SOLD! We have a winner

Nice guy from Eugene came up and carted it off today. Seems he needed yet another project. Got almost what I wanted. Not bad for this kind of thing. I think that concludes this saga, unless he sends some link or info once the drive-shafts are revived.

Car for sale $2700 OBO

OK so this wasn't how I imagined this ending but a number of issues all coming together have resulted in the cute little red car being posted 'For Sale' on Craigslist and other venues. $2700 OBO. We'll go through the issues below and the process for contact if you're interested.

The #1 issue, for me at least, is that the route to work is posted 45mph and now the alternate route is too. That's not so useful when the car tops out at 35mph. I've tried it. It's not safe. For routes that top out at 35 it does just fine, but we're not doing enough of that to make it worth keeping.

The big issue from the buyer's perspective is that the CV Joints on the drive axles are trashed.  I don't think this was so much due to the joints being all that bad, but the boots that are supposed to protect them had cracks down in the folds of the rubber where it was hard to see, probably for a long time. Bummer.
I'm pretty good with electrical stuff but this kind of mechanic-ing sorta thing is beyond me.  I've had quotes from the mid $300 range (assuming parts can be found) to beyond $1000.  You wouldn't think this was all that big a deal, but it's not like this critter shows up in anyone's part-compatibility book. Since most of the rest of the running gear is Suzuki parts, it's reasonable to assume these are as well, but I have no real idea how to deal with that.  As a result working on the drive-shafts is likely to be a chore. A chore I don't need right now.  It's working well enough for test drives, but not for any sort of daily use.
What else needs work?  I'm dealing with the window seal right now. The mirrors are already done, the rear hatch is sticking sometimes and the windshield wiper system is still looser than I'd want. Other than that it's doing pretty darn good. Oh, the main red gel-coat 'paint' is fine but that silver 'accent' paint they put over it looks pretty bad. Some adjustment required...

Pricing:
From what I can tell, with everything working well, this rig should fetch $3800-$4500 depending on battery condition. If we assume the lower figure and take off $1000 for the drive-shaft issue we come up with $2700-2800.
If we do it the other way and look at the new battery pack, battery heaters, the trick charger and battery monitoring systems, those parts alone come up over $2300 and I figure the rest of the car is worth at least $500, no?  Heck, the trick three phase AC motor and drive system is like $1500 on it's own so $2700 seems pretty reasonable that way too.

So, read back through all the historical posts to see if you're a good match for this vehicle.

Overview:  Seats: 2    No, you can't fit a third person behind.
                                  Even in a baby-seat.
Max speed 35mph (OK maybe 38 but 25-33 is more comfortable)
Range: 20 miles, maybe 25 under good conditions (I think it was originally quoted at 30, but that's crap.)
          ...besides, how far do you want to go at that speed ... ;-)
Originally sold for around $10K

Yea! New batteries

Yea! The friendly folks at Corvallis Battery (4th street in Corvallis) are going to pick up the car and swap in some new batteries. I can hardly wait. One of the other cars died *and* we have a nice parking place for this one now. Regardless, it's going back on the road.
Especially since they seem to have found some batteries that will really last at a reasonable price. The 'stock replacement' battery prices I've seen recently are like $280+ each (around $1800-$2000/set with shipping, installed) and by shifting away from the short lived finicky AGM batteries we should be able to get something good in there for under $1400.  Fortunately the charger is up to the job.    Stoked!

About the charger; Had not really explained about this earlier:
The cool non-stock charger is from the QuiQ/Delta-Q folks and has so many nifty features I'll let them explain: http://www.delta-q.com/products/quiq.shtml and if you want your batteries to last this may be the best $600 you'll spend. It's efficient and well mannered enough to keep from popping circuit breakers while still getting that first 80% of charge in there quickly. The display (above the arrow) actually provides useful information. Highly recommended.

Oh Batteries My batteries

The Menace has been sitting a lot.  The other electric car has severe battery killing issues and we keep swapping out batteries to try and troubleshoot it.  So mostly it just sits and waits for things to get sorted out and maybe more $200/unit batteries to show up. Could be a bit...

Huh, it actually works

Once we got everything fixed up, it, well, actually works.
Who knew?
Ya go out, unplug and hang the cord on the wall. Unlock the door (which work considerably better a few adjustments later) jam the keys in and switch on. Flick the switch to 'forward' pedal down and off you go.

The gear whine is much reduced at 25MPH now that it's getting broken in (450kM total) and all the switches and buttons and lights and windows and stuff pretty much just work. Beyond 25mph things get a bit noisier and the ride is a bit stiff. Handles surprisingly well though. The battery heaters do their bit on the few cold days we've had. Batteries over 55deg.F are sooooo much happier than that other sort. Plus the cabin is pre-warmed enough that window fogging isn't much of a problem. We got some anti-fog stuff just in case.

It's the 'Go To' vehicle for all the in-Town jaunts now. Six bags of groceries work fine. Beyond that you may want to lose the passenger.
The windshield wiper arm pivot still needs work since one of our vandal friends cranked on it and it needs to go in for some alignment work. Nothing real serious, but it doesn't go down the road quite straight.
Other than that, assume no news is good news.

Against a Sea of PakTrakr Resets

I know I know, a bunch of technical blah-de-blah.

That's *Important* Blah-De-Blah to you Soldier!

The PakTrakr is the battery monitoring system, and therefore pretty darn important to the regular and successful operation of the car. Plus there's a nifty little fuel gauge thingy that's kinda like the gas gauge in them regular Polluto-Mobiles. Reads from F down to E, reasonably accurate too. Problem is ours would reset to 100% full every time we moved off from a stop. Not so useful.

I gather that EMI (electro-magnetic interference) is frequently the cause of this behaviour, and the best 'fix' is to have the sensitive wires as far away as possible from the wires that are doing the heavy lifting, like say traction pack or batteryEQ wiring.

When we got the battery cover off we found the PakTrakr wiring bundled together with other wires and the remainder stuffed down between the battery sets along with many other wires.

Since all the PakTrakr wires were somewhat to extensively longer than they needed to be, we shortened each one up to a reasonable length for it's run out to the battery post and then routed them to be as far away from the other wires as possible.

Did it work? Almost. Instead of 20 resets on a 12 mi. run around town, we had only one. I went and got some little snap-on ferrite cylinders that are designed to suppress EMI/RFI and put them on each set of wires running out to the battery pack halves and another where they all come together (PakTrakr 'Remote') and that seems to have done the trick.

Another thing we noticed when we had the pack all apart was that some of the washers that hold down all the wire lugs on each battery terminal weren't all sitting straight. Since it's really important that the big high current (300+Amps) battery wire lugs have good contact with the battery terminal underneath I was somewhat concerned. Note that there was no indication that this had caused any problem to date.

This is an example battery terminal and the inset in the photo is the underlying terminal after it has been all cleaned and spiffed-up. We found most of the problem could be attributed to crimp on wire lugs that were the wrong size. It's hard to keep those centered and they tend to get everything above them skewed off a bit.

The thin lug shown here with the large hole is an example of the ones I cut off. The one above with the smaller hole and the larger contact surface area are the ones I used. All lugs were cleaned and flattened and the battery terminal surface was cleaned and everything coated with silicone spray to try and reduce future corrosion (I'm not sure how well this works).

Each terminal was assembled in order: Battery Terminal, Main battery wire lug, lug-size washer, smaller Accessory wiring lugs, smaller lug-size washer (shown above), crush washer, Battery Bolt. Torque to spec. Hope it works...for years!

Edit: A week later. Still some resets. Removed the external display and TaDa...no more problems.
Additional note: the BattEQ system got recalled by the manufacturer. I heard there was a car burning down problem. Anyway, that's outta there too. Simplicity is nice and the fancy new (non-stock) charger should keep things in good shape on it's own.

Hot Batts! [Edited]

Few people seem to realize that Lead Acid batteries of whatever construction have only half the capacity near freezing than they would have on a hot day. The various curves published by manufacturers would have you believe you only lose 20-30% of your capacity (and therefore range) as the temperature drops. Most of that is based on slow discharge information (C/20) rates. At high discharge rates (over 100Amps) things are somewhat different.
So, when it's cold out you either accept the much reduced range, Kill your batteries dead, or keep them warm. Fortunately the manufacturers know this and only sell cars with unheated, uninsulated battery boxes in southern Texas and some warmer sections of Hawaii.

This is the pair of battery heater pads and thermostat I picked up off Amazon. The pads are silicone material with embedded heating elements and are made by Kats. They are big enough for three batteries each. The Thermostat is by Lux and is designed to switch 1500W heaters so the pair of 80W pads should be no problem. It has an external temperature probe, but the wire is only 2in. long so I spliced it out to more like three feet (not shown in the photo)
I also got some foam insulating board and some of that silvered 'bubble-wrap' insulation. A short chat with Sean about the best way to get the battery lid off (a non-trivial task as the seats are attached to it) and I should be good to go for heating up next weekend.

[Edit] Installation process below...Two weeks later (So I'm slow...)
First ya just remove the seats and attached battery cover.

Easy as pie. Very complicated, exacting pie.
This is what it looks like with seats and battery cover removed.


The thick black wires are the high current cabling that goes to the controller and motor. The mid sized colored wires are the battery equalizer system and the thin wires go to the PakTrakr battery monitoring system.


Batteries removed and two layers of foam put down on the first half of the bottom. We had room for two layers on the bottom and the front and back (kinda wedged in due to the taper angle) but only one layer on the sides and middle. Hope it's enough.


The foam was notched out a bit to accommodate the cord attachments, although the weight of the battery would have probably pressed it into the foam without a problem.


Both heater pads are down and you can see the foam sections installed around the perimeter. Although you can't see them here there are also sections installed in the center.


This piece of foam covers the temperature probe to try and keep it at the same temperature as the battery itself. The wires run back up to the thermometer.

Now all we need is a nice cold night to try it out!
Just our luck. get the heaters in and what happens? Warm balmy spring.
Wait, this is Oregon. It'll change...