Posts Tagged ‘damage’

What a beautiful site

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I borrowed neighbor Mike’s 90 degree drill and was able to get the melted bolt out without too much trouble. The threads showed no sign of damage outside a little of the melted black plastic that stuck to it so I think I escaped with only a bolt replacement.

I also took a picture of the new battery regulator rack I’ve been working on. I need a bunch more spacers from Ace but I think it will work out well. My plan is to mount them inside a steel box I’ll make out of sheet metal and install some fans that will be powered by the external load jumpers on the regs.

Back to that Bolt

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Here are some more pictures of the melted bolt. It’s motor terminal S2. I removed the motor shroud from the forced air cooling so I could see from the inside what the bolt attaches to. I can’t get at the bolt with a bolt extractor without pulling the transmission and removing the motor mounts to rotate the motor so I wondered if I could unbolt the outer “nut” that the bolt goes into. It almost looks like a coupler that the wires from inside the motor connect to as well. My guess is that as long as I can get the inside to bolt back in I should be able to remove the coupler, extract the bolt on a work bench, then reinstall.

I will probably call the manufacturer first though. It does look like some ash/dust has spread into the motor so I don’t know if I need to take off the front motor cover and clean that up or not.

On a side note, I’m hopeful that the bolt melted on the first test run and every drive since then has been lacking power due to the small contact area holding the motor terminals together. It was so minimal when I tried to rotate the cable to see if it would turn the bolt the cable came free very easily so there wasn’t much contact.

Also decided to take everything apart and reinstall having knowledge of how it should go. This time around will be cleaner and safer (no exposed wires carrying full pack voltage within hand’s reach). So today I removed all battery regulators, battery cables, controller and board. It’s basically down to motor and batteries.

This doesn’t look good

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

Tonight I was looking under the hood just to check stuff out and came across this. This is my S2 motor terminal and the 2/0 lug that was bolted to it. I imagine it got loose and welded itself into this mess.

I’ll have to see if it will unscrew or not and figure out how to get it back together.