Project Mint

Tuesday saw me finally heading to Manchester to collect my latest E-Bay buy, a partially completed electric FIAT Cinquecento. As i struggle to say that dumb Italian word convincingly I will refer to it as the 500, or as Project Mint (Minty) as he has now been christened.
My top bid was £250, but I actually bought at £215, less I suppose the 6 pence I found in the car when I cleared the junk out of it. So £214.94 is my outlay so far. £50 for trailer hire plus my petrol costs saw "Minty" heading Hull wards.

The car has been partially converted to electricity, and is (was?) driving, but needs many problems resolving beofre it is roadworthy. A brief list of the obvious faults is as follows;

Ply showing through on one tyre, puncture probably fatal in another - four new tyres seem likely.
The horn doesn't work.
Neither do the headlights. Probably because the bulbs are missing.
Or the front indicators - well they do work after a fashion - they flash the sidelights - an earthing problem and no big deal, easily fettled..
The windscreen washers don't wash - although I found the pipe todat which has a joint whcih has broken, so a simple connector will fix that for pennies.
The drivers seat has a big split in it, so will need a new seat or a set of cheapy covers. I rather fancy a bucket racing seat.

That's the basics for the car as such - now to the electrical system,

The batteries are fitted under the rear seat, in a cradle, accesibkle by a hole cut in the floor - and that''s it. The rear seat passengers are liable to get wet and cold when water starts coming in. I plan to fabricate some sort of box to cradle the batteries and keep them spill proof and secure.There is room for four more batteries in the boot, a rude framework has been constructed but it empty at present. There is one battery under the bonnet, so it's running on 60 volts at presnt, but was intended for 72 on the controller, there is room for another 2 batteries under the bonnet (three more actually after a little tidying) and possibly four more behind the bumper. Possibly 16 in total which would give 192 Volts of power! A seperate 12 volt battery maintains the original 12 volts system for lights radio etc, and this battery is tiny compared with the 72 a/h batteries used for the motor. I have two options - Replace it with a larger capacity battery for more longevity (the car has electric windows and will need some sort of 12 volt heater arrangement, plus a stero - I can't live without one, plus it has to take care of heated rear window, lights and wipers) The second option is to put a further traction battery in it's place taking it to up to 204 volts, and then using a converter to supply down to 12 volts for the standard systems - thsi is not my favourite route as converting voltage means loses in efficiency.

Next the car need some sort of charging system rigging up. I intend to have an on board charger of some sort, so that it is simply a case of plugging in to a three pin socket. The car has come with a rather Heath Robinson 240v to 110 v site supply with a variable resistor attached in the supply line so that you can reduce from 110 volt down to whatever you need, measured with a handheld ameter or voltmeter. This will probably be replaced with a bespoke charger once the final voltage is decided on. I think 72 volts shoudl be enough on such a small car, and any extra batteries can be mounted in paralell as a backup reserve supply, rather than serial to increas the voltage. That would give extended range.

After the charging is sorted I need some sort of heater - possible 3 x ceramic heaters, rigged up into the existign heater set up so that the air vents and demister astill work effectively.

Also on the list of to does is a brake vacuum pump system. A bespoke electric vacuum to replace the engine vacuum normally provided by the petrol engine is available at around £250 from Taiwan. However a scrapyard may yet provide an alternative option as I am advised that the Mazda MX5 used an electric vacuum pump for that very purpose. The brakes do work, as I backed th ecar off the trailer under power and foud they eeded a good hard shove but did stop the car. The vacuum servo would make it a whole lot easier.

Anyhow today saw project Mint start with a bang (well a spark anyway). I have ripped out a load of gubbings not needed, like the air filter bracket and support whcih were part of the gearbox mount - a very heavy over engineered bracket for what it did. Angle grinder came in very useful thanks. Various other brackets and useless bits came off giving a net weight saving of 6kg once I'd weighed it up.

I also started tidying up the poor wiring of the car but I must have got something wrong.... the battery pack was almost flat last night, but still gave off one hell of a spark when I attahced it - there's a short there somewhere, not anything I've done toady sop far as I can tell, but big enough to melt the battery terminal when I connected. It'll have to wait until Saturday at soonest until I can trace things and see what has gone wrong.