• Fitting the electric drivetrain

    Jarrod • 03/16/2017 at 19:02 • 0 comments

    There are a couple of issues to overcome with the Smart EV drivetrain being retrofitted into my Eclipse, Firstly, the motor mounts are of course wildly different so I've had to grind off the left side mount to make room. A new mount will be fabricated for this spot..

    I'll also fabricate a mount for the other side, both will be welded to the subframe.

    Next issue is that the electric drivetrain gearbox will only work in one orientation, or else it will leak oil out of it's vent hole and the gears will not be correctly lubricated by the built in oil channels. This means the differential must be on the other side of the engine bay. Unfortunately it collides with the suspension crossmember (which has an indent for the original gearbox differential)

    So this requires some more grinding..

    I'll have to weld some extra support around the hole to make up for the structure I've cut out. But it just about fits now

    Getting close to the steering rack, I'll need another cm or so to allow for vibration isolation.

    To check alignment I ran a string from the center of one wheel to the other and used a laser line to indicate the axle center. Need to get this as close to central as possible to reduce loss in the CV's

    Just a little further and it'l be spot on.

  • ICEngine Removal

    Jarrod • 08/24/2016 at 06:49 • 0 comments

    I had been putting off the old combustion engine removal since I sometimes need to drive this car, but being the nice summer bike-riding months of portland and all, it was time.

    Also, the timing belt tore its self up.. oops

    Engine removal is kinda fun when you don't care about being able to put it all back together! I started off by draining the fluids, then removing all the air and water tubing, exhaust and turbocharger.

    Then the head and intakes as one piece.

    I wanted to take the head off anyway to inspect the damage to the valves (they hit the pistons when the timing belt broke) it's wasn't catastrophic, valves were not visibly damaged/bent probably because it was idling at the time. Would want to replace the valves if it was going back into service.

    Finally the gearbox and short-block engine came out as one piece. after removing the axles and engine mounting bolts.

    1Ton HF shop crane was on special, this was able to do the job nicely.

    Plenty of space to play with now!

    I'm keeping the AC lines intact with the compressor. I'm thinking a small AC motor to drive that shouldn't take up too much space.

    I won't have to touch the ABS hydraulics, I'll just add a 12V vacuum pump and pressure switch to drive the vacuum boosted brake cylinder.

    I have also kept the power steering lines, but removed the belt-driven power steering pump. I have a volvo pump that I will adapt to the lines and control with my everywhere-electric project (it's driven by an internal 3-phase BLDC motor)

    The wiring harness will be reused as much as possible, as it'l be a pain to run new wiring.

    So that's the easy stuff. Next major task is fitting the motor to the gearbox and making the non-matching shaft splines fit together. another blog post coming soon on that one.