Rear battery boxes

I finally purchased a cheap DC tig welding setup, and found a few minutes to start welding up a frame for the rear battery box and motor controller.

rear bumper installed

Last week I mounted the rear bumper. Today I installed the Go-pedal!

It is an accelerator pedal from a 2006 VW GTI (atleast I'm keeping it in the family). The nice thing about this pedal is that the 0-5k potentiometer built into the pedal is compatible with the Soliton 1 controller.

Seat-belts and turn signals

I'm one step closer to getting the car ready for inspection. Today I got the turn signals and brake lights working. Then I started working on the seat belt anchors. I am using a set of latches from a 944, because they were cheaply available and plug into the factory belts. I'm finding the biggest downside to starting with a salvage vehicle is finding out what is missing...

The seat is slid all the way forward in this picture, but the belt latch is easily reachable from the seat when in the proper position. I think this is nearly how the early cars were setup. Later cars have the belt attached to the seat. However, since these were modified aftermarket seats there was no place to attach the buckle. Still I'm making progress.

Fun with Fuses!

This week I am re-wiring the fuse panel in attempt to get working lights and turn signals. I am also taking the opportunity to upgrade to blade type fuses using a Hella fuse block.

Rear Motor Mount and Speed Sensor

I finally have the motor secured in a location that looks pretty good, and the transmission may even shift properly now.

Motor Mounting Bar

A 1/2 thick aluminum plate is bolted onto the Warp 11 motor, and spacers push the motor forward to the proper position.

Six mounting bolts on the rear end of the motor.

I also had to cut at notch in the mounting plate to enable the speed sensor to bolt onto the motor in the standard location.

The sensor was purchased from RechargeCar.
http://rechargecar.com/product/warptm-speed-sensor

Re-positioning the motor and transmisstion

The cross brace which supports the transmission has a small interference fit problem with the rear sway bar, so I made my own aluminum bracket to replace the factory one. Note the factory rubber mounts will go underneath the cross bar, in the same manner as they fit in the factory bar, just rotated 90 degrees so that a narrower mount could be used to fit the car. As it turn out, this mount that I fabricated looks quite similar to the one used for the G50 transmission.

Here are the spacers I will use to push the motor forward and back into the correct location, and shim the transmission mount down 3/8 of an inch.

I am finding that I keep re-engineering some of the things that the previous owner had hacked together. At some point I will just have to put the car on the road and drive it.

Building a Juice Box (Level 2 Charging Station)

Over this past summer I decided to back a project on Kickstarter for an open source level 2 charging station; called the EMW Juicebox.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/emw/emw-juicebox-an-open-source-level-2-ev-charging-st

Now that I have finally gotten the project assembled and started playing around with it, I thought that I would post some info about my experience so far. Unfortunately I haven't been able to test charging my car with the unit yet, but I'll report back soon.

The Basic Edition JuiceBox comes with a very nice aluminum case, pre-assembled mainboard, psu, and relay.

Wifi wasn't yet an option when I purchased my unit (but wasn't worried because I had a spare router sitting around), so I've made a few modifications to the hardware. Like adding a current current sensing coil and an arduino ethernet shield. This requires some small modification to the main board in order to use the SPI interface on pins 10-13. Pin 12 was used to trigger a relay for the GFCI test circuit, but since Pin 7 was free I cut and re-routed the trace as shown below.

I also added Jumpers to enable the LCD, but I haven't decided where/if I will mount one yet.

 Currently I am thinking that I will just develop an android application for the display instead of using the LCD.

Here is the working Ethernet shield.

I like the fact that the code is open source, so it can be modified. I got as far as sending a "Hello World" to my computer as a UDP packet. Not bad for a quick test. Stay tuned to see where I will go from here...

Rear Bumper

Test fit of the fiberglass rear bumper.
I still need to fabricate a real impact support to put behind the fiberglass, but it almost looks like a proper Porsche again.