Saturday, April 5, 2008

Going back to CAMP914

Yesterday was fun. I drove the electric 914 back out to Camp914 where I originally purchased the car and drove it away as a gasoline vehicle. Craig was happy to see me and took several pictures. Since the round-trip drive was 44 miles and included several long hills, I charged up for an hour out at camp just to give myself a bit of breathing room. Overall, the car handled the freeway and hills well.


Here's the 914EV charging up at Camp914.


Camp 914 is a fun place with many 914s as well as other Porsches and classic cars.

On a slightly more frustrating note, the LED flasher still isn't behaving the way I like it to, so I took it apart again to see if I could adjust the resistor values. I tested the unit by hooking it up to a 12V SLA battery and applying varying resistances to the output terminal to simulate different light-bulb loads. In my haste, I tried to unsolder a resistor while the battery was still attached and I fried the circuitry (oops!). I guess experience varies proportionately with equipment ruined. I ordered another flasher and put the original one back in the car along with two incandescent bulbs to give it enough load to operate.

I've mentioned before that I'm working on an open-source EV kit. Today I drove out to the U-Pull-It wrecking center and took a bunch of pictures of '92-'95 Honda Civics to see how I could design battery racks for them. The 914ev blog might be winding down as I put more time and energy into the open-source project with its own blog. I'll keep y'all posted as this gets going.

Cheers,
Tim

1 comment:

Gizmo said...

Hi Tim,

I did a double take on this sentence, "I drove the electric 914 back out to Camp914 where I originally purchased the car and drove it away as a gasoline vehicle." It sounds like you shouldn't drive an electric to Camp914 since your electric will turn into a gasoline vehicle. ;)