Visiting Gary of the OEVA to get a Crimper

As I mentioned yesterday, Gary Graunke (president of the OEVA) graciously offered to let me borrow a lug crimper to attach high-current lugs to the welding cable I purchased. This morning I drove out to his place and found a virtual Disneyland of EV stuff. Gary has a Honda Insight and Toyota Prius and an electric Chevy S10. His current project is to upgrade the batteries in his all-electric Insight to lithium-ion cells.

Here's Gary in front of his garage. There are EV toys everywhere!


Each of these yellow modules is a lithium-ion battery pack for DeWalt tools. Gary is hand soldering together several hundred of the cells in these modules to make a battery pack for his Insight.


Here's one array of DeWalt lithium-ion cells. The current boxes are wooden, but Gary plans to upgrade them to FR4 (fire-resistant) later to help prevent a fire. The whole pack should weigh around 200 pounds, which is far less than the 1200 pounds of lead-acid cells I'll have in the 914.


Here is the heavy duty crimper that I borrowed from Gary (Thanks!). I'm looking forward to firing up the motor.


After a run to ParkRose hardware, I picked up some 2/0 high-current lugs, some colored shrink tubing (red/black) with adhesive, and a 10-guage dryer cable to attach the Zivan charger to the battery pack through an Anderson connector.

Next up: fixing the bolts on the Azure Dynamics AC24 motor...