Lump

Time to remove the faithful little 3 cylinder engine. Definitely had mixed feelings about taking apart a car that was running reasonably well, especially as it's been totally reliable. 

Well past the point of no return now though! Seemed easiest to remove the complete transaxle, it looked like it would exit downwards after removing all the pipes and wires and the under-trays, and it wasn't too bad, taking about 4 hours in all.

It was a lot heavier than I expected!

Should be interesting to find out how much of that the hybrid motor accounts for.

The next step will be to separate the gearbox from the electric motor and engine, and then see what's involved in attaching the shiny new motor.

Mode: metal god

Spent an afternoon wrangling £70 worth of aluminium sheet into what I will choose to call 'a box'

As the dimensions were too big (and the sheet too thick) to work in my metal folder, had to resort to large chunks of wood, angle iron and a big hammer to form the corners. As a result it's not terribly beautiful, but it'll do the job. Here it is in situ:

Whilst under there I also removed the exhaust, miscellaneous bits of heat shield and a 10 kilo lump of ballast!  Certainly the car is pretty light in the rear - you can actually lift the back end off the ground by hand.  But not for long - the batteries will weigh it back down!

Elements

Not a huge amount of progress since the last post due to some long days at the office, but I did pick up the needed sheet metal. My old favourite metal supplier in Perth (Peddie's) having closed down I had to go to Dundee instead. 

However the weather has also been pretty grim so today was spent hibernating inside with the wood stove on, building the battery management system PCBs which will look after the expensive lithium cells. 

This is a pretty simple system of my own design which has evolved slightly from the last car it was used in.  Each board has 12 channels and can be grouped together or spread out over the pack with a communication bus linking them together and to the vehicle's charge and drive systems.