Wiring Up
I spent a good many hours today working on the car- got a lot done, and boy is it plenty hard work.
I basically just ran the necesesary power cables front/back under the car.
You can kind of see there, the welding cable is run in orange “Smurf Tube” from the home depot. It is fairly tough flexible plastic corrugated tubing. The tube is attached to the powerplant frame with huge zip ties, two tubes for the 2/0 power cables, one for the 8 GA wires that will attach the charger to the high voltage. I made and attached the motor leads in preparation for installing the front rack.
I’ve started to deal with the task of attaching all the lugs and terminals to the welding cable- it was fun for the first couple tries. I am using heavy duty lugs from EVSource and the diamond crimpers also from EVSource. The lugs are good, I’m a little unhappy with the crimpers- I have the dies set to 2/0, but it seems to be over-crimping somewhat. The lug metal is kind of extruded out in a little tab, and of course making the crimp requires a borderline ridiculous amount of effort, it’s impossible to make the crimp without bracing one handle of the crimper against something. If I were doing it again I might shop for a hex crimper instead of a diamond one. The crimps do seem to be “working” though, the connections are very solid.
There’s still a whole lot of integration that has to happen here. It’s doubly difficult because I am largely improvising my way along. I’m hoping to hook up the batteries and give the motor/controller a real first test this weekend. There will be video.