the battery is useless, it cannot be charged again. The same also if you charge it more than it can handle it does something spectacular like blow up or melt or break in some fashion. (Like I say, I'm not an expert on this, I just know that overcharging is bad!)

Now if I have eight batteries, and one is lower in charge than the others, when the others are getting low, the lower one is going to be fried because it will go past the point of no return. Likewise if one is charged more than the others it will blow up or do something spectacular when it charges beyond the point of full while the others are charging.

So there's this thing called "bottom balancing". It's actually a pretty easy concept in the end. At first it freaked me out, but it really is no big deal. At any rate, a battery will read a lower voltage when the battery is low, and a higher voltage when the battery is full. Between those two points it kind of floats it's voltage read so you don't get an accurate read unless you are at the very bottom or very top of the charge.

What we want to do is get all the batteries at the same voltage. Now since that middle are is kinda grey, we need to either match them up at full charge, or at the lowest point. There are advocates out there for both choices, but the bottom point makes more sense.

So how do you get there? Well, you plug stuff in to the battery and drain it. It takes hours to drain, and then when you're getting close to that point of no return you check it every 5 minutes until you get an exact number that you can match together.

Some people use light bulbs (the old fashioned kind), I wanted to go a little faster so I used skillets. It still took a couple days! I even had it running in the night time and woke myself up in the middle of the night to go check it.

Once you've gotten to that low point (if I remember correctly I went down to 50.5V) you let the battery rest for a while and it bounces back up. Then you plug it in again and drain it down again.

After that I needed to call in to EV West again because the chargers weren't charging! That had to be programmed too, and I had also installed the shunt wire backwards. After that, the chargers were charging great, and one last thing - I had to verify at what voltage the chargers would shut off, so as not to overcharge. That was fine, so I was good to go! The electric install was complete!

Here's some pics of my bottom balancing:

 image.jpeg   70.87K   31 downloads
 image.jpeg   34.21K   26 downloads

Toward the end I was getting desperate and plugging everything in!!
 image.jpeg   74.58K   24 downloads

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[Scousemouse]

Brilliant read

more power to your elbow

[Anchoright]

So here's the whole list of stuff to do the conversion.
- subframe from the Suzuki G-10 conversion
- Suzuki G-10 transmission
- new clutch and flywheel for good measure since I don't feel like tearing this motor apart anytime soon.
- Curtis AC50 96V motor
- Curtis Controller
- EV West chill plate
- DC to DV Converter
- Shunt
- LinkPro Battery Monitor
- Geo Adapter Plate
- Charger (I got two but you only need one)
- Charging Station I got this little one, it's pretty awesome and you can keep it in the car and use it anywhere. Most any charging station is fine though.
- Cooling kit for Controller
- Brake pressure transducer With this you can do regen braking. You connect it somewhere in the brake line.
- Controller mount from EV West Not necessary but makes it easy to mount the controller.
- These are the batteries I got I found them super cheap on eBay.
- Contactor Box
- Cable to wire the batteries together
- Cable from the batteries to the contactor box, and from there to the controller and then to the motor.
- these things
- some of this
- some of these
- module
- contactor for the DC to DC converter
- three of these
- charging socket

I think that's everything. I also got a lot of suspension stuff, wiring, LED lights etc etc because I want the car to be new - a daily driver that is reliable, as I said at the beginning of this thread.

So how much did it cost me? As I said earlier I paid for it in bitcoin that I had mined. It turned out to be 24BTC.

Edited by Anchoright, 07 September 2016 - 10:42 PM.

[Anchoright]

As far as specs go...
I still have not seen how fast it can go or 0-60 time. I'll do that after I have finished the work on my suspension.

When I started I wanted a car that had an 100 mile range.
The actual range is 110 miles on a full charge.

Charging time is 5 hours at 220V, which is half the time of a Tesla (10 hrs at 220V)
When I have tried a 0-60 I'll update this post, but it's faster than my 2016 MINI S, and faster than my modified 2012 John Cooper Works was.

I've also added a few commodity features:
Keyless entry
Start button
Your iPhone becomes the stereo system
(The stereo that is controlled by the iPhone is hidden behind the center console so you only see your iPhone)
Hands free calling
Reads and can dictate emails and text messages
It has a built in radar detector that is hidden in the engine bay and connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth.
Eight speakers with an additional amplifier. I figured that since the motor is silent it is worth the better audio system.
Polk Audio speakers.

Edited by Anchoright, 08 September 2016 - 05:25 AM.

[Anchoright]

Driving the car is different than a gas car. I think the way to describe it is that it is more natural.
I've had around 30 cars in my life and all except one was manual. In fact I converted two cars from automatic to manual. So I like stick shift.

Trogdor has a manual transmission and a clutch pedal, however it is driven differently than your average manual. A gas car has zero torque at zero rpm, and so you need to get it up to speed before engaging the gear. This is why we do what we do with the clutch, slowly letting it out as we slowly accelerate.

An electric car has 100% torque at zero rpm, so you don't need to use the clutch at all to get the car moving. You put it in gear, don't use the clutch at all, accelerate carefully and you begin to move.

Also the car starts from standstill in any gear. The motor is happiest when it is moving at full speed so the only reason you need the different gears is based on how fast you would ultimately like to go. For around town third gear is fine. I put it in third gear and forget about it. For the freeway fourth gear is fine. For highway fifth is fine. For a drag race (I haven't tried it but I think that) second gear would be good, and I'm not sure why you would ever need first. It just came with the transmission!

This is what I did with my shifter knob to reflect this:

 image.jpeg   27.95K   37 downloads

You would use the clutch only if you are already moving and decide you want to change gears, other than that you don't use the clutch.

I guess in a way you could picture it like having a giant electric drill under the bonnet. If you want the drill to turn fast you select a higher gear, if you want it to turn slow you select a lower gear, but the drill is happier if the trigger is pressed in all the way.

Now all this coupled with the fact that the car is pretty much silent really makes the car feel like "natural" driving. It really is quite an experience.

[Anchoright]

The story isn't over - because this is where I found the problems with the install! Also in perfect timing, my bonnet, roof, trunk lid and spoiler arrived from Rogue Se7ens - and they looked FANTASTIC!! I was so happy, it was like Christmas!! But I'm out of time today so I'll write more later.

[keegan]

I never thought I'd say this but that is a beautiful knob you have there!  I was about to ask where you got a five speed transmission but then remembered it's from a Suzuki.  

Did you mill the knob yourself as it's very nicely done!

[Anchoright]

I never thought I'd say this but that is a beautiful knob you have there!  I was about to ask where you got a five speed transmission but then remembered it's from a Suzuki.  

Did you mill the knob yourself as it's very nicely done!

 

Nah, I don't have that kind of equipment. The top of the knob I cut from vinyl. But it does look pretty awesome!

[McMini 22]

Brilliant work.

The idea of an electric car as an every day driver is quite appealing as the running costs are pretty low here in the UK.

The only thing that would put me off is the charging time. We are so used to taking the 5 minutes to put petrol in our cars that we would all struggle with the idea of anything different.

My own opinion is that if electric cars had exchangeable battery packs (or 2 or 3 for bigger cars) under the car then you would be able to drive in to a "battery station" and the battery packs would be changed out by a machine.
You wouldn't own the batteries but instead you would have a contract with a battery company and pay every time you changed your batteries.

There you go, I've solved the problem!

[nicklouse]

Brilliant work.

The idea of an electric car as an every day driver is quite appealing as the running costs are pretty low here in the UK.

The only thing that would put me off is the charging time. We are so used to taking the 5 minutes to put petrol in our cars that we would all struggle with the idea of anything different.

My own opinion is that if electric cars had exchangeable battery packs (or 2 or 3 for bigger cars) under the car then you would be able to drive in to a "battery station" and the battery packs would be changed out by a machine.
You wouldn't own the batteries but instead you would have a contract with a battery company and pay every time you changed your batteries.

There you go, I've solved the problem!

that idea is out there and has been proto typed but as yet not gone anywhere yet.

[Anchoright]

Brilliant work.
The idea of an electric car as an every day driver is quite appealing as the running costs are pretty low here in the UK.
The only thing that would put me off is the charging time. We are so used to taking the 5 minutes to put petrol in our cars that we would all struggle with the idea of anything different.
My own opinion is that if electric cars had exchangeable battery packs (or 2 or 3 for bigger cars) under the car then you would be able to drive in to a "battery station" and the battery packs would be changed out by a machine.
You wouldn't own the batteries but instead you would have a contract with a battery company and pay every time you changed your batteries.
There you go, I've solved the problem!

Fantastic idea! They do that in races. (Sometimes. Other times they switch cars.)

[McMini 22]

 

Brilliant work.
The idea of an electric car as an every day driver is quite appealing as the running costs are pretty low here in the UK.
The only thing that would put me off is the charging time. We are so used to taking the 5 minutes to put petrol in our cars that we would all struggle with the idea of anything different.
My own opinion is that if electric cars had exchangeable battery packs (or 2 or 3 for bigger cars) under the car then you would be able to drive in to a "battery station" and the battery packs would be changed out by a machine.
You wouldn't own the batteries but instead you would have a contract with a battery company and pay every time you changed your batteries.
There you go, I've solved the problem!

Fantastic idea! They do that in races. (Sometimes. Other times they switch cars.)

 

Should I patent the idea of a "battery station"?

[DomCr250]

Love it, really nice conversion.

 

Your range at 110 miles is very good - exceeds the mainstream cars ... I had a fully electric Ford Focus for the weekend and could only get 55 miles out of that, was told if I went to a Renault ZOE I could expect about 70 miles - still not as good as yours.

 

Will you have problems with registering it as an electric car, maybe not as their seems to be many more suppliers and modders in the US than in Europe?