So, my Honda CRX EV is finally back on the road after 11 years of inactivity.
I took the EV apart 11 years ago because the water pump needed to be replaced
and there were a few other upgrades I wanted to do.
Then, my brother moved his shop to another state and then 8 1/2 years ago I had
my first kid.
So, it sat idle for a long time and as these things tend to do (with me), the
scope of the project got much bigger.
I decided to upgrade the controller and replace my transmission with a later
model Integra transmission since there were better clutch options and it is a
much beefier transmission.
So, this involved custom mounts and a new adapter plate. Of course, I couldn't
find anyone who had the adapter plate I needed so I decided to machine my own
on my CNC machine.
The CNC machine had been moved to my brother's new shop in RI (from
Massachusetts) and needed quite a bit of work to get it going again (again, as
I tend to do, I made it a bigger project by replacing the windows controller
software with EMC 2 running on linux).
So, it was quite a while before I actually had the adapter plate machined
(December of 2010).
Anyway, I'm back on the road with a Zilla controller and 64 CALB 100 ah cells
(unfortunately, the old blue case ones).
I went from having a range of around 25 miles to what looks like 65 and the car
is a much more reasonable weight.
There's a lot to be done still but at least now I can drive the car!
So, on to the fun mystery. I was testing the car out on the highway the other
day and noticed that under hard acceleration, the brake light came on. I was a
little confused and thought either the fluid was low and sloshing or that I had
messed up the wiring for the idiot lights. Then I realized that one of my high
voltage cable goes right next to the master cylinder and, the float switch for
the brake fluid level is a reed switch. So, under hard acceleration when there
was a lot of current going through the cable, it was generating enough of a
magnetic field to cause the reed switch to pull in. I only had to move the
cable a tiny bit to get it to go away.
I expected to be having to track down some problem in the wiring. I was happy
to find it was a simple (and interesting) problem with an easy fix.
Glad to be back among the EV drivers! I almost broke down and bought a leaf a
year or so ago…
-Jeremy
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub
http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
