Re-starting the project
Posted by Brian on Monday, July 18, 2011
Hello followers - it's been a long time.
The 944 has finally been taken out of it's winter storage and has been brought to the new Singular Motion headquarters in Newmarket. We now have a roomy 2-car workshop where we can finally make some progress on this conversion. The cobwebs have been swept away, and we have started re-testing the systems that were previously completed.
One interesting thing we found was that our battery voltage has slowly climbed.... I really don't understand how this is possible, considering that all batteries have a small leakage current which should eventually drain the battery. The only explanation that I can think of is that the chemistry hadn't settled the last time we were charging, and since we charged as full as we could, this brought the voltage even higher as the chemistry gelled. Each cell is now resting at about 4.7V which is quite a bit higher than the maximum recommended voltage set out by the manufacturer. I will have to set up our heating element and try to discharge the pack down to a better level. These batteries certainly do have some unusual behaviour.
The next step is to build some sealed battery boxes and a new frame to hold them into the car. Because of the motor adapter we bought, the secondary shaft of the motor is interfering with the battery locations. This means that the bottom row of batteries will have to be installed from underneath the car, and the top row will have be lowered in from the top. The motor shaft will then be sitting between the two rows.
With the new workshop I'm sure we'll be rolling in no time.
The 944 has finally been taken out of it's winter storage and has been brought to the new Singular Motion headquarters in Newmarket. We now have a roomy 2-car workshop where we can finally make some progress on this conversion. The cobwebs have been swept away, and we have started re-testing the systems that were previously completed.
One interesting thing we found was that our battery voltage has slowly climbed.... I really don't understand how this is possible, considering that all batteries have a small leakage current which should eventually drain the battery. The only explanation that I can think of is that the chemistry hadn't settled the last time we were charging, and since we charged as full as we could, this brought the voltage even higher as the chemistry gelled. Each cell is now resting at about 4.7V which is quite a bit higher than the maximum recommended voltage set out by the manufacturer. I will have to set up our heating element and try to discharge the pack down to a better level. These batteries certainly do have some unusual behaviour.
The next step is to build some sealed battery boxes and a new frame to hold them into the car. Because of the motor adapter we bought, the secondary shaft of the motor is interfering with the battery locations. This means that the bottom row of batteries will have to be installed from underneath the car, and the top row will have be lowered in from the top. The motor shaft will then be sitting between the two rows.
With the new workshop I'm sure we'll be rolling in no time.