Progress

​Hello Electrified Miata and Formula-Mazda-E Fans!  This week's update will be short as I just got back from celebrating my anniversary and took a technology break this weekend.  Last week, we were working on getting the Electrified Miata's BMS leads
installed, and inserting 208 studs in the large battery pack by hand. On the Formula-Mazda-E, we were working on finish welding the motor mount, filling in holes and drilling the two blind back motor mount holes.

Electrified Miata news!

The large battery pack is LIVE!   The last 22 links were installed and we have 115.2 volts in it's 'from the factory' state.  Here's testing each cell of the BMS leads (and the pack).  

​The two cells that were damaged had lower voltages (3.57 vs 3.59-3.6) than all the other cells.   I'll manually charge those two cells to match the rest of the pack.

In other news, Joe received our first batch to 30 BMS boards. Joe will be installing the software on these boards and starting the test procedures, programming or debugging, probably some of all three!  

Formula Mazda E news!

Now that we're fitting the motor, we need good motor mounts.  The Leaf motor we've been using had been in a front end collision that snapped the front motor mount housing.   I paid $250.00 for that motor, so I hope the inverter or charger are still good.   We switched motors this week to one that has been verified to run and has unbroken motor mounts.

Bruce welded up the front motor mounts that were tack welded last week.  He also filled a few of the holes we had drilled before we rotated the motor to clear the frame.   We needed to make 2 'one use' transfer punches for our two blind holes.  Ben happened to be in Ed's shop the day I stopped by and he took the challenge of making them on the spot.  I left 2 hours later after visiting and having fun with the lathe with transfer punches in hand.  Thank you Ben for taking time away from your butcher block creation to help.    Bruce finished the marking and drilling and we brought all the pieces to Dave and Broch's for assembly.   We verified both order of assembly for alignment and that everything fit the way it is supposed too.   Thanks Bruce for all your work in the shop during the week.

Since the motor and trans-axle all bolted together fairly easily, we had time to work on the battery box design.  Progress was made.   More on that in a future blog.

Next week, for the Electrified Miata, we'll work on finishing all 208 studs, driving them into the pack, and and installing the covers, in addition to manually balancing the battery cell voltages.  For the Formula-Mazda-E, we'll continue work on the battery box design, paying very close attention to details like where the connectors are, how the BMS will fit, the chill plate coolant hose routing and other details.   As always, thanks for reading!