Thursday, January 28, 2010

Filling The Front Battery Box


I thought I'd follow Reed's advice and see how much weight I could shift to the front battery box. At this stage it's easy to try new arrangements. It turns out that 24 of these 100Ah cells will fit snugly into the stock steel front box. It was tight enough that I had to wiggle two of the packs back and forth a few times to get the last one to settle in, no pounding required. This is without any foam on the ends so there's no insulation there from the chilly winter roads or from vibration.

** Note: The arrangement in this picture is not a good arrangement because it positions two terminals right next to each other that have a fairly high voltage between them (where the big negative cable attaches). Even with insulated wrenches (mine are just wrapped with layers of electrical tape) it's best to orient things to avoid having high voltages this close together. You can guess what would happen if I accidentally dropped one of the copper connecting bars! Once I start hooking up connectors I'm planning to use a thin rubber mat over the cells I'm not working on. **

The front battery box in this configuration has 154 lbs. less than it did with the 5 big lead batteries. I wound up moving one of these 4-packs into the rear box and you can see the layout in later pictures.