August

The charger came with a standard 3-prong plug on it that needed to be changed as our charge port is in the front of the car and will utilize a J1772 port while we are planning to locate the charger itself in the engine bay. We took a page from the original setup and some inspiration from other EV West builds and fabricated some "engine tin" from marine board plastic. The filled the empty space around the motor and provides convenient room for mounting additional components. To this we will be mounting the DC/DC converter which will act as the alternator powering our accessories and charging the 12V accessory battery as well as the cooling system, pump and radiator, for the motor controller. Along with the engine tin we also cut a piece of ABS to mount to the rear firewall. This piece is mostly decorative and is held on by the charger mounted to the same firewall.  During this time we also settled on how we were going to mount our rear battery pack. Using the same marine board we used for the engine tin we routed channels in the plastic to slot the modules into with the housing itself bolted to the bottom of the cargo space and secured with all thread rod running through the parcel shelf and the floor of the car. Man handling those modules into place is not the easiest thing to do at 50lbs a piece.

I started a build thread on the DIY electric car forums, and read up some more on the batteries we had chosen. Eventually I abandoned my thread as it no longer felt helpful as some people on that forum seem morally opposed to the use of these modules fearing they will burst into flame at any moment. I was convinced to not rely on the charging system, and to pick up a BMS instead. After much research I settled on the Dilithium Design BMS offered by ThunderStruck Motors. This BMS interacts with the charger via CANBUS communication, but the charger I purchased wasn't programmed for that. I had to pull the charger out of the car and send it back to the manufacturer to get reprogrammed, I had already run the new longer cable through the car to where the charge port would be, so instead of undoing that work we just cut the cord and plan to use some Anderson PowerPole connectors to reconnect it, it also means I didn't need to rewire it in the first place.