The saga of the dual battery system for the Pathfinder drags on, and is getting to the stage where it's starting to drag. I had hoped to have it all done by now, but things have transpired against me, and it's taking longer than I'd anticipated.
Friday evening we finished off the cradle, installed the battery for the last time, and bolted it all together. That then left me in a position to get it all wired up. The circuit breaker ended up in the perfect position just off the +ve terminal, and it was quite a straight-forward job. It's now it's own self-contained unit, able to be connected to the rest of the car via the Anderson plug on the rear.
In related news, liquid electrical tape is now my new favourite thing in the world. Even if it does make one heck of a mess. Heat shrink is still pretty cool though, and I suspect does a neater, more reliable job.
In the above photos you can see the modified tie-down arrangement, with the rubber mat underneath the two metal "short sides", then the commercial tie down bar over the top. In practice, this works really well, and is exactly the right size. It holds the battery tightly, but distributes the force evenly across the top of the casing - there's no concentration of high stress in one point that would eventually lead to failure.
Saturday, I set out to bolt the completed carrier under the car.
Unfortunately that didn't go quite according to plan either. After man-handling the heavy carrier under the car and up onto the bottle jack...
And spending roughly 25 minutes lying on the concrete, slowly winding the jack up with one hand whilst guiding the top-heavy contraption with the other...
... the jack topped out whilst the carrier was still a couple of inches short of the mounting bolts! ARGH!!!!! Another 25 minutes followed whilst I painstakingly lowered it all back down to earth, and removed it all from under the car.
Next step is to borrow a trolley jack that hopefully will have a longer throw than the little bottle jack, and try again. That'll also be easier to move the carrier when it's under the car to get everything lined up, something that was somewhat challenging (but not impossible) with the bottle jack. Failing that, the fall-back plan it to put the back of the car up on ramps to give some more working room, then try and talk a couple of the boys into trying to manually lift it up whilst someone (hopefully me, so I don't need to help lift) can get the bolts started.
That's the major goal this week - I want to get to a stage where the carrier is mounted onto the car, and get the inner guard lining modified to clear it. By the end of the week I also want to have the rear control panel finished and ready to be mounted into the car, and be in a position to start wiring everything together. The project's starting to stretch on, so I'm keen to get in and finish it all up before I start to lose interest. Fingers crossed!
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