More Battery Boxes!

I'll bet you are getting sick of reading about battery boxes. Well, I am getting tired of building them! Hopefully we can move on soon!

Whew! Another Sunday is over and a lot was accomplished this weekend! My first job on Saturday was to remove the last remaining original cross member on the rear frame of the truck. Lots of grinding to remove the heads of the rivet bolts and some pounding to finally get the thing to come out of there. With that gone, there is much more room for the battery boxes and complete access to the batteries for maintenance.

I set up some paint cans and blocks to put the battery boxes in place for sizing. As you can see in the photos, they appear to fit. These boxes will not be worked on at this time.

Before the welding began, I had some time to put together a couple of the HV cables. I used 3/8" lugs, solder pellets, and 2/0 welding cable. They are fairly easy to assemble. Place the lug in a vise, add some flux to the strands of copper, heat up the lug to melt the solder, and slowly slide the cable into the lug. Remove the heat and let it cool. Add some heat shrink to cover. I completed the motor jumper, controller to motor, controller to main contactor. Plenty more of this later.

Mike and I (mostly Mike) completed all the welding on the rear of axle box. After some grinding and clean up, we welded the box onto the support square tube on the truck. The rack is very solid and seems to have come out nicely. Two batteries were placed in the rack. It will hold 8 when full. The rear box can be seen in the photos.

This was the end of the work today. It was over 90 degrees and very humid today. Lots of fun. This portion of the truck is taking the most time of all the conversion process. I guess I should have known, constructing these boxes from scratch would take some time....quite a bit of time! Some S10 conversions just place the batteries in the bed of the truck, I guess I could have gone this route, but really did not want to give up my bed space. I also wanted the truck to look as much like a normal S10 as possible. So onward we push toward the goal line.... More to come!!

Welding, not welding, welding...

First post with no photos. Not much has changed since the last post, but wanted to do a quick update. All of the steel has been cut for the battery boxes and just about all the boxes are tack welded together. There were a few setbacks when my Argon/CO2 tank ran out and I had to take it in for a re-fill. The tank was out of certification, so they had to send it away for a week to be pressure tested. The gas company gave me a small loaner bottle to use in the interim.

Last Sunday we got down to seriously welding the main rear of axle battery box. Before this I purchased 4 of the GC-2 golf cart batteries from Sam's Club so that we could do final fitting checks before finish welding all the joints. The batteries fit this box perfectly.

The bad new is: the little bottle of gas lasted about an hour and we did not even get all the joints done on this battery box. So after buying Mike some lunch, we called it a day.

Yesterday, I went to the gas company and retrieved my bottle and some 2/0 welding cable to use for High Voltage connections. Hopefully we are set up to complete some battery boxes next weekend.

I didn't realize this process with the battery boxes would take so long. Live and learn, I guess. Keep moving forward and until next post....