Here is a pic of the steering box completely hooked up (finally!!) and ready to steer. The orange thing that is in the way, is a battery box. I provided a hint so you can find the taper bolt.

I spent most of the last few days working on the wiring. In the picture below, I’ve removed most of the loom from around the wiring so I could figure out what I still needed and what I could cut.. The fuse box is out of frame on the right and all the wires are running from it to the on-board computer on the upper left (the silver thing). Then a bunch of the wires are running from the computer to other places. There are also about 25 homeless connectors (don’t show up as well as the wires in the pic) that used to hook up to things all over the engine compartment, that are no longer there.

Below is the after pic.. I’ve cut back all the wires that are no longer needed, and put loom (the black tubes) around the rest of them. You can also see that I’ve mounted the computer on the side of the wheel well (silver thing on left). Since the wheel well is curved in all directions, and the computer is square and flat, I mounted it on a piece of 1/4″ polyethylene, and then mounted the polyethylene to the wheel well using smaller polyethylene spacers and also some neoprene (rubber material like they use to make wet suits) to absorb vibration. I had to mount it low because my control board will be sitting on top of the orange posts and so the computer had to be below that.

BTW.. the computer used to control stuff all over the vehicle, but the only thing that it is still doing (that I know of) is computing how fast the truck is traveling and sending that information to the speedometer (and maybe the Anti-lock braking system.. and ok it also keeps track of how many miles the truck has traveled). Some day in the future I might figure out how to build a small device that can just handle the speed and distance, so I can remove that large silver box from the motor compartment. Until then, there it is, taking up space.

And here is a pic of me.. checking out the loom.. Its typically cold in my garage but Spring will be here soon..

Typically, the Internal Combustion Engine is responsible for generating power that drives 4 other things on the vehicle that you will need to consider when converting to electric. In hindsight, I did not place enough importance on this aspect of the project. Replacing each of these sub-systems is a major undertaking just by itself.

1. Heat
2. Air-Condition
3. Brakes  (Power Brakes)
4. Steering (Power Steering)

This entry is just for steering.

Once upon a time, vehicles all had manual steering, and this would be one reason to convert a really old vehicle. I decided to go with a 2003 truck that had power steering, so the power steering had to be replaced. When I tried to collect information on how to do this, there was no readily available information on how exactly to proceed. If I called any parts store, they simply looked up the vehicle in their computer and told me that they didn’t make a manual steering box for my vehicle. Yeah, I know. (BTW: My S2000 has electric power steering.. go figure.. I suspect one day, all vehicles will have such).

After collecting lots of info, it appeared that one work-around would be to get an old manual steering box from an older vehicle that would bolt to my newer vehicle, and then go from there.. but it was not obvious how to determine what other steering boxes would fit my truck. Also, on one of the forums, somebody suggested that “Flaming River” made a “Vega Gear Box” (remember the Vega from the 70s) that would bolt to my vehicle.

Either of these seemed like potential fixes but no one could promise that either would actually work. Eventually, after many hours of online searching and phone calls, one of the parts guys at the local Chevy dealership, spent an evening doing research for me and called me the next morning to say that both choices would probably use the same bolt patterns that are on my vehicle, (I will have to leave him something in my will), since the bolt pattern had not changed in many years.

Note: There was another idea, which was to keep the power steering box, without using power. This would allow me to exercise my arms every time I needed to turn the wheels. The steering wheel would be a lot harder to turn than when using an actual manual steering box because the gear ratio would be smaller and the power steering fluid would have to be pushed through the lines every time I turned. That was a non-starter for me. I was going to win this battle.

So I decided to go with the brand new “Vega Gear Box” from “Flaming River” instead of the 16 year old manual gear box that I eventually located at a  junk yard that was 3 hours away. Keep in mind that the new gear box was 10 times more expensive than the junk-yard gear box, and in hindsight, I possibly made the wrong decision, but I will never know.

Here is the power steering box that I removed. The picture is from directly overhead, from the front of the vehicle. Its bolted onto the side of the truck frame. The steering shaft is connected under the blue shop towel. The “pitman arm” on the left, attaches the bottom of the gear box to the cross linkage that actually controls the movement of the wheels. The silver tubes route the power steering fluid from the reservoir that was attached to the ICE, into the actual power steering box, and then to a cooler in the front grill (which you can’t see). You can link here to learn what happens inside a power steering box that makes it easier to turn the wheel.

So when I received the new manual gear box, it was fairly easy (with the help of my brother-in-law) to remove the existing power steering box, and bolt the manual gear box into the same location on the side of the truck frame (using the same bolt holes). It looks like the picture below. At the taking of this picture, we still need to connect the steering shaft to the silver U-Joint… and the big “pitman arm” on the left, needs to be hooked up to the bottom of the box. I’m writing this 3 weeks later, and still trying to complete those two tasks.

Ok.. first problem is hooking up the steering shaft to the gear box. There was no obvious way to do this and there  were no instructions included, so I’m back on the phone to track down more information. I found someone at “Flaming River” who emailed me the instructions. The instructions were quite complex and involved drilling holes and welding stuff together. Lovely.. (BTW: Its amazing how many times on this conversion project that someone with a straight face has told me that I simply need to “weld” something… like everybody keeps a welding torch and mask right there between the screwdrivers and the socket set).

We decided against that, and instead decided to simply take the metal shaft that was included with the kit, and find someone that would make the end of that shaft, look enough like the shaft on the previous power steering box, so that it would hook back up the same way. What could be simpler?? So I simply called around to “machine shops” to find someone that would do this. As it turns out, “machine shops” are only interested in taking really large jobs and no interest at all in something simple like this. Long story short, eventually I asked Leo the metal works guy, and he was willing to machine the part. Once he did, we hooked up the gear box to the steering wheel, but it didn’t work very well..

In the picture below, the new gear box is on the right.. Moving to the left, it has a new “U-joint” attached to it.. then there is the “metal shaft” that I had machined.. so it would attach to the existing “rag-joint” .. which is the weird looking thing on the end of the existing steering shaft..

The problem was there was a lot of “play” in the system as the new U-joint and the existing “rag-joint” worked against each other. (If you want to see a video of what I’m talking about then post a comment and I will post the video). And (yet again) after a lot of discussion and phone calls, we eventually decided that we needed to replace the flexible U-joint that came with the kit, with a rigid “coupler”. And of course, a coupler is not the same length as a U-joint, so the shaft that I had “machined” to attach everything together, was now the incorrect length, so we would need to do that whole process again.

Its interesting, that I try to explain all this “problem solving” in isolation, but typically there are other problems that I’m working out, and they tend to affect each other. For this problem, I can’t decide if we need to completely fix this problem before I give the truck to Leo, who is going to weld in the battery box frame. It was not clear to me how having battery boxes will affect our ability to work on this problem. In the end, we decided to “bolt” in the battery boxes in the engine compartment so they could be removed if need be.

This entry could continue. Once we replaced the U-joint with the coupler and had a new connecting shaft made, the current problem went away (yeah!!).. but we had more problems.At the moment, we have not been able to tighten the “taper bolt” that attaches the “pitman arm” to the “cross linkage”.  I wouldn’t know where to start to explain what that means. In essence, its not a normal bolt, and to tighten it, requires some magic incantations that involve a super fast “air drill” (which most people keep next to their welding torch) which can spin the nut so fast that the bolt can’t keep up. If we try an air drill, and it doesn’t work, then my electric truck might have to do without steering.

With the hood off the truck, I took measurements using string taped across the motor compartment and then string taped across the underside of the hood (in the other garage), to measure and compute where exactly the underside of the hood would be in space. It was not an exact science so I was winging it. I’m not going to explain it all here, but lets just say that it took awhile and I filled up a sheet of paper with measurement values and computations, and didn’t take any pictures.

Once I decided exactly where the board should be in the motor compartment down to a 16th of an inch, relative to a sharpie mark I drew in the motor compartment, I wanted to verify that all my numbers were correct. To do this, I needed help so I asked my friend Xan if he could come over to help for an hour (should have taken some pics). I worked with Xan a few years back and he has a quick mind and a talent for problem solving. (Actually, software is almost all problem solving.. after that you just type).

We cut 4 posts using wood and then propped them up on the floor and attached them inside the motor compartment using tape… so that the top of my template would be at the exact height that the control board would be, using my computations. This actually worked much better than I thought it would.  Then we installed the hood back onto the truck.

Funny Story: this was actually the first day we could do this because when the hood was removed weeks before, one of the very special bolts that is used for the hood pivot, was dropped down into the left fender abyss, and has never been seen since. We had to use the VIN number of the truck to order that bolt which took a couple of weeks to arrive. Xan and I plugged up the abyss that is conveniently provided next to where the bolt lives so we would not repeat that scenario.

So we installed the hood and then we wanted to actually see how much room there was/is between the top of the template (control board) and the bottom of the hood. Apply the “refrigerator door light” metaphor here. Actually, since the radiator was gone, you could almost get a ruler in there, but we decided to do an actual experiment… so we made a little box that was 5 inches tall and painted the top with toe-nail polish (which happened to be the same color as my girlfriend’s toenails). That would have made a cool picture.

We could shut the hood and then open it back up and check the fire retardant material for toe-nail polish. It passed the 5″ of clearance test, so we made another little box at 5 1/4″ which also passed. The third box at 5 3/4″ left  a line of toe nail polish from the front edge of the box, so the experiment was a success.

Ok.. The title of this entry is “change request”.. I’m getting there.. So once I verified the exact location of the board, it was actually a little lower than I thought it would be when I originally made the template. So I started to worry if I had enough room to clear the break fluid reservoir. Hence the name of this blog entry.  Actually, I did or didn’t have enough room, depending on where the actual pivot point was to be for the board. In order to figure out my options, I had to do more measurements and computations. Here is the tool I used. A cardboard box. I always keep one around just in case.

The bottom of the board is represented by the middle horizontal line with the numbers on it. Yeah those are numbers from 9 to 11 by 1/2″ increments and each one represents a possible pivot point. The brake fluid reservoir is represented by the dot on the vertical line. I could hold the string on the possible pivot point dots and then grab the other end where the edge of the board is (on the right), and then rotate that section of string, up toward the break fluid reservoir dot to see if it would CRASH into the break fluid reservoir or just slip by. The result of this experiment was that I had very little choice for the placement of the pivot point unless I cut a notch in the board. Ouch. My bad..

I really, really, really didn’t want to cut the board. I emailed Rich of Chapel Hill, master of woodworking, famous from the previous two blog entries, and builder of the board, and asked him about possibilities. Before it was done we will have exchanged about 20 emails on the subject, as he talked me through the process.. like the pilot was incapacitated, and it was up to me to land the plane.

For example, when I removed all the masking tape and newspaper once the primer had dried, there was some over spray on the board. How did that happen!! Panic!! Sent email to Rich, who must have been sitting at the computer at that time and he wrote back to say, use a crumpled up brown paper bag like sandpaper and rub it off.. and of course that worked like a charm.. Apparently, the grit number of a brown paper bag is like 2000, so basically I just sanded the primer over spray off and didn’t even scratch the enamel (unless you look really, really close).

Below is the end result, followed by the metaphoric plane that I landed (I’m heavily into metaphors).

Seriously, that little notch took 4 evenings and 3 trips to Home Depot. First, I spent two nights practicing on the left-over scrap MDO board. I learned that I was not going to be able to cut the notch with a jig-saw close enough to where I could sand it down perfect. Others probably could, but not me. However, I also had a coping saw (hand saw with very thin blade) which appeared to work much better, and even better if I first used the jig-saw to quickly notch out 80% of the wood, and even better if I replaced the coping saw blade with an even thinner coping saw blade.

From there I could use three levels of sand paper to round off all the edges by hand in about 2 hours. I toyed with the idea of using a dremel (google it) but sanding by hand would reduce the chances of screwing it up. It was 30 seconds of sanding followed by 30 seconds of observation, repeated for 2 hours. Over the next two nights I sprayed on primer and then sprayed on the paint. Here is the primer picture.

OK.. So when I started this project I did not know that I was going to learn so much about woodworking.. but I have. Actually, the control board will reappear in several more future blogs, as I try to attach all the widgets to it and wire everything up.. stay tuned..

That would be the primer. I’m not sure I have ever fully understood why you need primer, but I know now. Primer has no color but a lot of adhesive talents, and paint has lots of color but a lot less adhesive ability (apparently its difficult to make a substance that is both). So you spray the primer on the wood and it sticks to it really well, then you spray the paint on the primer, which also sticks really well, and there you go.

For a professional result, you should sand the primer before painting (with superfine sandpaper). The fine scratches created during sanding provides more surface area for the primer and paint to adhere. Rich is sanding the corners by hand in the picture above and sanding the large flat area using a power sander below.

The actual color painting took 2 days, one for each side. In the picture below, Rich is putting another layer of paint on the board. What is interesting is that he is using a spray gun, even though we purchased several cans of spray paint. Rich actually extracted the enamel from the spray cans, and loaded it into his spray gun. I wish I had gotten a video of that process.

Once the board was dry, Rich delivered it to my home. I would have picked it up but it would not fit in my little car. I thought that this would be the last entry for control board construction, but it turns out that it is not, because I had to make a small modification to the board, which for me was a huge deal.

The plan was to cut the template into the exact shape with all the needed holes marked, and take it to Fitch on New Years Eve morning. I stayed up till 2am finishing it up on Wednesday night (30th), and got up early on Thursday (31st) to be at Finch when they opened. I thought with luck they could make my control board before the New Year. Here is my template.. Its upside down, but if you noticed that, you must have made one yourself. The cut-outs are for high voltage cables.

So I arrived at Fitch Lumbar bright and early with my template, and there was a large hand written sign on the glass door.. “Closed For Inventory”.. I peeked in the door and sure enough there were like 8 people inside and they were all counting stuff.. Sooooo… I went and sat in my car and wondered what to do next. Tomorrow was New Years and then the weekend, so it was going to be 4 days till they were open again.. I took out my iphone (how did I survive before iphone), and did a google on “wood working 27517″. The first entry was “Hammerhand Woodwork” and a button with the phone number and a button for a map. I hit the map button and saw they were located near my house, so I touched the phone number and just like that, I was talking to Rich Komisar.

I explained my situation to Rich, and being a master wood craftsman, he knew all about MDO board, but didn’t have any in his shop. He also had just finished a project and so had the time to build my control board. The next thing I know we were driving over to Raleigh to Capital City Lumbar to buy MDO board. We purchased the normal 4′ x 8′ sheet ($100) which they cut in half for us. On the way back, we stopped at Home Depot and bought some spray enamel and primer. I had not yet decided on the color so I stared at spray can tops for quite a while. The control board sub-project had begun!!

When we got back to Rich’s shop, I left him to his work and I had some errands to run. I wanted to move my bank accounts from a large bank to a small bank. See moveyourmoney.info.. its a really big deal. If you are associated with a large bank then you should take a look.

I returned a couple of hours later and took pictures and videos of Rich working (stay tuned for videos). Here is a pic of Rich working on the control board. The first thing I noticed is that the board was in the foreground and Rich was intently working on something next to it. It was one of those, “I don’t know what you are doing, but I’m sure that you do, so I’m not going to say anything, and eventually it will be clear” moments..

So eventually it became clear that Rich was making templates that would allow him to quickly make all the necessary rounded cuts on the board, and they would all be perfect and look exactly the same.. and it worked. Here is Rich clamping one of the templates to a section of the board before using a router to make a perfect rounded inner corner.

Rich’s shop was an interesting place. I don’t think I have ever been in a professional woodworking shop so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. Lots of wood, lots of tools, no surprise there. Here is the main section. I like this picture because I’m thinking if I had a woodworking shop (in a different life), it would have a similar balance of organization and messiness. Check out the size of those Bar-Clamps!

In any case, once Rich finished cutting all the perfect corners and cut-outs, he was going to prime and paint it. In order to do a really good job of that, it was going to take days. I decided that it was worth the additional time and cost to have an exceptional control board. In the end, Fitch Lumbar being closed was a blessing in disguise. Rich was going to construct an infinitely nicer control board!! Plus, working with Rich through the process while taking video and pictures was a very positive experience.

More entries on control board to come.. Part II is priming and painting..

To figure out where to drill the holes, we placed the motor in space, using the engine hoist and the orange tie-downs, at the place where we thought it should be, using my brother-in-law’s best educated guess. Then we threaded the bolts into the engine mount from the side with the welded on nut, right up to the dog ears. Then we marked the dog ears where the bolt just touched it. This was not the first thing we tried, but it was the last, because this worked. Below is the same picture from the last post, because I didn’t take any pics of this process. Imagine that the orange tie-down is holding the engine in space, and the bolts are threaded from the opposite side, and just touching the dog ears.

Next we had to remove the motor mount (the large piece of metal that hugs the motor and has dog ears). To do this we had to unbolt one of the engine mounts (the large bracket thing that is bolted to the frame of the truck). Remember that the motor is attached to the transmission which is locked into place under the truck. The motor can move around a little, but not enough to remove the motor mount without removing one of the engine mounts.

So now we can drill the holes in the dog ears. I had lots of practice drilling holes in metal after we drilled the 6 holes in the Adapter plate. This was only 2 holes so it should be easy. The bolts are 3/8 inch bolts and so we drilled a 3/8 inch hole. When we tried to insert the bolt, the hole was too small. Apparently, when you drill into metal (as opposed to wood) you need to drill a slightly larger hole. However, the next size drill bit I had was 1/2″ which was way too big, so next step was yet another trip to Lowes. Also, Vern’s time had run out so I was on my own for the rest of the day.

At Lowes I bought a 25/64 drill bit, a 13/32 drill bit and a 7/16 drill bit (you do the math). After drilling using the 25/64 drill bit, the hole was still too small, so I tried the 13/32 drill bit and the bolt went though. The 7/16 drill bit is still un-opened.

So now all I had to do was wrap the motor mount back around the motor and thread the super strong bolts into the holes I just drilled. As it turns out, this was not easy. In order to thread the bolts through both sides of the engine mount, plus the holes I just drilled in the dog ears, I had to line everything up using the orange tie-downs and an engine hoist, to a very exact tolerance. As usual, it took awhile as I experimented, but eventually I got the bolts through the dog ears and the picture above was taken shortly after that.

This was quite a milestone in the project… Next step: Control Board

In any case, Vern came over a couple days after xmas and the goal was to get the transmission and the motor fully attached to the vehicle.  The first step was to locate the transmission so that it would fit into the crossbar (the thing that bolts to the frame on both sides of the truck and supports the transmission in the middle). In order to do this, we needed to move the transmission in three different directions. It needed to go back 2 inches, toward the right 1 inch, and we also needed to rotate the transmission about 5 degrees. There did not appear to be a science to this and we were mostly trying stuff till it worked.

We could move the transmission/motor combination in 3D space using a jack on the transmission, and the motor supported with tie-downs to the engine hoist, but it was not obvious how to get the combination to rotate. I’m also not sure how or when it got to be rotated incorrectly. Its probably related to how the dog ears (see pic below) on the motor are resting in the engine mounts. I say this because we got it to rotate back by raising the motor and placing a small piece of wood in one engine mount and then lowering the motor. Doing this, we were eventually able to rotate the motor/transmission pair the few degrees that were needed.

Here is a picture of the electric motor. You can see that it is being hugged by a large round metal “motor mount” which has dog ears on it. In this picture, we have already drilled holes in the dog ears and attached them to the engine mount… but before we did that, they were just resting in the “engine mounts” which is the thing mounted to the frame of the truck which used to hold the engine using the same bolts that are now going through the dog ears. I’m thinking those are some big time strong bolts.

So our next hurdle was what I call the “giant piece of rubber” (GPOR). Here is a pic of it from under the truck. You can see the large black crossbar holding the transmission where it is supposed to be, the rusty drive shaft which heads back to the rear axel, and the giant-piece-of-rubber (gpor) between the transmission and the bottom of the truck. The gpor is plugging the hole in the floor of the truck that allows the gear shift inside the cab to fit right into the top of the transmission.

Here is the same gpor inside the cab and surrounding the base of the gear shift. We spent quite a long time trying to attach the gear shift to the transmission, but this gpor was impossible to work around. When Ray was extracting the transmission from the vehicle the previous week, it was in the way big-time as well. Normally you can get to the bolts that attach the gear shift to the transmission, from inside the vehicle, but on this particular vehicle, the bolts are on the lower side of this gpor so you can only get to them from under the truck. However, it didn’t seem possible to do that either, because by the time you press the transmission up high enough to attach the bolts, you can’t get to the head of the bolt in order to tighten them (or maybe there is some magic incantation that we didn’t know).. In the pic above, the bolt head is between the gpor and the transmission which is being pushed up into the hole with a large amount of force.

So eventually we took a knife to the donut shaped gpor, and sliced through it and removed it. Once we did that, the whole attachment process was trivial. Then we dropped down the transmission a bit, slipped the gpor back where it was suppose to be, and jacked everything back up into the hole, and bolted in the crossbar. In the picture above, you can see that we did a poor job of getting the gpor positioned back uniformly, but it would take several hours to fix that, and the console will hide it… so we left it. Note that the place where we actually cut it, is on the other side of the gear shift in the picture, so you can’t see it. Its a very tight fit, so we are confident that everything is still water tight..

Next step is to bolt in the motor..

At this point in the process, everything is proceeding as planned. However, not long after this picture was taken, the engine hoist was up against the front bumper… the chain was almost touching the back grate.. and the dog-ears on the motor were bumping into the engine mounts attached to the truck frame, and we still had a ways to go. Had to think for a while. Eventually, we removed one of the engine mounts and steered the dog ear on the opposite side into its engine mount. Then we re-attached the engine mount we removed, with the dog ear positioned inside.

After that, we all crawled up under the truck on that cold concrete floor and discussed how we were going to get the transmission moved to where it needed to be and then attached. By then, it was sitting on a floor jack. What we decided was that everyone was tired and hungry so we went into the house and  made some sandwiches. After the sandwiches, we decided it was late and Vern needed to go home. Stefan and I discussed more about how we should proceed and he was willing to continue working even though he needed to get up early and catch a plane (its almost xmas). I hated to turn down the help but I thought we were at a good stopping point, and we had a lot more to do, and that concrete floor was very cold, so we called it a night.

Vern (brother-in-law) came over on Wednesday (12/23). Vern worked as a GM auto-mechanic for like 35 years before he retired, so I’ve been consulting with him on a daily basis by phone since I started the project. Stefan came over on Wednesday evening as well so there were three of us. The plan was to assemble the motor to the transmission and then install the combination into the vehicle.

I can’t believe I didn’t take a single picture of the coupling parts but here is a diagram which is probably easier to understand.

Ok.. You got a motor on one side and a transmission on the other (not shown in diagram but see picture below) and they both have shafts that turn.  The idea is that you need to transfer the torque (rotational force) from the motor shaft to the transmission shaft. Ok the motor and the transmission both attach to the “Aluminum Adapter Plate” (see diagram) and the “Aluminum Spacer Plate” is the appropriate thickness so that the motor shaft and the transmission shaft are positioned the correct distance apart (really close but not touching).

Ok. The “Steel Hub” attaches to the motor shaft using magic (i.e. a key on the hub fits into a notch on the motor shaft). The “Hub Spacer” then attaches to the steel hub using recessed allen head screws. Then the “Coupler Disk” attaches to the “Hub Spacer” also using allen head screws. Next the clutch (which already lived in the transmission) attaches to the “Coupler Disk”.

A clutch is quite an ingenious widget. Normally they perform three functions but in this application we only use two of them. First, it is constructed so as to grip onto the transmission shaft, so right there its quite useful. Second, it actually is composed of an inner ring and an outer ring which are connected by very strong springs. The outer ring receives the torque from the motor and transfers that torque to the inner ring through the springs. The inner ring is attached to the transmission shaft. The springs give the transmission gears an extra micro-second to get up to speed (and the gears really appreciate it).

The third function of a clutch, which we don’t use, is that the outer ring can be pressed against the flywheel on the back of an internal combustion engine (ICE) to receive torque, or moved away from the flywheel by pressing the clutch pedal, when you need to stop. This is needed because the ICE is always turning. An electric motor, on the other hand doesn’t turn when you are sitting still, so you don’t have to disengage the transmission from the motor. Therefore, the clutch in this application is “hard-wired” to the motor.

Here is the transmission “bell-housing”. The clutch attaches to the “splines” on the shaft. The hardware that is needed to disengage the clutch from the flywheel has been removed. Also, the “nipple” on the end of the shaft was cut off after this picture was taken, since it is no longer needed.

So, here is Vern and Stefan tightening the bolts that hold the transmission to the “Adapter Plate” using a fancy torque wrench that Vern brought with him. The motor is hidden behind his arm. Also, I took the “Adapter Plate” to a local metal works shop (Leo Gaev) that morning and he shaved off the excess parts so that it roughly follows the shape of the transmission bell-housing. While I was there, I asked if he could build “battery boxes” (sounds like he can, stay tuned).

Once these bolts are tightened, step one will be completed. It actually went quicker than I expected. The next step did not.

So.. I have a co-worker friend named Stefan who actually spends most of his time in Colorado, although he works out of our office in Chapel Hill (I work with many engineers located all over the country so that is actually not uncommon). In any case, Stefan was around the office last week and was very interested in the whole electric conversion concept and was very positive to the idea of helping out. So I signed him up for the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings before xmas. Stefan turned out to be yet another project savior for me, because I wasn’t going to try to drill those 6 holes by myself.

Here is a pic of Stefan drilling one of the holes.. and I just now noticed that he is NOT WEARING his SAFETY GLASSES!! I can’t believe I didn’t notice that at the time! Hell, I’m holding the camera and I’m sure I’m wearing mine. I’m going to put this picture up in my garage with a caption about wearing your SAFETY GLASSES along with a google hit count for “drilling cornea emergency room” (48600). In conclusion..  always wear your SAFETY GLASSES!! Jeez..

So Stefan was the first to figure out the magic combination of pressure and speed for drilling aluminum. I will post an actual video once I figure out the easy way to do that.

In any case, it took about 3 hours and 2 fully charged batteries to drill those 6 holes. That would be 40 minutes on the first hole and 10 minutes on the last hole as we slowly gathered clues about what we were doing. One time consuming problem was that the shavings would get clogged with the bit and hinder the cutting. After trying about 6 different methods for fixing that, we figured out that a standard vacuum cleaner would collect all the shavings with no problem (genius I tell you). Also, I’m betting that I spent around 10 minutes total time with the drill in reverse until I memorized all the obvious clues for that state (I’m going with the concept of an expert being someone that has made every mistake that is possible to make in a given domain).

Transmissions are not to be trusted! We drained all the fluid from the transmission when it was removed from the vehicle and an hour later it was dripping on the floor at Ray’s garage. When Stefan and I took it off the back of the truck a week later, we stood it up in a bucket just to be sure. It seemed to be empty so we put it on a cart and wheeled it to the work area. Once we got to the work area, I turned my back for just a second, and when I turned back, there was a short stream of transmission fluid on my garage floor in the work area. I now have a cardboard and shop towel bib for my transmission, but I’m sure it will find a way to leak on my floor again. Transmissions are not to be trusted.