More activities...

The front disk brake kit was received and installed. It was easier than the rear kit - it took only a couple of hours to install. It came with all new wheel bearings and seals, so I bought a grease gun and a bearing packer. That saved me a lot of time. Grease is messy, by the way.

I also bought a Xantrex Link 10 (formerly called an "Emeter") which is a battery bank energy in/out monitoring meter. This will act as a "fuel gauge" for the battery pack. I also plan to use a PakTrakr battery bank monitor, which is a little LCD display that shows the battery voltage and status of the individual batteries. The combination of these two devices should give me a pretty good idea of how the batteries are doing while driving, and how much distance I have left at any given time.

The new electric motor arrived! I got a NetGain ImPulse9 from Ryan at evsource.com (my cherished EV parts supplier - they have everything I need). It's heavy. I mean Heavy. Well, OK, it weighs less than the VW engine, but it's hard to move. It's only 9 inches in diameter and 13 inches long, but it weighs 130+ lbs, so it's kind of like my own little personal neutron star.

I also got a new flywheel (lightened balanced Chrome Vanadium), new throwout bearing, clutch disk, clutch cable, gland nut, and racing pressure plate (that one is still on back order). With all this new stuff I'll be able to mount it up on the motor and make sure everything is balanced by running it from a single 12v battery.

Rear Disk Brakes are on!

It took a few days to finish the rear disk brakes (a little bit every night, plus some good long sessions on the weekend). I had to figure out where all the parts went. The calipers need to be mounted on the brackets with spacers between the bracket and the caliper, to center the caliper around the rotor. The kit provided three different thickness spacer pairs, so through a process of trial and error I was able to figure out which spacers centered the best (the thick ones were two thin, the medium and thinnest were too thin, but the thinnest plus the mediums were perfect).

Next, the emergency brake cables were a couple of inches too long. They stuck out into the passenger compartment at the e-brake handle such that even if the nuts were tightened all the way down to the bottom of the threads, the cables would still be loose and would not activate the levers on the calipers. I decided to extend the cable sheath under the car where it meets the cable entrance to the body. The sheath has a nose at the caliper side that fits into a mounting ring there, and at the body side has another nose that fits into a short tube that sticks out of the body.

I went over to Lowe's and looked around in the iron pipe aisle. It looked like a piece of 3" 3/8 pipe would work, so I bought a couple. Got home, and sure enough, it fit snugly right over the tube on the body, and the nose on the cable sheath fit too. I slipped the pipe over the cable and heat-shrinked it to the nose, then mounted the cable in place. Perfect!

I got the new steel brake lines, bent them into shape, and finished the plumbing. Time to bleed the brakes. I conned Shelley into sitting in the driver's seat and pumping the brakes. Since the reservoir had dripped dry, it was kind of a lengthy process. In with the new, out with the old. Clear going in, dark brown coming out. It would be good to get all new fluid in there anyway. I ran out of brake fluid. Note - those one-way valve "one person" bleeder thingeys are great for flushing the system out of old fluid, but the final bleeding still has to be the old "loosen-push-tighten-release-repeat" method.

Sunday morning took a trip over to Pep Boys and bought a bunch more fluid. Debby helped me with the final bleeding. At last, the pedal was firm and the rotors were locked up tight. The e-brake was working too - time for a test drive. Up and down the street a couple of times, and the brakes were working great.

I also built up a bunch of foam-board fake batteries to start thinking about where the batteries are going to be mounted.