One Last Spin

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.