Monday, November 12, 2012

Rear Cambers

I have the opportunity to have the use of my neighbors garage for the next month so I started this weekend by installing new adjustable rear cambers.

This picture is a little fuzzy, but here is the new camber installed in one of the rear wheel wells.


And here the old next to the new. It was pretty quick installing these, although I have not done a proper alignment yet. I took a good guess at how far out I should be and I think I did pretty well. 

And this is what the wheel looks after the new cambers. Before it really did look like there was 600 lbs in the trunk and the wheel was bent in considerably. 

I probably will adjust the cambers again towards the end of the week bu for now I am happy. I also installed the stock splash shield and did an efficiency test.

For the past month my driving styles have yielded a consistent 302 Wh/Mi figure from the wall using a KillAWatt meter. Well my last test showed it is now down to 291 Wh/Mi! I usually have a 16.7 mile commute which is 75% at 40-45 MPH and the rest is stop and go with 30 MPH tops if I'm lucky. I still need to add more air to the tires, I found 38 PSI+ for my last EV showed improvements in efficiency.

To put it into perspective, my previous 96v lead EV was 450 Wh/Mi from the wall!

Friday, November 9, 2012

Heat!

My EV now has working heat!

Last weekend I got my heat running just in the nick of time. We had a small snow storm this week which the EV did great in. I did find that I need to insulate the heater piping in the engine compartment, when I am at 45+ MPH the heater has a hard time staying hot with the air going right over it.

I now have access for a garage for the next month so I will be working a lot on my EV. I have a lot of small things to do, but I will be kept busy for a while. Once I get my heater insulated I'll make a video that shows the temperature of the vents and how easy it is to turn my heat on!