Saturday, October 6, 2012

Battery Racks & Heater Plans

I have been very busy working on the Electric Booger. A couple of visits to Metal Supermarket and a welder borrowed from my buddy Trevor allowed me to complete the battery racks.

Here is the front rack:
With batteries in place:
Yesterday I completed the rear battery racks:
That's right, no more back seat. My choices were to keep the useful trunk and use the useless back seat for batteries or keep the useless back seat and use the useful truck for batteries. It was an easy decision.

Now on to the heater. As everyone knows, with a lack of ICE, there will be no hot engine coolant to keep me warm on cold winter mornings. The usual EV conversion solution is to remove the heater core and install the ceramic element out of a small 110V heater. However, after doing some research on MX-3 heater core removal, I have decided against this. You basically have to disassemble the entire dashboard to get the heater core out, and right now I do not have patience for that.

The other day I was giving the heater system a good hard look. It turns out that the heater fan box is at the right side of the car and connects to the heater box with a plastic pipe that takes about 10 seconds to remove:
So here's the new plan: buy a cheap hair blowdryer to stuff inside this pipe so all the heater fan air is forced through it. I will power the heating elements with my battery pack through a decently sized contactor. Sounds like a plan to me. Hopefully this plastic pipe won't melt too quickly!

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