Registered

Well the car has finally been registered. After a 12 week delay comprising 7 weeks to receive the approval letter from Qld Transport and 5 weeks waiting for an inspection, it is done.

Of course Murphy's law came into play when I took it for the final inspection at the QT depot at Zillmere. When they checked the brake lights it turned out that one of the bulbs had blown while driving it to the inspection and when I tried to blow the horn it also didn't work. That turned out to be a loose connector. Luckily the inspector was a human being and allowed the vehicle to pass.

I have been doing some testing of the acceleration of the car and have been tweaking the motor controller settings to improve the acceleration. Unfortunately I improved the acceleration to the point where the front transmission mount broke. I have ordered a new mount and will put it in next Saturday.

While waiting for the part I am manually balancing the battery pack. I have made a single cell charger from a PC power supply that is capable of puting 40 amps into a cell. I am also using a high power resistor 0.22 ohms 150 watt to bring higher voltage cells down to a lower value. Unfortunately with these cells the voltage tends to bounce after charging and discharging. ie the voltage may rise to 3.4 volts when charging but when you remove the charger it goes back down to 3.38 volts after a few minutes. So there is a lot of waiting involved. Once I get it roughly balanced I will let the BMS do an automatic balance at top of charge.

I have also put a small DC pump onto the high pressure port of the auto transmission to try to keep the clutches engaged when the motor is not spinning. This partially works but I am drawing atf from the cooler loop which creates a vacuum in this loop to the point where the pump stalls. I will have to draw the fluid from the transmission sump, so it needs another outlet brazed into the sump to connect to.

Ian Bartie is also making an ATC (Automatic Transmission Controller) to replace the vacuum modulator in the transmission. It will control the pressures and gear change points in the transmission electrically from the motor controller. The device comprises a model airplane servo which drives a pin into the box via a cam mounted on the servo shaft. When the motor current is high the controller will drive the servo so that the pin moves into the transmission and out again under low current. This should simulate exactly the effect of engine vacuum on the vacuum modulator. Testing on the existing vacuum modulator showed that moving the pin only 1mm gave a change point from 2nd to 3rd gear speed variation, from 40 km/hr to 80 km/hr.