After getting to a point where I was pulling to the side of the highway each day to Reinitialise the battery computer (happened once going up the Kings Way on ramp) I decided I would need to scrap it or fix it.
So over a few beers I decided to fix it. Thats when all good life decisions are made. Thanks to what others had done and my own investigation I thought it might be possible but I would need to spend 2-3K on cells, so a big gamble. Over a few more beers I decided why not, you only live once.
I imported the batteries from EV Assemble (they were good) and they sat there for a while. Got my act together one day and went hard for a few weeks at night and weekends finishing the prototype. It wasn't really possible to test the concept without building the whole thing anyway so I just went for it.
Slotted in the car one Sunday and with fingers crossed, the battery computer accepted it and my mods and away we went. Been driving it every day since.
The car has 100 x Headway high power 8Ah cells with an Orion BMS. I managed to squeeze them into the original battery box. After trying a lot of configurations I settled on two packs of 35 cells and one pack of 30. It worked out to be 20 rows of 5 cells. The ORION BMS isolates groups of cells, up to 36 per group so it made sense to divide the pack in three for ease of maintenance, wiring and safety.
Made some new mounts, bypassed the original pack voltage sensing and temp sensing. Handed that job over to the ORION BMS. Still need to finish the temperature control system for summer as well as a CAN to ANDROID dash display (TORQ) The cells do not heat up much, about 5-8 degrees C over 100km's but its winter here with daily temps from 5-20 degrees C.
I have completed about 3000km's so far, all going well besides the regen making the pack voltage go too high for an instant and a couple of cells with high internal resistance which are not getting any worse so I haven't bothered replacing them.
It is really nice to see the old thing up and running but I would not recommend the conversion until everything is sorted and I can see how the batteries are going to cope over time.
-Piers