Forcing a Fit and Letting Sparks Fly

Well, after yesterday's letdown with the front battery box not fitting into the steel frame, I loaded up on caffeine and pulled out the grinding wheel.


Here is the front battery box not fitting into the front rack. If you click on the picture for a larger view, you can see the front-side edge not in the rack. I first tried a hand file, but made much more progress with a paint removal wheel attached to a drill.


Here we are, slowly grinding away 1/32" of plastic at a time to hopefully not reduce the structural integrity of the front battery box.


Yay! The front box now fits into the rack (albeit tightly) and we can move onward.


The next instruction calls for adding a threaded rod covered with heat-shrink tubing to prevent shorting out any of the wires on the relay mount board. The threaded holes in the battery rack for the vertical thread-bars had powdercote in them, so I used two nuts tightened together on the top of the threaded rod to get more leverage to twist the rod into the threaded hole.


Next up is installing the auxiliary battery. This is rather tricky since you can see that the front edge of the battery is resting on the front hood latch. Earlier directions for mounting the front battery rack say to move the rack at least 2 1/2" forward of the rear wall. What this really means is that you need to mount the rack EXACTLY 2 1/2" in front of the wall so components on the front of the rack don't hit other parts of the car. If this has clearance issues, I might have to re-drill some of the previous holes to move the rack. This will be a royal pain after adding all the wires.


Okay, we now have all the wires from the fuel compartment with connectors on them attached to the battery or components on the relay mounting board.

In the process of attaching cables to the auxiliary battery, I got a click from the key-switch relay on the right and the DC-DC converter turned on (red light). I also got minor sparks coming from the negative terminal of the auxiliary battery. I suspect I hooked up something wrong and will reverse engineer the connections next.

I was somewhat blindly following the instructions up to this point so I'm guessing there's a bug. Also, the instructions for the DC kit may not apply to the AC kit. Here's where the real fun begins since there are no wiring diagrams from Electro Automotive for the AC kit yet!

Off to sleep to prepare for another day... Cheers.