First of all, let me say how much fun it was meeting so many of you at Woodburn this year! I'd name individuals, but there are just too many of them ;-) Enjoyed meeting you all, seeing many of your cars, and talking to many of you.
Second of all, let me give a abbreviated version of my travelouge. Drive down to woodburn was not as smooth as I might have hoped - first of all, because of the way I built my trailer, it had so much aero drag that I could only maintain 50mph on the power it put out. Second of all, both PFC-20s cranking away could only draw about 32A because of the pack voltage and my lack of a buck enhancer - and third of all, for the first twenty miles of the trip they were doing more like 20A because I had the throttles down. So I made the trip at about 50 mph, stopped to charge for a hour just before portland. Got to see many fast EVs, shot a video that I will put up on my web site later of a EV drag race from inside Rudman's Ford Fiesta, Goldie.. On the way back, shortly outside of Woodburn one of my tortured PFC beta units gave up the ghost. The smell of burning silicon told me something serious had happened, but the charger still appeared to work - except it had no current limits at all in buck mode. So I drove on to Wayland's, and Rich met me there. John very kindly loaned me his buck enhanced 20 (Thanks, John!), and I refilled my batteries at 40 amps for a couple of hours. Then, feeling much less drained, I continued on down the road, this time doing between 55 and 65 with 40A being dumped into my pack nonstop. (Love that buck enhancer!) At times I drafted trucks, which let me cruise at 65 for about 5kW. Otherwise it took about 15. (Normally it takes about 6.5-7, so as you can see, the aero effect of the trailer is not inconsequential) Sadly, a intermittent flaw in John's charger (which me & rich had noticed while charging off AC at Johns) kicked in about 60 miles from seattle, and the charger's duty cycle fell, and then fell again, until it was only running about 20% of the time. So I slowed it down to 45, and stopped and charged for about 15 minutes just south of Seattle, then drove on home. All in all, a pretty good 400 mile run. I think next year I may just do it on the batteries, though. In the meantime, I'm going to try and get all the bugs out of the trailer system - having a trailer _double_ your power usage is just no good. [Part of the problem is that the generator, the way it's mounted right now, sticks up _above_ the lip of the car, so it's like a giant parachute going down the road] Anyway, I made it there and back. I will have to cruise over to Rich's soon and give him Wayland's charger so he can repair the intermittent fault and return it to Wayland. -------------------------------------------- Other notes from my Woodburn experience: 1) That NiCad Geo is a _beautiful_ car - the EV album doesn't really capture the amount of craftsmanship that has gone into this fine machine. 2) Victor may be as crazy as Madman & Wayland. It's one thing to read about a 3800 lb CRX, it's another thing to actually see it. 3) The MoRad set a new NEDRA record! I told you all that was a cool scooter. ;-) 4) The Killacycle ate a SVR in a really interesting way - I hope someone got a picture of that battery, it literally had _holes_ in it.. 5) I still want to see Bob Rice's other EV.. ;-) Maybe he should get a entry in the EV photo album for it. More later, perhaps.. S.
