Friday, March 23, 2007

A Cheap Balancer and Transmission Issues



After talking with some engineers at HP and mulling over some ideas, I came up with the attached schematics for an inexpensive battery balancer. This one relies much more heavily on complex PIC programming and uses an off-the-shelf laptop or inkjet-printer power supply to deliver an isolated source of power for the battery charger. Any feedback you have is welcome. The analog engineers at work are still designing the current/voltage limited step-down buck converter so that will be coming when I get their feedback.

On a different note, I called Alan at A & P today to see how much it would take to rebuild the removed transmission. 1st and 2nd gear are grinding badly and I think the synchro rings are gone. His response was approximately $500 in labor and $800 in parts (OUCH!!!).

I'm going to try to replace the sychro rings myself based on the Pelican Parts article and, if I screw up, I'll take the whole thing back to A & P to put it back together. What's the worst thing that could happen :).

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