Battery Box Work III
The fun continues with the battery boxes. I completed the rubber insulation and installing the custom silicon heating pads in all the boxes. I found because the size of the batteries were bigger than what I had planned for that the thickness of the rubber insulation had to be adjusted on all the boxes. Unfortunately I could not adjust the size of the front box so only 17 batteries will be going in that box. It was planned for 18. That is not a huge loss in overall battery capacity and actually could not have been avoided, even if I had planned on batteries that were thicker. That front battery box fits between the two front fenders so the width is fixed. Now that all the boxes are finished they can be installed in the car and as batteries are bottom balanced they can be installed in the boxes. I still don't have a solution for mounting the trunk box. I was thinking I would like it to have it on some type of roller so it could be rolled out for maintenance.
I also did some testing of the silicon heating pads to see how much heat they would produce, inside the battery box, with batteries sitting on the pad. I used a 120V 250W pad that I had purchased just for this testing. The result of the testing is that the pad will generate at least 30 degrees C heating. That should be enough to thaw out cold batteries, if that is ever needed. I don't plan on leaving the car out in the cold and then try to charge it. Usually what I do now with my Leaf is drive it into the garage and immediately attach the charging cable.
Still no spline adapter from EV West but I did get some other parts from them. I got another large contactor box, some fuses and fuse holders and a maintenance switch. I got the Gigavac switch that is hermetically sealed. That will be used in the engine compartment. I plan to have another disconnect switch inside the passenger compartment. That will go between the rear seat battery boxes.
A video of the battery box prepartion can be seen here. There is a short section in this video that was repeated from my last video, because that vidoe was not shown on EVTV.