On the Road Again

 It's been a long time coming, but today's the day to play some Willie Nelson and celebrate the return of eBugeye. 

This is the first run after two years of rehab (both the car and me) since being rammed by an 18 wheeler. Much of the repair process has been documented in previous posts, but I need to share the most recent adventures.

Not the actual cable

After the eBugeye was delivered to my garage for final wiring, I committed an unforgivable, unfortunate, bone-headed brain fart, so we had to drop the rear battery box for servicing. Here's why: to measure the high voltage cables to connect with the front pack, I had the notion to connect a single cable between the poles of the Anderson Connector, then trim each side to the right length to mate with the cables from the front pack. Brilliant, right? WRONG!  I had just created a "suicide cable". 

BANG! Sparks flew and some of the magic smoke escaped. The Anderson connector melted. I didn't suffer any injuries, except for the humiliation of knowing that was maybe the dumbest thing I'd ever done and I certainly knew better!

The good news is the fuse did its job, but not before I fried two of the battery cells. My friends at EVTV still had two new CALB CA100FI cells in stock, so we dropped the pack to replace them.

While the pack was out, I reconfigured the platform to put the fuse up front where it could be replaced more easily if this were ever to happen again.

Rear pack ready to raise into the boot floor.

Rear pack assembly in place in the boot.

While all this was happening, I added some convenience and safety items:

HV Maintenance switch and 12v circuit breaker

Charge indicator light and USB port

Interior light

Finally, I installed a horn reconditioning kit from Bugeyeguys so the horn button on the steering wheel beeps for the first time. Next steps are interior finish and mount the Thunderstruck BMS Display. Hard to believe this project is nearing completion.