Waiting for the money to come together so I can then wait while the parts are on order so I can wait for a time-window to get the parts installed is a painfully slow process. This is a project not a job, my job and my family do get priority, and on top of that life gets in the way like it does for just about everyone. This has certainly not been a fast project and I’m still a long ways from being done, but there is progress being made.
At this point (Summer 2024)
- The top/body of the donor car is off and in storage.
- The ICE parts are gone, and the frame has been disassembled / sand-blasted / powder-coated
- The frame & suspension have been rebuilt, disc brakes have been added in the front
- The motors have been joined together and are in the frame with the gearbox on rubber mounts
- The hydraulic steering pump & brake vacuum pump are installed with hoses
- The motor-controllers have been modified and are in place & wired up
- The battery support frames have been built and are bolted in, battery boxes are welded & painted
- The high-voltage cabling is in place incl. the fuse/switch box and the monitoring adapter
- The low-voltage wiring to the front of the car is in
- The control wiring for the DMOC’s in in, and PLC<>CAN<>DMOCs electronics have been built
- The coolant hoses are in place and trimmed, and the last of the hanging brackets are being made
- The radiator/sensor/pump assembly has been figured out and quoted, cabling is in
- The main charger has been figured out and quoted (Nov 2024)
and, to me, it’s starting to look pretty serious. Messy, but serious.

Next steps
Next on the to-do list is to order and install the radiator / pumps / sensor piece and complete the central part of the cooling. Likewise, I am about to wrap up the power steering and brake pump hoses to make all that operational again. Once those are done and tidied up I can start installing the Big Battery over top of all that.
The first battery pack has been wired up and has its bus-bars installed. Getting all of the holes drilled and tapped took a bit, but it came together pretty nicely (from a fit/mechanical perspective at least). The big thing still to figure out about the batteries is how to plumb the cooling, I’m still looking for the magical manifold that will make it all super-simple (hot-tub plumbing, heated-floor parts, or building it out of the usual McMaster parts), and something will get figured out.

Once that is in, it’s clean-up time for the little projects. I still need to re-build the emergency brake (to get some clearance between the central lever and the U-joints), the parking-pawl on the torque-box (to make it a lot lower profile and hook it to the “P” position on the gear-selector/steering column), I need to find a better spot for a small vacuum pot for the power-brake pump (right now it’s too tight between the motor and the frame), I need to make a bracket to hold the power-steering fluid reservoir to the fender-well, just a list of small projects that can go relatively quickly once I can pay a bit of serious attention over the Xmas holiday.
Time-line
The goal for spring is “simple”: have the batteries in, the HV cables dressed & terminated, a running +12V system with the PLC & DC-DC converter in their spot plus some minimal features (lights ?), have running coolant loops incl. water-pumps and radiator(s), and have the emergency brake and parking-pawl both properly functional. Basically, complete all of the bits & pieces required to end up with a fully road-worthy moving chassis. I won’t have the CAN-bus system running by then, that’s a big project all by its lonesome, so spinning up the motors is for another day.
At that point I can take the built-up frame over the local safety-inspection place and see what they want added or deleted. I can then submit their paperwork to the DMV for re-classification as well as make sure that the insurance company will actually cover the project as a road-going car. I’m hopeful it won’t be a long list of changes, I think most concerns have been incorporated already, but then again there’s bound to be something. Fall of 2025 sounds like a good target for the official approval.
As for re-installing the body and rebuilding that part of the project, I’m not overly worried. I’ve done this a couple of times, most of the things that normally mess up in that have already been addressed (like flaky wiring), and it’s down to finding OEM parts in great condition at reasonable prices. I have a lot of it in inventory already, I’m also sure something will go missing / kaput / wrong, and we’ll deal with it when we get there.