Charger, heater and vacum mounted

This weekend I mounted the charger, the heater and the vacuum system. The Brusa charger hangs under the same aluminum U bar as the Soliton motor controller. The mount is made of two sturdy 50x50x5 mm aluminum angles with two 3x30mm "suspensions" to distribute the load to all four bolts on the Brusa. It also has a small 2mm diagonal angle to support in in the front to back direction.

The black-faced Brusa charger mounted in front of the transmission

The Brusa high-voltage connected to the connection box.
Still to connect are the control wires the go into the black multi-contact to the right

Angle bar to support the charger front to back

The front battery box serves as the mount point to a lot of stuff in the conversion. The A2 is a fairly modern car and there are no big areas of metal around the engine compartment to mount things on, Only two aluminum frame bars and lots of plastic (which is now removed). So, the vacuum pump is now mounted onto the battery box using two pipe clamps. The vacuum reservoir mounts to the lock carrier in front of the right front wheel where there is some space left. This means that there is almost a meter of vacuum hose (in fact it is coolant hose) between the reservoir and the vacuum servo which is in the rear left of the engine compartment. I hope the hose will not "eat up" all the vacuum by compressing itself.

The vacuum pump mounted on the front battery box

The heater also mounts to the battery box with its top mount. Its bottom mount is an aluminum angle fitted to the box that holds the motor controller.
I am getting second thoughts about the heater. It is made from an ordinary steel pipe and it is far from stainless. A couple of days after I had tested the function and watertightness of the heater I emptied it of the last remaining water. Out came rust-brown water. I am not sure I want to get all that rusty water into the heat exchanger in the ACC even though engine coolant is normally corrosion protective. Maybe I will make a new one out of aluminum instead...

The heater (the black cylinder)

It's a tight space

 The wires for the heater goes to the SSR (Solid State Relay) box which will control on/off of the three heating elements as commanded by the Arduino.

More connections go onto the front battery box

The SSRs for the heater...

... connected nicely. Only the control signal from the Arduino remaining.

Finally something happens!

I haven't been doing much on the project for quite a while, I must admit. I have been driving around in my little A2 which is a quite nice car even with a gas engine in it ;)

But now things are starting to move again!

I have shopped around for parts and they are slowly arriving at my garage.
68 CALB100FI batteries have been ordered from ev-power.eu. The are due to get here in the end of June.
A Brusa NLG-513 charger has arrived from Brusa in Switzerland. The Brusa is the best charger around, I think, since you can configure it pretty much anyway you like. Brusa actually had a sale on them so I got it for half price! :)

The Brusa charger with cables 

After some discussions with Joost at Rebbl in the Netherlands I decided to order a Meanwell SP-750 AC/DC converter from Elfa to use as a DC/DC converter. Sounds nuts, but it turns out the Meanwell can take AC as well as DC current as input. Up to 370VDC input and it produces a nice 13.5VDC which will charge the little 12V battery a bit. I am taking a chance that it's power, 750W will be enough. The DC converter is CE marked and has nice EMC certificates.

A Kilovac 500A, 500V contactor is on its way from Farnell in the UK via its Swedish reseller Microkit.
Today a used transmission from a Audi A2 1.4TDI arrived. as did a clutch from the same car and a flywheel from a VW Polo. I have to change the transmission too, remember? Just like I changed the brakes just because of stupid Swedish regulation. Nevertheless It is good to have it here and being able to measure it without ripping the car apart.

Flywheel and clutch

The flywheel is from a Polo with the same engine as the A2 (1.4 TDI with motor code AMF) so I hope it will fit the transmission. Look at the picture below, it is tight!

I am thinking of maybe buying a VW New Bettle motor adapter from Rebbl and I have sent them some measurements of the transmission and flywheel to check if it will fit.
More stuff I have to decide upon now are AH meter to measure battery charge, current shunt, volt meter, a 500A fuse, shielded battery cable, battery connectors for connecting the CALB cells to eachother and a lot more...
I have pretty much decided to go for the Kostov K9HV motor and the Evnetics Soliton Jr controller, but they are not ordered yet.