Congratulations on getting it back on the road! Owning an 'older' EV has its challenges!
Tom Keenan -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jeremy Green Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 11:18 AM To: Electric Vehicle Discussion List Subject: [EVDL] EV Grin and a fun little mystery 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) _______________________________________________ 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)
