Biting the Bullet

As you may remember, I received a package from Azure Dynamics several weeks ago with a notice saying that the bolts on their electric motors tend to work their way loose occasionally. They provided an upgrade kit with lock washers and loctite to remedy the problem. I had already installed the motor in the 914 and chose to not perform the upgrade due to the hassle of removing the motor. Now that the battery boxes are arriving on Tuesday, I'm realizing that I really don't want to take the risk of having the bolts come loose. Also, applying the upgrade after the battery racks/boxes are installed will be a royal pain, so I bit the bullet today, dropped the motor and replaced the washers on the bolts.


Here's the back end of the transmission/motor. Based on a suggestion from another 914 AC customer, I purchased some long 8mm bolts to lower the transmission end about 8 inches and still keep it stable. Note the long silver rods (8mm bolts) in the diagram above. I used one floor jack to lower the back end of the tranny. I had to remove the speedo cable, the accelerator cable, the clutch cable and the shift linkage to do this (argh!).


I used the second floor jack to lower the front end of the motor assembly so that the 12" long motor bolts could actually slide out of the AC 24 motor.


Here's the end of the AC24 motor lowered so that I could extract the long bolts. Notice that I've already removed one in the upper right position on the round endcap.


Here are the pieces for the upgrade kit above one of the motor bolts. In short, a lock washer and flat washer replace the nylon ones that came with the kit. Loctite further holds the bolt in place.

While this was a real pain. I'm glad this is taken care of so I don't have to worry about it.

Tomorrow (hopefully): connecting the motor to the controller and possibly starting on connecting the batteries with high-current cable.