Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Front Battery Mounts

Spent some time last night working on how I am going to mount the batteries in the car. Since I'm going to have the rear wheels driven by motors in the trunk, the logical place is up front where the ICE used to be. Since I'm planning on having four packs, I need to find a place to put the 96 batteries and no matter how I try, they aren't all going to go in the front. Still, I think I can get three up front which will nicely replace the weight (~360 pounds) and I won't have to monkey with the suspension. I'm thinking the fourth pack is going to go where the gas tank was but I haven't made up my mind about that yet.

Since I'm trying a bunch of different configurations, I came up with a different way to simulate the pack rather than the cardboard box method. I got some foam insulation from Lowes and cut it up into 96 LiFePO4 battery analogs. This made it very easy to pack (pun intended) the batteries into the front of the car to determine the best way to get most of them up there.

Now I just have the job of fabricating what I came up with. I tried a little gas welding and let me tell you, it is HARD!! Metal fabrication is definitely not my strong suit so I'm probably going to end up with something that will at least initially, be bolted in. Not my preferred solution, but you gotta work with what you have.

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