Too many projects

So the bathroom project is largely completed, and I immediately delved into my latest home remodeling project. Its fair to say that remodeling is an addiction.

Our house was built in 1970, and is a basic 1 story ranch with 3 bedrooms. On the south side there are two bedrooms and a bath, and on the north side the garage is in front, and the master bedroom and (newly remodeled) master bath in back. Between the ends there is a formal living room with entry, and formal dining, both in front, and behind each is an informal living room, and informal dining room and kitchen. In 1985 the previous homeowners tacked on a 15×20 foot two story addition off the informal dining room in back. In the southeast corner where the addition and main house join there is a 1 story 8×10′ room connected with a doorway into the addition.

When the addition was created the homeowners chose to remove almost all of the rear windows of the house. (Possibly to prevent light pollution from falling on the 2 story observatory in the backyard, but that is another story.) The master bedroom window was partially covered over by the addition and was removed, the bay window in the informal dining room became the entrance to the addition, and the back door was removed, since it opened into the 1 story portion of the addition.

So when I purchased the house it had 3 bedrooms, 3 living rooms, the upstairs “bonus room” in the addition, 2 baths, no dining room (since it was now a walkway into the addition) and the formal dining room had become a laundry room. It wasn’t very useful. The first project I tackled was moving the entrance to the master bedroom out of the informal dining room and around the corner into the addition. This left us with enough wall space in the dining room to put in a small table. However, at 2500sq feet, and with lots of public space divided into several living rooms, it really needed more bedrooms. Plus with our first child on the way, and a roommate occupying the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the house, it seemed like a good idea.

Earlier this month I blocked out a floorplan that divides the lower level of the addition into a bedroom, a hallway to the master bedroom and staircase, and a half bathroom. Since all of the walls were non-structural partitions I experimented and built the walls from steel studs. They cut easy, go up fast, and are straight and easy to sheetrock. In Austin steel studs are about 50% more expensive than wood framing. Also electrical work is a bit more of a hassle (gromments and special boxes) so I am not sure if I would use them again.

The door to the 1 story portion of the addition now opens into the bathroom, so it will need to be relocated. The only good spot for it is on the other wall, opening into the living room. I could just put in a door, and in fact after opening the wall we found the opening for the former exterior door. Still, this seems like a good time to address the other issue, with no windows the living room is dark, by removing the wall between the 1 story room, and the living room, I can add more windows to the 1 story addition and brighten the living room. In the process I can remove 1/3 of the fireplace rock, centering the fireplace (currently it sits off center in the rock wall).

So for the last two weeks I have drywalled one side of every wall. (I haven’t had framing and rough inspections yet, so I can’t close both walls but I didn’t want the sharp and somewhat fragile steel studs exposed. This last week I’ve been doing the electrical rework. That means adding a hall light, removing some outlets that were in the now bathroom, and moving several circuits that run thru the disappearing living room wall. Plus several switch moves to handle new door locations. Its about 7 minor issues, but since I am trying to minimize the amount of drywall work each of them is taking an evening or so to complete. Not as much fun as doing the bathroom fresh was.

I talked to a structural engineer this morning, the framing gets really weird where the addition and main house connect so I needed some advice on building a header. They never removed the old roof, just built a new roof atop it to connect to the addition. Plus the roof of the 1story addition is setup oddly. He said for the 8 foot span a doubled 2×8 Laminate Veneer Lumber (LVL) beam would be best and gave me a basic education on calculating structural loads. I might write another post about that. The LVL bean was $100 and had to be special ordered, a bit more than $32 for the two 16 foot 2×10 demensional lumber I was planning on using.
So, big project and the scope creep could be massive. Windows are the big one, the new bedroom needs a bigger, egress friendly window, and the connection between the living room and addition has little value unless I put large windows in there as well.

So I washed and waxed the MR2 and reassembled the dash (after my failed E-Meter experiment) and took the car over to Chris’ to show to a small TV crew from the local PBS station.

I added a quart of fluid to the transmission, it probably needs more, but a quart was enough to wet the gears and quiet it down significantly.   It still makes a metallic clicking noise in reverse, complete with the clink of something metal falling to the bottom whenever I stop.  I’ll probably end up pulling the transmission this week and taking it to a local shop for rebuilding so I didn’t want to end up having to drain a ton of gear oil.  Cost is estimated at about $1000.

Sitting in the car with the T-Tops open and the sun beating down was damn hot.  If I am going to even consider driving the car I really need to install AC…  Got a nice sunburn out of the deal.
On the plus side, after driving around for the TV crew the Optima’s sucked down a much better charge than they did earlier this week, maybe the batteries will wake up and improve the dismal performance of the car.  I’d like to stretch out the battery replacement for a few more months if I can.

I think I killed my E-Meter. To its credit, I did something stupid, and I probably deserve it. The MR2 lacks good places to mount the emeter where the front panel buttons are accessible. I’ve had the emeter unattractively ty-wrapped to the top of the left dash pod as a stop gap for too long.

I gutted the stock instrument cluster, and replaced the useless guages with a piece of lexan for mounting the E-Meter on. Since the cluster will not allow me to reach the front panel buttons I soldered one wire to each button and carried them out of the case. A little testing showed that each button’s opposite side is common with the negative input terminal. So in theory by grounding each wire to the emeter’s ground (not the 12v frame ground) I would be able to use remote buttons. The cruise control stalk has two that might be ideal..

To make a long story short, I think one of the leads came in contact with the chassis while I was hooking it up and now the E-Meter lights up for a second and goes blank. The emeter makes a high pitched noise, which leads my to suspect a power supply problem, but I measure +5v at pins 1 and 2 of the connector leading to the display board. (and I think I remember it always being noisy)

Someone on the EVDL suggested I send it to Xantrax (the company that currently manufactures them) where they can usually fix it for about $80.  Ouch

I haven’t posted much about the MR2 in over a year. That should be a good sign, but its not really. I drove the MR2 pretty regularily during Jan-Jun of last year, but began to have problems in summer.

The DC/DC blew again, as did Nick Viera’s. The combination of the Zilla controller and the DCP/Alltrax DC/DC does not seem to be a good one, although neither Alltrax or Cafe Electric has any idea why. With a fairly small 12v system battery in the car driving it becomes risky, especially after dark. I was still using it for short errands and stuff thru the summer, (even with the T-Tops off its hot sitting in the black car in the sun with no AC). Finally in late July while making an ice cream run with Chris one of the batteries in the rear trunk blew an intercell connector inside the battery (chunks of lead melted their way out of the battery top).

I basically stopped driving the car then, even failing to take it to out to the renewable Energy Roundup in September. With the bathroom project eating all of my freetime the MR2 sat idle all thru winter (the best time to drive it).

I started poking at it this weekend, (just as temps are reaching the 90’s here again). Basically I have to make the same choice I’ve always had. Sink time and effort fixing the MR2, or spend time and effort transplanting the EV components into another car.

Right now the MR2 has some pretty significant fixes needed:

1. The transmission is leaking nasty gear oil, probably around the axle seals. Since I’ve replaced these seals once already I am beginning to suspect the engine mounts (we had to reuse the standard mounts on the supercharged tranmission) are torquing the transmission slightly sideways. Finding the correct set of mounts may prove difficult.
2. The interior is a mess. I need new fabric on the doors (one is completely bare), and maybe a seat rebuild. The radio and speakers are still missing and the radio pod in the center dash looks like hell. The windows still make horrible noises when moved up or down. The T-Tops may still be leaking.
3. No Air Conditioning. I have all of the parts (dryer, condensor and compressor, hoses and pressure switches), but still have to find a 1/2HP 3 phase motor that isn’t huge (the one I have is about 8″ in diameter and 10″ long). Adapters will be required to hook to the stock evaporator, and I still need to find a new expansion valve. Not to mention dismantling the dash from hell… again.
4. Batteries… the set of Optimas, minus the failures, is still at a functional 156V. Capacity is probably down some but I bet it would still get me to work and back (10 miles roundtrip) A replacement set of batteries will be needed eventually.
5. Charger mounting. The PFC-20 charger is one of the first ones Manzanita Micro made (#20), and it has an early low efficiency heatsink. Crammed in the rear trunk like it is now it really heats things up and it seldom runs at full power. It would be nice to find a new spot for it or replace it with one of the more recent ones.
6. Body and paint. There are some rusting scratches, worn areas and the body is becoming faded enough to look shabby. A new paint job isn’t cheap but would allow me to patch things like the unneeded engine bay cooling scoop and seal up the engine bay lid. Be nice to seal the bottom of the engine bay as well.
7. Clutch… the clutch still doesn’t work. I need to dismount the motor and install a spacer to prevent the hub from sliding back toward the motor under the force of the racing clutch, or drill the motor shaft so the setscrews on the hub enter the shaft slightly.
8. Suspension… somewhere in the front suspension there is a worn bushing or pivot that is causing a bumping noise when the suspension is unloaded.
9. Speedometer… I still need to actually fabricate my digital dash.
10. Solve the DC/DC problem once and for all. I need to just break down and buy one of the power supplies that are talked about on the EVDL.

Having said all that.. I do love the car (although I really wish it weren’t a two seater) and I doubt I can find anything nearly as fun to drive to replace it with. Sigh.

I pulled my entries off of http://livejournal.com and moved them here.  Wordpress will import from Livejournal, and you can use a piece of software called ljArchive to get posts and comments off of LJ and export them into the xml file format Wordpress requires.  This is a lot simpler than using Livejournal’s export feature which only exports one month at a time.  I also fixed the dead image links.

As I side note I stumbled across an MR2 fan site which has copies of some of my early conversion journal articles (which were posted here on mindbent) copied onto their site.  This is a pretty tacky violation of my copyright, but I don’t know if its worth bothering.  (OTOH, I removed that content from mindbent.org for a reason.
Mark

So the bathroom project continues. Last night I got the tub deck concrete counter glued down and the tub set into some mortar. I also took a couple dozen pictures and stitched them together using a nifty program AutoStitch.

Been driving the MR2 a few times a week. Alyssa is back in school so I need it as a second car to get to work. I replaced the DC/DC fuse and connected it back up. With it mounted to the trunk floor it has worked without incident for a few weeks. Still not idea if the fuse blowing problem was heat, or a loose 12v ground wire.

Driving to work this morning the roads were damp from rain. I made a right turn and got on the throttle as I was exiting the turn. The rear end broke loose and with the short wheelbase the car really swings out fast. I managed to correct quickly with only a slight overcorrection and lifting the throttle and got it under control.

Stock MR2s are pretty stable. The only major danger area is lifting the throttle suddenly when cornering.  The weight will transition forward, the rears break free and basically there is no way out. A lot of MR2s have been wrecked this way.
The MR2 EV does not seem to handle like stock, with the higher rear wheel weight, and with most of the weight close to the rear axle the weight transfer is a lot less aggressive. Most of my skids have been power related, the high torque of the electric drive breaks the rears loose and the rear end stops cornering. The fast throttle response of the Zilla only requires a light lift to make the wheels grab again.

The battery are sagging a lot more under load, even a fully charged pack can dip into the 10.5V per battery range under moderately to heavy accelleration. This might be the cooler weather, or I might have another faulty battery in the pack.

Mark

The MR2 is working well electrically.. but a couple of other problems are beginning to surface. It is rather disheartening.

The DC/DC was returned from Alltrax, and installed. Everything seemed to work. The stalling issue was finally resolved after an afternoon of driving back and forth in the driveway. It was not a loose connection as I had thought, instead the Cat5 cable between the Hairball controller and the Zilla power stage was intermittantly shorting internally causing the hairball to reboot. This is likely the cause of the hairball’s programming getting wiped out as well.

Last week I went on a week business trip, leaving the car with Chris to take to a clean air show at the mall over the weekend. Chris drove the car, um, aggressively and returned it with a dead DC/DC and a destroyed third gear syncro. It is now very difficult to shift in and out of third. Third gear has never been easy to shift into, and Chris was using second gear for burnouts. I think shifting into third under load with only a partially effective clutch was the final straw.

The u-joint in the steering rack has been making noise for some time (I think it is the cause of the banging whenever the front tires go over a bump) and it is heading downhill fast. The steering rack is no longer available rebuilt, so I will have to take my chances with a junkyard rack. The alignment is way off, and the front passenger lugnuts loosen over time.

So the car is drivable, but a number of expensive repairs are on the horizon and my enjoyment level is way down. $200 for a new steering box, $600+ to rebuild the tranny, $50 alignment, new tires etc.. The DC/DC went back to Alltrax for more repair work, under warrenty, thankfully.

A newer car would have less of these issues… and parts would be easier to obtain. I strongly recommend against converting a car older than 5 years unless you have a really good reason.

Mark

The weekend I showed the MR2 at the Festival de las Plantas at Guerrero Park. One way distance was about 13.76 miles. I had never done a range test on the MR2, but I’ve been working on 25 miles as the approximation based on other EV drivers experience. The organizers offered outlets so I set out expecting to get enough power for the return trip doing a slow 15amp charge during the 8 hour long Festival.

At the event power was in short supply, the organizers plugged AustinEV and all the food vendors into the Austin Energy’s portable solar/battery trailer. The trailer had been oriented badly by the setup crew, with its 16 panel solar array pointing North-NE and under heavy shade. By 10am the inverters on the trailer began shutting down every few minutes. Initially we assumed it was due to overloading and disconnected appliances and the EVs. 4 hours later Aaron was charging the Henny Kilowatt from a hidden outlet near the ballfield, and the MR2 was still waiting its turn. By 2pm it became apparent the trailer was shutting down due to low battery voltage, and its panels were still in shade (it didn’t begin generating until almost 4pm). The ballpark outlet breaker had tripped, and the groundspeople were unable to find it to reset it.

By closing the MR2 had received less than 15 minutes of charging. The 180VDC pack was showing about 186V. I left the parking lot with some uneasiness. A quick acceleration told me the pack was still pretty strong. I followed the Henney at 45mph to the IH35 feeder. Feeling a little more confident I hopped onto the freeway at 1st St. By 15th street I could tell things were weaker, the pedal had to be held down a little farther to cruise at 55mph. At 50th street I could have stopped an Aaron’s house for a few hours of charging, but he lives in an older home with limited chargin potential and I feared the oncoming darkness. The trip to the park was done in the early morning, requiring headlights. The DC/DC is with DCP/Altrax being repaired and I had no portable charger for the 12v system.  Without 12v power to run the Hairball computer the car won’t go, regardless of how much power is in the main pack.

Still cruising I skipped the 50th off ramp and continued on. passed 290, started the gentle climb to the 183 flyover. I crested the hill at 183 and relaxed, the next 2 miles is a long downhill to my Braker Ln exit. Approaching the exit my speed dropped rapidly and the low voltage light on the dash came on. I was forced to pull over just before the ramp. At this point I was feeling pretty good, I was less than 1.5miles from home and the rest of the trip was on 35mph surface streets. I gave the pack a 10 minute rest and drove home, timing the lights well enough to keep momentum up.

Arriving home I checked the pack… all the batteries were dead, floating at about 11.5. All except #13 which was at disheartening 10.5VDC and #9 that was destroyed at 6.5VDC. I put #9 on a 12V 10amp charge for about 1 hour, and it rapidly returned to 11.6VDC. Odds are it needs to be replaced and probably sags heavily under load. #13 took a 10amp charge for about 2 hours to come up to 11.5, there is some hope for it yet. Once all the batteries were vaugly in balance I fired up the PFC-20 for a 20amp charge.

So.. like every EV newbie, I am well on my way to destroying my first pack of batteries.

This morning I pulled the driver’s seat for easy access to the Hairball. Carefully (becuase a few feet in either direction lay the wall or the garage door) I moved the car forward and back in the garage. The stalling problem reappeared a few times. Following our theory on wiring I probed the power terminals on the Hairball. Nothing, it would not fail when it was being probed. Checked the wires which seemed tight but following a hunch I grabbed a jewelers screwdriver from Sean and tightened all the terminals. Previously I had been using my smallest Craftsman screwdriver with the 1/8″ blade. It fit tightly but still tightened the screws in the elevator terminals.

Not enough.

Using the jewelers scredriver allowed me to add another turn to the screw terminals. A quick ride around the block failed to reproduce the cutting out. The surging problem in 2nd gear has also disappeared.

The cutting out while backing into the driveway usually happened while going over the curb. The sudden restoration while coming home happened after bumping over the curb onto the sidewalk. The slight pressure from the meter probes was enough to make it work in the garage.

Learn from my mistake. Intermittant connections are a major problem in the high vibration environment of cars. Solder permanent connections and the wire to the pin of any connectors. Use automotive rated connectors whenever a disconnect is needed and locking washers on any screw fitting. Double check every connection.

Mark