Between the less-than-successful but still enjoyable EAA conference near Chicago last year, the release of Who Killed the Electric Car (which AustinEV supported with a car show at a theater in Austin), another great showing at the Renewable Energy Roundup, and most recently our successful and encouraging showing at the Sustainable Shopper’s Ball in south Austin, 2006 wasn’t exactly a slow year for EVs, AustinEV or EAA. It has however, been a very slow year for the Ohmbre project, but this is fortunately beginning to change now.

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Sometimes you have those days when it takes you forever to accomplish something so uninteresting that you have a hard time explaining where all the time went. Yesterday would be one of those days. Though I always end up getting less done than I plan for, yesterday was actually a really productive day. It’s just that the result isn’t much to write about.

But, you know, read on anyway. (Updated, 01/17)

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Another productive Saturday afternoon. We managed to get the heater core out, as shown in the Disassembly gallery starting on page 4. Unfortunately, as it turned out there was indeed a leak in the core as I’d suspected when running the heater. The reddish GM Dexcool had congealed into a nasty syrupy glop in the bottom of the vent unit, which I’ll have to clean. Fortunately it looks like the heat/vent module disassembles further, so with some luck I can get it all out.

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Suffice it to say at the moment I’m thrilled beyond reason.

The news for today is so insanely great, I must make an effort towards prudent restraint lest I break my rule about profanity. Fortunately for my more sensitive readers, the proper English spelling is unclear for most of what I’d like to express, comprising as it does this sonic goulash of primal Tim Allen grunting spiced with the garnish of an occasional “hot damn”. The big guy is here, and is now safely parked in the back of my garage thanks to some help from Mark Farver, and so one huge item now gets marked off the punchlist.

Motor. Done.

Pictures of the new arrival are in the Motor gallery, page 2.

Also, a couple shots of the current state of the dash, um … sans-dash, are in the Disassembly gallery, page 4.

Getting really close on two fronts.

First, this afternoon was dedicated to penetrating to the core. Uh, well, the heater core. And although I didn’t quite reach it, after 3 hours and some assistance by AustinEV member R.D. Childers, the dash did finally come out. Of course by this time it was too dark to take useful pictures, so no shots of the carnage yet. But the vent module is now visible, and hopefully shouldn’t be difficult to remove. Behind that, the prize. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll be able to get the heater core out and start thinking about how I’m going to design its electric replacement.

The big news though .. ah, very good news. Yesterday I got the call from Netgain I’ve been waiting for, for months. My Warp13 motor is ready to ship, and I should have it in a week or so. Better yet, they took pictures, a few of which I’ve posted in the Motor gallery.

This is probably my favorite so far — a lineup of the Warp8, the huge new Warp11, and … well, mine.

On many vehicles it’s the most difficult component to get to, and such is the case with the Hombre as well. Among those folks doing an EV conversion and replacing the heater core with an electric element, it’s a frequently-heard expression that most auto manufacurers start with a heater core hanging in space, and construct the car around it. In most cars the heater core is buried so deep in the dash, it’s a major endeavor to get to it, with multiple assemblies and sections of under-dash infrastructure requiring removal.

Some people go the easier route, forgoing the disassembly of the dash and installing an electric liquid heater in the engine bay, to warm the water in the heater core (in the place of the former gas engine). This approach doesn’t work nearly as well, but the simpler installation is tempting. As for me, I’ll be doing it the hard way, replacing the heater core with a PTC ceramic heater element, like the kind you find in inexpensive space heaters. Unlike simple glowing-wire resistive heaters, ceramic heaters generate lots of heat without the concentrated high temperature of an incandescent wire. This makes them less likely to start fires. Doing this installation will require not only replacing the heater core, but custom-fabricating its replacement. The effort will be worth it however, as unlike the heated water approach (and indeed unlike the heater in a gasoline-powered car), the electric heater will provide nearly instantaneous heat, seconds after it’s turned on.

The way this is usually done is to start with the absolute minimal ceramic space heater, which can be had for between $15 and $20 depending on where and when you look. I bought one at Target a couple weeks ago for $17. These heaters are sold under a multitude of brand names, with slight variations in the shape and color of the case, but they’re all a simple, cheap assembly involving a ceramic element in front of a fan in a cube-shaped plastic box. No oscillation or digital temparature control, no fancy curved shapes. I’ve seen these simple cube heaters sold for $35-40, but if you’re paying any more than $20 you’re being ripped off. Open the box, pull out the element, and string as many in series as necessary for your pack voltage. In my case, I’ll probably be using 3 of them. I’ve got two more of the Holmes heater pictured in the link coming from an eBay seller, for $11 each.

I tinkered again today with removing various bits from my dash before pausing to read the instructions in the shop manual. Especially the part where they say to remove the passenger side fender and then jack up the truck and remove the wheel. And then I decided, it’s December 24, I’ve got better things to do today.

Started digging into the dash last weekend, and while I don’t have any shots of that yet, I *do* have new shots of nearly everything from the past few weeks leading up to it, in the disassembly gallery. Along the way we’ve noticed some signs that the engine might not be the one that came with the truck, and found additional evidence under the floor covering that the truck may have been flooded at one point. More stuff I’d be pretty ticked about, if I weren’t converting the truck. For my purposes, it’s sufficient that the frame is solid and there is no body rust.

Wow, who’d have thought — some folks are actually irritated that I haven’t updated in a while. I’ll interpret that as good news, that I’m not just typing this for myself; maybe I’ll now feel more pressure to update it more often, which can only be a good thing. While not going into too much detail, there has been a lot going on for me in recent months, not all of it good. My apologies for the lapse.

Fortunately, it hasn’t been for lack of events with the project. Despite my earlier hopes, these days I still have almost no time to work on the project during the week, but I’ve set aside every Saturday afternoon from 2 to 4, and so at least every week sees some work done. Currently, the only thing left on the truck to be disassembled is the dash, to replace the heater core with a ceramic PTC element (e.g. from a $20 Wal-Mart space heater). Everything besides that is stripped down; the interior is even stripped to the sheet metal. The engine is out, the fuel and exhaust components are out, and this past weekend I built a size-accurate mockup of the motor to help with figuring out how I’m going to mount it. Pictures of all of this are forthcoming; I’ll add to this post or follow it up when I’ve got them on the server.

I can’t finish without some pics however — these taken by the folks at Netgain of a motor nearly identical to mine, produced for another customer. This shot shows the motor next to the Impulse 8, which looks like a golf cart motor in comparison. Another shows the six terminals, to allow series/parallel switching of the split field. The wire coil is from the overtemp switch, which can be used to tell the controller that the motor is overheating. This picture shows the drive end fitted with a yoke for a 1350 U-joint. I’ve been told that the customer intends to weld this yoke in place and use a telescoping driveshaft from a 4×4 to deal with suspension travel. I have different plans.

And that brings me to my favorite pictures, of the custom-machined 8620 chrome-moly shaft from the awesome folks at Dutchman Motorsports. Like the motor it’s designed for, this thing is a beast — that’s a sixteen-inch ruler there folks. The real challenge in making a part like this is the hardening process. When you heat-treat steel to harden it, you find that afterward, it’s changed shape slightly. So the manufacturing process ends up having 3 phases — milling to spec, hardening, and then milling again. Except that the second time, you can’t really mill it with cutters anymore; you’d ruin your tools. So you have to grind it. Really challenging work, unless you’re an expert like the Dutchman. The dimensional tolerance on nearly all the dimensions of this part was 2 thousandths of an inch. The finished part is accurate to within 1 thousandth.

If the Warp13 is truly “Torque City” as reportedly exclaimed by an impressed Warfield engineer, this shaft will provide a nice 6-lane highway out of it.

In case you’re curious, the other shaft in the pictures is one that another customer had made for a smaller (but still huge) Warp11 motor; apparently he arrived at the same conclusion I did and went for a custom job. His shaft was made by Mark Williams — some pretty esteemed company for mine to have in these photos.

Managed to put in a little more work on the truck this weekend, with a few more parts coming off, and generally I’m feeling pretty good about everything right now. Progress is slow, but I’m not too worried.

When I was a kid, my parents would get so mad when they’d catch me on Christmas afternoon pulling my new toys apart with a phillips screwdriver. Now, this is my toy and I can do what I want with it. As in those days, I just have to remember not to lose the screws.

Pictures here.

A project like this is full of small milestones that are pretty meaningless from a pragmatic perspective, but are important nonetheless for symbolic reasons. Tonight had one of those moments, in which I emptied the Hombre’s fuel tank, for the last time.

I’d been thinking I’d need to use some kind of pump or siphon arrangement to get the fuel out and I’d been dreading the task for a while. The solution I ended up using turned out to be a lot simpler; Mark Farver suggested I use the fuel pump. I opened the main fuse and relay box under the hood, ripped out the fuel pump relay, and in the contact holes I inserted the ends of a 2-conductor speaker wire. I ran the other end to the fuel tank in back where the disconnected fuel line was inserted into the gas can. Shorting the free ends of the speaker wire together turned on the fuel pump, and I let it run until the tank was empty. It took me 6 trips with the little 2 gallon fuel can, but the result was an empty tank in the Hombre, easily and with no mess.

Since my Integra has to use premium gas, I dumped it in my roommate’s truck. During the process a neighbor mentioned how much less crazy my project now seems, with fuel prices being so high these days. Sad that such a significant looming problem only becomes visible when it can be measured in dollars.