Hello Electrified Miata and Formula-Mazda-E Fans! Last week's goals on the Electrified Miata were completing electrical work on the fifth and final battery as well as drilling it's battery covers. Work on the Formula Mazda-E was a detailed check on the battery order and sending drawings to SendCutSend for coupler evaluation. Join us on our journey to propel these vehicles quickly and quietly. I had a real dilemma for this blog. Which video should I use for our cover in this week's article. Jacob and Claire each came over to drive the go-kart before disassembly. They both had that 'Electric Vehicle' grin when mashing on the 'go-faster' pedal. Both enjoyed spinning the kart around in 360's. However, Claire had that hair which flowed with acceleration while Jacob had well, a blue hat. Okay dilemma solved, they both will be in the video showing the world how much fun electric go-karts can be. The go-kart has been sold to Jacob Borshard and may have a future life used as a cycle-kart ! While the go-kart has been a ton of fun and quite useful for proving our batteries and software perform as designed, it does take up precious space in my garage. On car night, the go-kart was disassembled very quickly and without any sparks! Motor and controller have gone to Broch Evan's motorsport, the batteries and computers to the Electrified Miata and frame and running gear will be delivered to Jacob this week. Thank you Bruce, Brian and Broch for disassembling our fun go-kart to make space for more fun. Also, thank you Jacob for donating
to the Electrified Miata project. The fifth battery is now connected electrically. Last week we were trying to drill the battery cover with the studs installed. However, after reconsidering the challenge of doing it that way, I decided to remove the studs and drill the covers using the same method as assembling the largest battery, ie using an aircraft bit to drill throught the pack. I was confident that I could avoid catching the cells with the drill bit as this pack uses a different plastic spacer which aligns top and bottom quite well, eliminating the alignment problem I had with the larger pack. The bottom cover drilling went well and the top cover was aligned with the bottom on car night and the first row of holes were drilled. All that remains are to re-install the studs, finishing drilling the second cover and electrically connecting the bus bars via 44 copper jumpers. We'll still have to install the BMS boards. Joe was able to spend time on the newest revision this week. He has developed a methodical way of configuring and testing the previous version of these BMS boards. Now, he has to make all the changes needed to perform those same functions using the new board and processor. He'll be starting by storing a unique identification string on each board, separate from the code that can be changed or upgraded. I admire and am grateful for Joe's methodology, discipline and organization for this critical part of our project. For the Formula-Mazda-E, we re-designed the battery tray to match readily available materials and performed simulation testing at 10G loads to study battery tray stress. My previous experience designing a coupler came in handy as Broch was able to get 5 drawings evaluated at one time! We also got 5 coupler slices back from Send-Cut-Send and evaluated those on car night, choosing the most precise fit. SendCutSend slices enables us to test the dimensions quickly and in a cost-effective manner. The biggest news is this project is that the batteries have been ordered and have a 12-16 week lead time. Next week for the Formula Mazda E, we'll be ordering more coupler slices from SendCutSend to evaluate dimensions on the trans-axle side of the coupler. For the Electrified Miata, we'll finish working on the fifth battery. We'll need to deliver the go-kart to Jacob and clean up the shop for the next phase of testing, involving computer assisted rev matched shifting. It will likely be two weeks before I publish the next update. As always, thanks for reading.
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AuthorBill likes cars that understand the 'go fast now' pedal Archives
May 2022
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