Tube and Wire

Not the same tube and wire some of your older houses have, more along the line of a long vinyl tube or hose which I'm planning on running the main battery cables to the rear battery box through. I've cut it and routed it along the undercarriage, but I still have to secure it and, of course, run the big wire through. So why don't I just run the wire and get it over with? Well, I want to be sure of the entire route it is going to take so that I cut enough: this stuff costs three bucks a foot and I don't want to make a thirty dollar mistake by cutting it too soon.

It's pretty hard to see (the vinyl hose is clear) so I've outlined the hose ends in bright green (sorry if you don't get color).

Depending on the clarity of your vision (or imagination) you can also see that I've painted all of the battery box frames. The rear battery box now has a thick rubber pad on the bottom: two semi-truck mud flaps cut to size, $6.95 each. I'm thinking of getting some of that magical blow in foam insulation to fill in the open areas around the outside of the battery box when everything else is in place. Right now it SEEMS like a good idea.

On the other end of the wiring project I've cut an air circulation hole in the electronics board and mounted the Zapi controller above it with standoffs. You can also see that I've used some lighter metals (aluminum and sheet metal) to mockup the contactor to contactor "buss" bars. Now I need to find a source of copper buss bar and a machinist, or some way for me, to fabricate these. After some mental gymnastics and a bunch of experimenting I finally got the contactors all layed out in a workable configuration. I'm pretty happy with it: short cable (or copper bar) runs, accessible, and pretty logical.

This is the DC-DC convertor. I opted for the Todd PC-30, which provides up to 30 amps of 12vdc for the cars aux circuits. This is a nice unit although I admit I was a little suprised to open the shipping container and find it had a big AC wall socket type plug on it. It's supposed to hook to my 144 volt DC circuit! No problem, this is a versatile enough unit that it runs off of either AC or DC. So I'll leave the AC plug on it in case I ever need to charge my 12vdc circuit. Handy!

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