Now You See Me...

Now you don't! The completed battery cradle bolted under the car. You can just see the back corner peaking out from under the bumper.


A perfect fit up under there! There's enough room around it to allow easy cleaning and access, but it's still quite snug and makes the best use of the available space.


I've still got the inner guard lining off, but will re-fit it soon and modify it to suit. The arch flare that's attached to that inner guard was damaged a little while ago - now that I've got it off again I may take the opportunity to clean it up and re-spray it so it looks brand new again.

Surprise!

When cleaning away some of the sound-deadening compound inside the rear cargo area so I could bolt the carrier in tightly, I discovered that underneath all the goop an existing hole had been drilled right next to where I had drilled! I hadn't even seen it before, but if you look you can see it goes all the way through. I must not have noticed it from below because it was covered on the inside by the sound deadener. No problems - the big 40mm washer will sit over it and keep it sealed up nicely.


Proving that no job can be completely straightforward, one of the big washers needed to be slightly modified to miss the existing cargo tie-down point. The bench grinder made light work of it.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it's come together. There's a couple of things which need attention though, that previous haven't shown up. Probably my biggest concern is that the inside pair of bolts are bending the floor. You see, the floor raises slightly between the outside pair of bolts and the inside pair. When we'd used the mockup, and bolted in the empty carrier, it didn't look like it was going to be a problem - the bolts would just torque down and everything would be fine. But now with the added weight of the battery, it's quite visibly bending the floor down at those bolt locations.

I'm not comfortable with this, and can see the floor cracking around the stress points during high-speed corrugated driving, or low-speed offroading. So my plan is to make up some more 50mm washers, the same as the ones welded to the top of the uprights. I hope to be able to loosen off the bolts holding the carrier, and slip a washer or two between the top of the carrier and the floor on the inside bolts, thus spacing them down to the level of the outside bolts, and keeping everything square. Hopefully this will reduce the twisting force that the battery and cradle is currently applying to the floor of the car, and equally distribute the weight across all 4 points.

I'll try to get that done this week, as I want to tie up this part of the project and move on. It looks to be the only thing that will require changing - everything else is working well. The carrier is certainly looking strong - with it bolted onto the car it won't move - pushing/pulling it will see the entire car rock on it's suspension rather than shift the carrier. And that's exactly what we want!

I made a start on the rear control/distribution panel last night by tracing my template onto 3mm MDF board, cutting it out with the jigsaw and spending a couple of hours sanding it back to get it to the right shape and clearance. I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along.

To give some extra support around the cig lighter plugs (3mm MDF is really quite bendable/breakable, but I didn't want to step up to 6mm board), I've glued another layer of MDF on behind where they will attach. Hopefully laminating the board like this will give it extra strength in the areas that it needs it, whilst still keeping it light and easy to work with. Once it has all the controls and points bolted onto it and is attached securely into the car, it should be more than strong enough to do it's job.