Matt's EV Blog

An Untimely Update

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 10:12:02 -0400

Welcome back. This blog has been needing an update for almost three years now (oops). Car work never stopped, but as I had less time, I stopped updating the blog. Long story short, it drives now! In fact, it drove, it broke, it drove again, broke again, drove… Well you get the idea. It will take me a while, but I will be documenting the process still with posts over this summer. While waiting to bring the blog up to speed on the major steps that brought the project to completion (although it’s never really complete), I’ll write some small posts about some of the minutia going on right now.

To tide you over until the actual posts come out, here’s a teaser video hehe

I have slowly been checking of small projects related to getting the car restored. The most disgusting part of exposed subframe was directly behind the seats. In addition to there being a mess of factory wire harness sticking out, some of the old smelly and water damaged insulation mat was still sitting exposed. This area previously held two storage containers (which also had some gross water-damaged carpet). My goal was to make all of the parts that used to cover this area clean enough to be reinstalled to cover up the wiring. Remove the old insulation, then the panels would just be bolted back on, and the panels reinstalled with the storage containers. Easy, right?

The panels were badly rusted and needed to be restored. Also, they used to be covered with carpet, but I wanted to try to avoid putting carpet back into this part of the car. The plan was to paint them to a nice finish so they didn’t need to be covered by anything. I had just planned to give them quick coat of PlastiDip (because it has a nice satin finish and is electrically isolating). But I felt wrong just painting over the rust on the panels, I knew the coat wouldn’t last. So I jumped headfirst down the rabbithole and got to sanding.

The struggle begins.

Four full sheets of sandpaper, three ruined Dremel bits, and a dusty palm sander later the rust was off. It took about three hours, and by the time I had finished both panels it was to dark outside to paint. One day project was now two.

On the right is the rusted out interior panel, and on the left is the freshly cleaned panel.

While I waited for the sun to come back, I checked out the damage on the storage bins. I quickly gave up on cleaning the carpet and decided it needed to be replaced. I designed new brackets in CAD that would utilize the existing carpet pinning as attachement points to hold a sheet of polycarbonate to be the new floor of the storage container. These didn’t take too long to make, and this part pretty much went to plan (imagine that). I threw a nice coat of paint on the polycarbonate sheets to give a nice “piano black” gloss finish and called it good. I couldn’t have been happier with the end result, they look like they came straight out of a Tesla.

Painting the back of the polycarbonate. I picked up one of the spray paint grips after my hand started cramping.

The next day I had dry sanded panels ready to paint. I went with PlastiDip over normal spray paint for a couple reasons. First, it is electrically isolating, and now that there are some high voltage wires in that are of the car, I felt that this was a safer option. Second, PlastiDip doesn’t need a clear coat to get a really durable finish the way spray paint would (I’m sure you could with some spray paints but I don’t trust them as much). Also the satin black finish of PlastiDip looks real nice in my opinion. Four-ish coats later, the panels were looking great and ready to be reinstalled.

My makeshift paint setup. The panels were hung from the roof gutters by bungy cords. Suprisingly effective.

Panels layed out as they will be reinstalled into the car.

Done! Project finished. Obviously not, nothing is that easy. It was at this point that I realized the insulation was not just the foam mat that had easily come out. Underneath, was a thinner layer of “tar mats”. I couldn’t install the new insulation without first removing the tar mats. Also the tar mats were old and starting to crack so I wanted to remove them. This turned into another huge undertaking.

There are basically two ways to remove old tar mats: extreme heat or extreme cold. Considering the proximity to the batteries and success with my initial attempts at removing the mats using the cold stuff from an air duster, I decided to go with the later approach. People commonly use a dry ice slurry to freeze the insulation off, but I wanted a more concentrated source of cold. I was worried that the widespread freezing of dry ice would freeze the batteries (or get them cold enough that condensation could form inside). Hense, inverted air-duster cans.

For the sake of keeping this post short, I’ll skip to the beautiful finished install. Looks super space-age.

I replaced the old tar mats with some fancy Dynamat thermal-acuoustic insulation. It was a marked improvement over the old mats.

After spending hours pounding out old tar mat, I started to realize just how big the area where the storage bins had been was. And I started thinking… It would make a lot of sense to put the batteries here, instead of where they are mounted now… Nothing is ever done. More posts to come.

Motor Install

Wed, 18 May 2016 16:50:12 -0400

Precision alignment, solid engineering, and razor thin tolerances. These are all things that are necessary when attaching an electric motor directly to the drive train of a car. With its higher torque, our AC-50 would be able to pull the car to speed from a standstill with a direct connection to the wheels entirely bypassing the transmission. This would be an elegant solution but it requires the aforementioned things; precision alignment, solid engineering, and razor thin tolerances. It just so happens these are all things I am very bad at. So instead we decided to take the easier (and more common) solution. Adapt the electric motor to the existing transmission of the car. This makes the process similar to just swapping engines.

Motor to transmission coupling is pretty common in EV conversions. It has many benefits over the alternative (motor to drive train) including being much easier to do and maintaining the existing shifting of the car. While the motor could pull the car to speed driving directly to the wheels, it will accelerate MUCH faster if you shift through the gears the way you would with a gas engine. This was the way we decided to go when we started planning.

Three basic components are required: the motor, the transmission adapter plate, and the flywheel adapter coupler thing (that’s the technical term).

The bright red transmission adapter plate ready to be bolted to the motor!

Essentially, the motor shaft goes into the flywheel adapter which then bolts into the flywheel where the old motor would have. The flywheel then connects to the rest of the transmission assembly in the same fashion it would have with the original setup. The transmission adapter then bolts to the outer casing of the motor and the bell housing of the transmission to keep everything held together nicely.

The adapter plate is just a big piece of machined aluminum that bolts to the motor and then to the transmission. It had to go on first and it was trivial to put on; just four bolts and some washers. The adapter plates job is simply to help out the motor mounts and ensure that the motor doesn’t move around relative to the transmission.

The flywheel is also essential to all of this. It, with the help of its friends the clutch and release plates, serves to transfer all of the power coming from the motor into the rest of the drive train. It is important that the flywheel is weighted perfectly so as not to oscillate or cause unwanted vibrations as the motor revs. Because of the nature of a rotary engine the old flywheel was weighted to compensate for the momentum generated by the drum of the motor. Our electric motor doesn’t generate any momentum as it rotates smoothly around a static axis. This means the compensating weight on the flywheel will actually cause oscillation instead of preventing it. So all that struggle of liberating it from the motor? Wasn’t necessary.

But now we have a really cool flywheel trophy from the original engine! Anyhow, we ended up having to order a new unweighted (often called sport) flywheel. Not only was this flywheel much lighter (Yay, better gas mileage! Oh, wait...), more importantly it was not weighted. These lightened sport flywheels are designed to have the counterweight added on to them as a separate piece and we just didn’t do that. Problem solved.

The flywheel coupler thing has those coveted razor thin tolerances. In fact, it’s tolerances are thinner than a razor. Quite a bit thinner. In order to fit it around the shaft of the motor we had to heat it with a heat gun to expand the metal enough to pound it on with a rubber mallet. Yes, believe it or not, this is the way its designed to be put on. Then it was a simple matter of bolting the flywheel onto the adapter and the clutch plate and pressure plate to the flywheel in turn. Then the whole assembly was ready to be attached to the transmission.

Here is where it got difficult. Imagine threading a needle but you can't see the head of the needle or the string. And the needle weighs 150 pounds. That’s what it was like installing the motor/flywheel/clutch/adapter assembly into the transmission. It took a good hour or so of fiddling to finally get the teeth of the coupler to mesh with the teeth on the input shaft of the transmission. It is best described with a video.

The first shot of this video is just the flywheel mounted to the coupler on the motor, then the rest of the clutch assembly installed onto it ready to be put in the transmission.

After that though it was finished! It was a simple matter of bolting the transmission adapter plate to the transmission bell housing with provided bolts and the install was finished! Or at least we hope it is. We have no way of testing or seeing whether everything has set correctly because the bellhousing is sealed once the adapter plate is bolted in. We’ll just have to wait until the rest of the components are in to give it a spin but that comes later.

So there you have it! Motor installed, right? Well, we still need to attach it to the existing motor mounts. As it is it is resting on a two-by-four between the mounts, obviously not a very permanent solution. Spoilers: we already made the motor mount I am really late writing this post. I’ll have a post up about that process soon.

Thanks for reading!

Shiny New Parts

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 15:56:28 -0500

Well, its been a while. I haven't posted for a long time, but in that time a lot has been accomplished (get comfortable this is going to be a long post). First and foremost, we ordered the parts (cue confetti)! Due to the rather large and heavy nature of the items we were shipping we had to order the shipments in two loads. Unfortunately, because some of the parts are made-on-demand there were some unexpected delays with the second shipment. Of course, we should have probably come to the conclusion that this would be the case sooner as many of the parts we are ordering aren't exactly something you can find on Amazon (and thats saying something). Anyhow, the good news was we were notified as soon as we received the first shipment that the second one would be delayed. So in the mean time we were able to get some work done. Here is what was accomplished (more or less in this order):

Gas Tank And Exhaust Removal

Soon after we had removed the engine we began what seemed to be the next logical step: purging the car of its remaining petrol componentry. Removing the exhaust on a car with some miles on it is a pretty large challenge as I'm sure many mechanics will attest to. This is mainly due to the fact that the entire exhaust system (including bolts), likes to corrode under the immense heat and frequent road water. This means most of the bolts are not much more than rounded of nubs with nothing for a ratchet to grab onto and as you can imagine, that becomes a problem. After a few snapped bolt heads and bruised knuckles, we decided to take a more delicate approach... RECIPROCATING SAW (a.k.a "The Butter Knife")!!! Luckily for us, the car won't be needing its exhaust system once we are finished with it. We were able to make a single, cut and maneuver the entire thing out. On a side note, the different types of reciprocating saw blades (logically) work best on whatever kind of material they are labeled for. We figured, "Ahhhh, a blades a blade. How big of a difference can their be between a wood and metal blade anyway?" Turns out we couldn't have been more wrong. We spent about an hour and a half attempting to cut through the pipe with a wood blade (we even resorted to a Dremel for a little while). Finally we caved and bought a nice metal blade and thus, The Butter Knife was born. It only took us about 30 seconds to finish the cut with the new blade. Just goes to show, you've got to have the right tool for the job.

After the exhaust was out, we moved onto the gas tank. This was a little more of an operation. We had to unbolt and remove all of the bolts holding in the fuel lines that used to run to the engine and then carefully pull out the fuel lines while trying not to spill the remaining gas that was in them all over the garage (and in our faces). Let's just say our garage still has the faint aroma of gas. Once the fuel lines were out, it was time to remove the gas tank. It turns out that the gas tank is literally held in with nothing more than two metal straps cradling it to the frame of the car. We literally just had to remove four bolts and the whole thing dropped out... Mostly. Turns out some fuel lines run through the chassis of the car. We didn't know that and had to disconnect them, which resulted in more gas in the garage (and all over our faces, again). So much for a clean removal, but hey! It's out.

The gas tank came out with only a little bit cajoling. This is a quick edit of the process.

Flywheel Liberation

Removing the flywheel was not difficult at all. It was really just an excuse to get to play with large power tools. As I mentioned in the last post, the engine uses a massive 54mm nut to connect to the flywheel. Needless to say, our ratchet set would not suffice. So it was of to Harbor Freight Tools (we seem to be visiting here a lot lately) to buy the biggest electric impact wrench they had. It would fit up to a 46mm bolt. So then it was of to the internet to order an adapter to fit larger socket types. Then it was of to Lowes to buy a massive 52mm impact socket!

Me holding the combination of socket and driver that can only be described as “epic”.

Once home, it was a simple matter of firing the thing up and letting it works its magic on the bolt for a few seconds. We had to give the flywheel a couple taps with a mallet to get it off, but we have been informed (by the internet) that this is normal.

Flywheels are heavier than they look. Don’t put your hand under one.

And yes, I somehow managed to injure myself during the process.

Cleaning and Refurbishing

As I have stated before, the car is in amazing condition. However it goes without saying that a car this old will need a little maintenance here and there. And as we go through the project more tasks seem to add themselves to that list. Luckily, I had a lot of time while waiting on the backorder where I desperately wanted to work on the car and thus was able to finish a lot of these smaller tasks. The first and most exciting was the windshield wipers, a necessity as we live in the Pacific Northwest.

This turned out to be a relatively easy task that took only about five or so hours, not including the time for ordering parts. I had some time after school one day and decided to have a go at it. I managed to get all of the parts out and after a couple seconds of fiddling with the mechanism I realized the motor was fine and that the arm that linked the wipers together had seized with rust.

The windshield wiper motor was still in great condition.

This was awesome because as you can imagine a couple pieces of bolted together metal is a whole lot easier to find (and cheaper to buy) than a motor. After bolting on the new arm (backwards at first resulting in the windshield wipers cleaning the hood area of the car instead of the windshield) it worked like new.

Installing the repaired assembly back into the car.

Wipers are working!

On the topic of weather proofing, we also ordered some new seals for around the windows. The old ones were in pretty bad shape.

The old weatherstripping literally crumbled as I was taking it out.

A piece of old weather stripping on the left compared to the shiny new one on the right!

Finally with all the important stuff out of the way I started to work on some minor aesthetic problems. We plan to get the car resprayed when we're done, but right now there are other smaller things to get touched up. First I wanted to detail the car. Obviously I'm not a professional but with the help of a lot of YouTube videos and an abundance of forum posts on the internet, I was able to get the general idea. The main sources of dirt were in the engine compartment and the bell housing of the transmission. I cleaned both of these thoroughly and after some work they looked much better. Had we been installing another petrol engine I don't think I would have gone to all the trouble as it would have ended up dirty again anyways. But with the new electric motor there will be no oil or carbon buildup to be had! So it should stay pristine barring the occasional splash coming in from underneath the car.

Sanding of some rust that had accumulated on the hood hinges.

Wiping down the front of the engine bay.

Battling the unstoppable forces of filth, grime, and oil residue that had made their home in the transmission bell housing.

After all that I decided to look to the inside of the car. Most of it being leather, it was a little bit trickier to clean. One of the seats of the car is in perfect condition, however the other has some cracking in it. We will be getting that one reupholstered, I think. But the other one is in impeccable condition and so I just cleaned it up a little bit. Leather is hard to clean and you have to be careful not dry it out or ruin it in some other way. I did extensive research on the subject beforehand (and tested it on the cracked seat first) and it came out well. I also did the steering wheel as it was also made of leather. Then it was on to the carpet which was easy, the rest of the dash, and other plastic bits which basically just needed to be dusted.

Stereo Rewiring

So one of the things I have always wanted in a car is an in-car entertainment system that doesn't suck. Surprisingly the only car that I really feel meets this criteria is the Tesla Model S. I may not be able to afford one of those, but I certainly can try to make something similar. As of the moment I am writing this, the stereo rewiring is all finished and I'm just working on getting the Nexus 7 fitted so that it looks like it came stock. That's the ultimate goal here, and not just for this bit of the project. We want this car to be a 1984 Mazda Rx7 GSL. Almost, anyway... I think I might call it the 1984 Mazda Rx7 GSL-EV as it kind of rhymes with the mass produced GSL-SE model. But this is wildly off topic. The stereo rewiring was a pretty big project getting the whole thing operational and since it isn't totally finished I think I'll save it for another post. Just thought it was worth mentioning as it was what occupied the majority of my time while the parts were on backorder.

Parts, Parts, and More Parts!

Somewhere in this process the parts started to come in. They came in two orders, the first much sooner than the second. Unsurprisingly, they came in big trucks on big pallets, and both delivery people asked something along the lines of, "Is thing the right place?" I don't think our house is the kind of place they are accustomed to delivering too.

The components have finally arrived!

Anyhow, the first shipment came in with just the motor, controller, chill plate, and controller mount. There wasn't a whole lot we could do with the motor without some other parts but it was fun to look at. As for the controller and chill plate, those I could work with! The chill plate needed to be mounted to the controller with black silicone and then bolted in place. Seemed easy enough, and it was (for the most part).

The shipment and its abundance of parts rest in front of their future home.

The motor controller awaiting chill plate installation.

The billet aluminum chill plate sanded and cleaned to perfection.

Basically, I just sanded down the imperfections on the controller and the chill plate and took off any smaller stuff with solvent and a paper towel. This left an oily coating which I cleaned of with isopropyl alcohol. Then I went about applying the black silicone around the edges of the controller.

Applying the silicone… For the first time.

It was some pretty hardcore stuff (it's designed to withstand an immense amount of punishment and still maintain a seal), so it smelled pretty bad. It took a couple hours to air out the kitchen afterwards. Everything seemed great and I laid it down on top of the controller and lined it up perfectly, before quickly putting in the bolts. Unfortunately, we didn't get bolts that were threaded all the way up the shaft... This would have been fine except the bolt was long enough that even with the bolt tightened to the very end of the threads it wouldn't clamp together the controller and chill plate.

As soon as I realized this, I rushed off to find one Vice Grips and C-clamps, the next best solution to apply pressure until the silicone cured. It kind of worked, but after about 15 minutes of playing with it, the silicone had started to cure without any pressure being applied and I decided to do it right and start over.

Removing the old silicone from the controller after I decided to start over. Keen observers might note the forlorn look on my face. I am mourning the loss of a whole tube of black silicone. Not a total loss though… I learned to always check your bolts before doing anything to permanent!

I ended up having to wait until the next weekend to finish it because none of our local hardware stores sold the exact silicone we needed. But in the end, it turned out much better and I was satisfied with the results. It probably would have worked without redoing it, but I didn't want to take any chances and it would have irked me to no end.

The second order came in well after the first and was just as exciting (if not more). The batteries, charging station, charger, cabling, DC/DC converter, and so much more was contained within the glorious confines of many a cardboard box and one big wooden crate. I won't detail every component until it gets installed, but a list of some of the bigger components from both orders can be found here.

Moving the batteries indoors. Batteries don’t like the cold very much and while they’d probably be fine, better safe than sorry (plus we have more room inside than in the garage).

We moved most of the stuff into the house so that it could be in a more climate controlled environment until we are ready to put them in the car. At least thats what I'm telling people. Really, I just want to look at all the fancy components. I mean just look at this billet aluminum throttle controller! It's a work of art!

Magnificent, anodized gold, throttle controller. Yes, I’m totally geeking out.

Anyhow, that's about all for now, the project is now in full swing! More posts to come soon.

Engine Pull

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 00:47:36 -0400

The week after we got the car home, we began classifying and removing all of the components in the engine. This was, of course, much easier said than done. It took us until Tuesday of this week, about five weeks later to finally get it out.

I won't go through the entire process right now, but if you have any question feel free to contact us on our contact page. The simplified version of the process went something like this:

Step 1: Start to remove something.
Step 2: Find another thing that is in the way of the first thing you were trying to remove.
Step 3: Go back to Step 1, repeating the process with the new thing thats in the way.

This infinite loop kept throwing a wrench in the process of removing the engine. Multiple times we thought we had gotten everything out and then realized there was one more piece remaining which started us at Step 1, of the above process again. But we had a lot of fun tinkering with the engine, and we now know a lot about it as well as the parts of the car that it was connected to. All valuable experience.

Originally, based on reading we had done on the internet, we thought that it would be easier to remove the transmission with the engine. This would require us to drain the fluid from the transmission and disconnect the shifter and the drive train. But we had been told that it was almost impossible to get out the bolts connecting the transmission to the engine.

However, after some exploring we found that this was not the case. Most of the bolts were relatively easy to reach. And with the new found glory of a wondrous tool called a breaker bar, we were able to remove the bolts with relative ease.

Using the wondrous breaker bar to loosen a transmission bolt! Keen observers might note the forgone ratchet lying in front of me.

After many hours of hard work and problem solving we finally had the engine lift attached, the transmission propped up, and the engine mounting bolts off. So slowly, we began lifting. A shortened (and timelapsed) video of the removal process can be found below. The full version might show up in its own post down the road depending on whether I have time to edit it.

Removing the engine… (We wish it went this quickly!)

All things considered, it went pretty smoothly. It took us about four times longer than we had originally planned but it wouldn't be an engineering project if we were on schedule.

It’s out!

After admiring the inside of the transmission bell housing and looking around the engine, we decided to continue with the process. As it turned out this was yet another adventure (no surprises there, seems as if everything is more difficult than one would expect). In order to adapt the new electric motor (which is now on order and should arrive in a few weeks!) we will need the clutch plate, pressure plate, flywheel, and the throwout bearing. The clutch and pressure plates came out relatively easily, the flywheel however was a different story.

As it turns out, the Wankel 12a (which was the motor in the RX-7), have one massive bolt in place of what is normally four smaller bolts to hold the flywheel to the drive shaft of the engine. In case you were wondering, massive means 54mm. So we are leaving that as an adventure for next week!

As usual, more to come soon, thanks for reading!

Homeward

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 08:02:50 -0400

One of the most nerve-racking parts of this whole process was seeing whether or not the car ran. That came a couple weeks back. Blame finals for the ridiculous tardiness of this post.

To be honest, I was a little skeptical as to whether or not we would be able to get it to start. It had been sitting for two years, not to mention the fact that it was fully exposed to the elements for that entire time. After scoping it out the week before, everything looked great but obviously looks can be deceiving.

The engine looked to be in great condition.

In this case however, with a new battery it started right up much to our surprise and elation. After doing a few laps around the parking lot, we discovered a few problems though.

Adding in the new battery went smoothly.

First and most obvious the tach was making a terrible buzzing sound and would not exceed 1000 RPM no matter how much we revved the engine. Less obnoxious, but more important were the brake and coolant lights which were eliciting some strange behavior. The brake light, after our first lap, turned off and stayed that way until we turned the car off and turned it back on.

As for the coolant light, we checked the radiator and found it was pretty low so we topped that off which fixed it.

We filled up the radiator to fix the coolant light.

After a little more discussion we decided to hit the road. The tires were super unbalanced and the ride was a little rough but it was easily driveable, and the more the tires heated up the better the ride was.

Before we could hit the road, new tabs needed to be added so we were legal.

After a quick stop for gas, we hit the road and after about a minute of driving the tach stopped buzzing and started accurately reading the RPM. Eventually the brake light went off as well. Everything started working itself out as we drove it further towards home.

This is something we won’t be doing for very much longer…

Not all the gauges were totally functioning correctly, however. The temperature gauge was reading way too high and the fuel gauge was off as well, not that it mattered for our purposes. The ride home went fairly smoothly despite the wide range of suspicious sounds and smells emanating from the car. Much to our ears dismay we also found that there was a short somewhere in the speaker system.

Overall it was an amazing ride, going even better than I could have hoped for! We got it home successfully with only minor problems. The next day I gave it a thorough scrubbing after checking all the seals on the doors and except for the paint and some minor interior sun damage, it is looking amazing!

Car all cleaned up and looking way better. It’s amazing what just a good wash can do!

More to come soon, thanks for reading.

A First Look

Sat, 02 May 2015 16:04:12 -0400

Today we got our very first look at the car in question, the gorgeous 1984 Mazda RX-7 GSL, probably one of the best looking classic cars out there. With my limited knowledge of classic cars, I think that in its category it is only rivaled by the Porsche 911.

Anyways, this was one of the most anticipated parts of the entire build for me. It allowed my vision of the completed car to take shape a little bit further. For this visit we just did some rudimentary work on the car (checking the oil, tire pressure, etc.) to get it ready for driving it home on a following weekend.

The car is fondly named “Raenier”, in honor of my Aunt’s dachshund.

The car had been stored outside in a storage lot for about 2 years since last being driven, so going into it I wasn't expecting too much. But I was pleasantly surprised. The car was in excellent condition, mostly just a little dirty from sitting out in the elements so long (lots and lots of pine needles). Luckily nothing on the body of the car appeared to be rusted out (other than the windshield wipers which will be an easy fix).

The only bit of the car that might need some body work. It appears as though someone may have bumped it in the storage complex.

The tires were flat and the paint looked like it had seen better days but all of the issues were minor and it looks like it will run just fine. Of course it won't be running in the traditional sense very long (goodbye, gasoline!). We just need the car to drive from the storage lot to our house where we will be working on it. Avoiding highways that will be about an hour and half drive, so we'll see how that goes coming up in the next couple weekends.

The engine of the car is still in good condition, (hopefully) meaning an easy trip when we bring it home. And there are the aforementioned pine needles.

Overall, there were really only minor little issues that will be easy to fix later on down the road as we work through the process of converting it. After seeing the car and experiencing the first part of the project come to fruition, I was really excited.

Regardless of how it runs I think it is going to be quite the adventure... I am so excited to be able to give this car new life, its going to be a beautiful thing when it is finished!

Thanks for reading! Many more posts on the way.