AEVA Forums

Happy day!
It's an exciting moment isn't it.

The smallness of those cells should make it easier to fit them in the spaces available. I assume you're going to fit cells in front up to the weight of the original motor.

coulomb wrote:

acmotor wrote: what are we going to call the 'energy meter' in an EV. There is a big tendency to call it a 'fuel gauge' and 'tank'. Will that too cause exploding heads.

Coulomb, I nominate "coulometer".

Jeff Owen wrote:
You would get on well with Weber. A few weeks ago, I arrived at his house to find him grinding the imperial sizes off of a spanner and engraving it with the metric equivalent.

Oh truly? That is just gorgeous.

SI units are fine but when you grew up miles ago I grew up miles ago, but in my schooldays, I can't say I really enjoyed calculating by hand, say, the price per million gallons of water at 4s 7d per acre-foot. These youngsters don't know how good they have it… Grump, grump. So let's make all effort...

Renard they appear to check a pump(s)? Is this any use? http://www.m3forum.net/m3forum/showthread.php?t=341672 That's quite a good thread, but the writer deals with faults that I assume do not occur for me, because the system seemed to be working OK before the engine was removed, so everything poin...

Tell me where I can find the wires in question and I'll stick a probe on it. MY ABS light goes off soon after I start the engine. It doesn't wait until I'm moving. I looked up the ABS wiring diagram in Bentley for the 1992 model. Alas, it is a simplified version without the inputs I need. So your w...

Congrats on getting it passed! Thank you, and also to the others who have congratulated me. It's been a two-year journey with ups and downs, but I'm glad I did it. My car doesn't have ASC, but if you want me to sniff around with my scope for the other signals, I'm happy to. It'll be something I nee...

The engineer's concern about the front axle load limit would be assuaged, he said, if I installed appropriate new coil springs. I suggested the King springs specified for the model range, to which he agreed. So at some expense I had two new King springs installed in the car. They affected the ride h...

Well they are obviously usable at line frequency. As the Epcos document says. I had originally set up my PWM at 60Hz before I realised I didn't need it. In an AC situation I presume they could be PWMed with a zero crossing triac, with snubbing. One could get nostalgic for the old radiators with resi...

BigMouse, with a fairly heavy car -- 1350 or 1400kg? -- the current you need to get it up a long hill means that you need to allow adequate space for a decent sized cooling fan.
Just something to bear in mind.
For myself, I may have to increase the cooling of my motor. More tests will tell.

BigMouse wrote:
By the way, you can use realoem.com to do part number cross reference for any BMW.

Thanks for that reference BigMouse. Further checking this morning confirms that, as you say, the front axles are the same. And the springs are different. That enlightens me about the situation.

Thanks friends, for that input. I'm learning things I didn't want to know about front suspensions. It looks as though the E36s are all much the same, but the springs are different for different models. Perhaps it could be a matter of fitting new springs? And I suppose the shock absorbers should be r...

I took the car to the engineer in Ballina the other day On the way, I drove cautiously and at speeds of no more than 80km/hr along a fairly flat road. Consumption: about 135 watt.hr/km. On the way back, at 90 to 100, consuming about 160 watt.hr/km. Fortunately a couple of little faults that had been...

weber wrote:

Now what do you say?

Nice diagram.
I was calculating the maximum hole diameter. You've calculated the minimum.

The front flange holes do need drilling out further and I haven't done that for fear of "butchering" them. Call me a butcher, but I'd just clamp the flange in a vice (with soft jaws) and use a 10 mm bit in a hand-held drill and wobble it around a few degrees off normal to enlarge the hole. The form...

The master adds up all the cell voltages to calculate the total battery voltage and I would expect errors due to resolution to cancel out over the fairly large number of cells in the battery, For what it's worth, My Fluke multimeter reports a voltage only half a volt different from the BMS at 400V....

BigMouse, some of those pumps have control electronics pretty much integral with the motor. There are only some such as the Toyota MR2 with motor and controls separate, where you can easily 'roll your own' control.

Thanks TJ, you reassure me. I will confirm my thermistor's output against the WS's with the Bridge, and keep monitoring for a while. There's not much space between the motor fan entry face and the lower front battery box, maybe 8-9cm, so that doesn't help the airflow. The gap is visible in the secon...

Is the 85-90°C temperature the winding temp (as reported by the WS200 from the thermistor on the windings?) or the case temperature? The windings. I glued in another thermistor in order to control the motor fan, as well as the one that reports to the WS. It was that winding temperature that I was m...

The bigger the reservoir, the less often the pump will run, but it will run longer each time. So that's not really relevant. And in any case, it will depend on the efficacy of the pump. I'd say the reservoir needs to be as big as necessary for one severe braking stop. What other situation needs to b...

I took the car for a 23km Sunday afternoon drive. Novelty value. I pushed the speed up to 100km/hr. Very smooth. (Well, it's a BMW after all.) I found that things go better when I move through the gears more like the ICE original. Not that every gear is necessary, but it provides smoother running an...

Do you have an externally driven (electric) fan on the motor? Also, I would expect that the motor would be more efficient closer to its rated RPM. Higher RPM means higher phase voltage and lower phase currents, so less copper losses. Lower current also makes for a cooler motor. Yes, Papst 12V fan r...

Can you increase regen in the controller? It would require re-programming the Driver Controls unit. But perhaps the present situation is desirable as it allows for better "fuel" economy. With top gear at 1:1 and the diff at 2.93:1 the car is at 39km/hr for 1000rpm -- quite a slow motor rotation. An...

I fixed a few faults after my first run on 20th May, and today took the car out on the road again. This time I was not quite so anxious and was able to make more observations. 1. A 40A fuse for the PS pump doesn't blow. 2. I adjusted the cut-out speed for the pump upwards as I found cornering at 60k...

weber wrote: Thanks Renard, for telling it like it is.

Well, I wanted to sweep my screw-ups under the carpet, but then I realised that they could possibly be helpful to others. And present a more realistic picture -- that it's not just you who makes mistakes.