Finishing the front battery setup
Once the motors were in and the rear battery frame got installed, the next part was to build the 2nd support frame for the front battery box and to figure out where the two Azure motor-controllers are going to land. This frame takes over a lot of functions from OEM pieces, like holding the front fenders in place, and has to fit very specific mounting places so as not to modify the OEM frame.
Based on what’s going to be re-used vs. where I need to modify things, I decided to re-make the filler plates that make up the front of the fender-wells as well as the core-support frame that held the radiator in place in the original car.
The large white styro-foam brick is a dimensional stand-in for 1 battery-cell (the actual part weighs 40 lbs so this made things a lot faster and no risk of electrocution). They sit on the frame over the electric motor, and need a second frame in the front to sit on. The white poster-board mockups are the replacements for the fender-well pieces and the core-support. All in all it took a dozen attempts to get it “right”, but I got it there.
Placing the motor-controllers
The only problem left is that the controllers are a LOT larger than the space left between the battery box and the fender. Per the ruler there’s maybe 11 inches, and the controller is 22 inches long.
That’s a real issue, and I’ve decided to bend a piece of the fender “out of the way” so the controller can sit partially inside the fender. I appreciate that it is a modification of the OEM car, I’m telling my conscience that it’s OK because I didn’t cut anything, but I wish there had been a cleaner way. I just couldn’t find one.
That then also means that the controller has to slide in and out of its position (I don’t want to ever have to remove nicely-painted fenders if I don’t have to). It slides onto a set of pins way inside the fender, and is mechanically secured at the battery box end. The whole setup comes out like
The skinny horizontal bar at the top is just there until the actual battery-boxes get mounted, and it serves to keep the weight of the controllers from bending the center of the frame. Don’t know if it would, but it could, so I installed a cross-strip just in case.
The original connectors of the controller came out on top, the cable-ends/plugs stick straight up from there, and with the cords plugged in it would have required ~4 to 6 inches of clearance over top of the controller to get it all to route nicely.
I have literally 0.6″ from the top of the controller to the underside of the hood, so I’ve had to modify the DMOC’s to install a new single connector on the side that faces the other DMOC (one left-side, one right-side). The original connectors have been removed from their circuit-boards, and the circuit-boards are now held in place by goldish plastic spacers.
This was probably the first time I was thankful for how big and un-crowded the DMOC controllers are. And, for a side-by-side of a modified DMOC and an original one, there’s this image.
