Sunday 21 July 2013

After considerable thought,& lack of enthusiasm ,I have 

Original battery trays

decided to abandon the notion of mounting the batteries under the car. As it would turn out using the 100ah CALB batteries , at their height, means I have to place them on their side & this then continues to restrict the numbers even further. Each of these would take just 10 , leaving me still to fit 25 elsewhere.
I have constructed already a frame for 11 in the spare wheel space  and would get 5 more under each front seat. So 4 would have to go in engine bay. This would mean then that I would have 6 carriers , two which would have to be waterproofed. Each would have to be wired up , in & out, and I could just see issues arising, not the least of which , for those batteries under the car, I would not be able to visually monitor any BMS I was to use.
 So out came the back seat.

Back seats in their original condition.

As it has turned out , the son's dog has made certain of my choice as I left the seat back outside the car and went out to a meeting. On my return, the dog had  destroyed a fair portion  of the seat foam & covering!     

Now it is simple - inside the car where the back seat was - 3 rows of 15 batteries -!!

Have spent a fair bit of time trying valiantly to mount the motor/gearbox in. Had a piece of 5 mm plate cut to rough shape and I drilled & mounted this to the motor. Then put combination a couple a times in & out trying to determine the best position for the top main mounting hole to mate the plate to the side engine mount.

The old engine mount is on left above the motor. This mount plus the original rear & original front mounts I had filled with urethane. This has firmed them up considerably, I hope to the better.

Here I have temporarily mounted the plate to the motor and worked out the location for the hole to pass the main mounting bolt to the mounting block on the right side of the engine bay. I have used the original engine bolt that originally passed through a cast fitting and then to the block. So without this casting anymore, I have an excess of bolt. I have had to use a number if 1/2"washers to pad this out including a couple between the plate & the block just to achieve a good fit without tensioning the plate too much.

Having got this far , the next consideration is  a combination of further taking some of the weight off the gearbox mount at the other end, and also to design something to hold.the motor and prevent the rotation torsion of the motor. Possible problems would be that excess torsion would rip the motor off the engine mount block and at best cause a weakening of the plate let alone too much of a reliance on the gearbox mount that originally would never have had too much weight reliant on it. 

What I have decided to use is to fabricate a 20x20mm tube , v cut , and bent below the motor. Picked up using original front engine mount , and picked at the rear using  the rear rubber mounts. Then I fabricated, using 20 mm flat iron, a hoop , sectioned,  and with two bolts to tension up around the motor. This hoop fits neatly between the motor & the 20x20 mm tube above. I will pull the motor up  & out  and weld this hoop to the tube. This will both pad that space, so as the load is now on the three original engine mounts, and much less on the rear gearbox mount.

I will remount the hoop before welding and its likely to overlap the motor's mounting eye-bolt. I will remove the bolt but will replace it after I make a  small notch in the hoop to accommodate the eye-bolt back into its screw hole.   Then I hope I have succeeded in what I believe is the last of the  major engineering parts.