Hi Steve,
Congrats on the new car. This summer I put many hours into one of these cars. Some things where different however, like 4 motors, a corvette rear end, and agm batteries to name a few:) When we got it, it had 22 hawker 38ah batteries in it. The pack was not too difficult to remove. The first step is removing the front bumper piece. make sure you disconnect all of the front lights. next up are the two arms that hold the headlights. Next, disconnect the tie rods, and the steering cylinder. (tropica has hydrolic steering, like on a boat!) Then there are all of the main tray bolts. They are in a 'u' pattern on the front firewall. All of them come out, and then the .5'' alum firewall is free. Remove that and you are now almost ready to slide out the pack. I don't know how the car was originally wired, but you need to check that there aren't any cables coming out the back of the battery tunnel before you start pulling the batteries out the front. You should be able to remo!
ve the first few batteries by hand. If you want to try and use a roller rack thing from under the car, you will find pretty big slots running right down the center of the car. If you had a bb roller on a jack, you could probably jack it up underneath the car into one of the slots, and you would be able to roll the pack out instead of slide it out. We had a very handy 4 wheeled cart that was just the right height for the pack once we put two 2x4's on it. I was able to pull the pack out pretty much by myself, although it certainly takes some muscles and a strong back. Be careful on the way out that you don't let all of the pack weight rest on the weak aluminum on the edge. Also be careful where you pull the pack from. The front lip isn't all to strong. If you want more details, I will be at the stanford rally on saturday. I hope to be zipping around on a xootre....
-Thomas Cook
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: My new Tropica
>Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 02:36:56 -0400
>
>I'm the proud new owner of the Tropica Bruce posted about earlier this week. We were told by the previous owner that the charger was dead, the batteries were dead and perhaps one motor wasn't running. We trailered it home to San Jose last night and took it off the trailer this evening.
>
>Ok so what have we got here? I got out my DVM to measure the pack voltage. 2.4 volts. No, I didn't misplace a decimal. Well that's not good. I plugged in the charger and the voltage started climbing. I thought, hey the charger seems to work after all. Well no, it put out a whole 4 volts! Fair Radio to the rescue. I hooked up the "charger" and brought the voltage up slowly watching the current. At about 40 volts, I was startled by the tail lights comming on. It was dark by now. What suprised me was that I had the main switch off. A look at the schematic shows that the main switch only disables the drive system. That probably explains why the batteries were so dead. The DC-DC was suppling power to the "card cage" for the whole time the car wasn't getting charged due to the bad charger. I brought it up to 72volts and let it set there for a couple hours pulling very little current. I then raised it up to about 85 volts and the pack started drawing about 8 amps. I !
let it go a co!
> uple more hours but that was all the time I had. I'll measure the resting voltage to see if I made any headway and continue charging tomorrow night. I'm not expecting much. I fully expect this pack to be more than murdered but maybe I'll get enough charge to check out the motors or go around the block. While charging, I checked out the rest of the electrical system and everything seem to work.
>
>So far it's been very popular in the neighborhood. I got a real kick out of the number of people asking if they could sit in it! I'll pull the charger out this weekend after the EV Rally and check it out.
>
>I need help with two things, so far. Does anyone have info on the battery watering system? There is a central watering system that is filled from 3 quick disconects in the front. There apparently was a small tank and pump that was available. I'm also looking for information on how to build the battery cart for removing the battery pack from the tunnel.
>
>
>thanks,
>Steve
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