“Go to school, Joel. Learn something.”

-- Lana, from the movie Risky Business

one man’s attempts to improve himself

Doug Weathers
dougw@spamcop.net

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Not with a bang, but a redirect
In case you haven’t noticed, this website is pretty dead. I’ve started a new site, graciously hosted by my lovely and talented wife Anna on some of her .Mac storage.

I’m moving to a remote hosted solution instead of the local machine that this site is on because a) we’re about to move and turn off the server and b) the original reasons for setting up Learn Something on a home machine have gone away.

Originally, I wanted to post many pictures of my EV conversion, and web hosting used to charge two extremeties of your choice for storage space. However, the software this site uses, Blosxom, was too hands-on for me, and meanwhile storage got cheap. So here we are.

Go have a look around on the new site, and let me know what you think.

22:53:06 13 Feb 2006 /computers | writeback | permanent link

Golden Ghias
I’m on the road with Jay Donnaway, who invited me to copilot for him during the Ghia cruise to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Karmann Ghia. I’m typing this from the Mac of Johnathan Donnaway, Jay’s brother, who is currently at the hospital expecting his wife to give birth any moment.

Perhaps I ought to unpack that a bit.

Karmann Ghia Parts and Restoration has a yearly get-together called the Treffen, which is a show-and-shine/swap meet sort of thing. This year happens to be the 50th anniversary of the first VW Karmann Ghia to roll off the assembly line, so KGP&R decided to do something special. They put together a Cruise Across America and got Disney sponsorship.

Oops, looks like we’ve had a successful birth. Time to save and exit, more later.

21:38:18 20 May 2005 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Wild Abandon
We came up to Portland this weekend for a couple of Anna’s Amaranth functions, one of which was a magnificent crab feast. But since my birthday is next week, my parents decided to celebrate this week. I chose a dinner out, at Wild Abandon.

Since we left Portland for Bend, one of the things I miss the most are the restaurants. “Gee, why doesn’t Bend have any great restaurants like Wild Abandon?” In my mind, it’s the archetypal great Portland restaurant.

The decor is funky yet sumptuous, the food is inventive and delicious, the wine list interesting and affordable, the service warm and friendly, the desserts — well, the desserts are merely very good, but that’s OK with me since I’m not supposed to eat them anyway.

So we had a great meal, and a great time. Thanks, Mom and Dad! I love you.

22:57:09 30 Jan 2005 /family | writeback | permanent link

Burning Rubber
The air was filled with the whine of an electric motor and the acrid smoke of burning rubber. I’d tweaked my machine for maximum speed and it looked like I’d been successful. In a few more seconds I’d know for sure.

Yep, I had managed to drill out the rubber grommet for the brake line. Turning up the speed on the drill press had done the trick. The half-inch drill bit had basically melted its way through the grommet, leaving a hole large enough for the blue braided hoses from the brake reservoir to the master cylinder to pass through.

With the brake reservoir hoses all taken care of, I was able to finish installing the front battery shelf. Everything went together perfectly.

All that remains to be done on the battery shelves is to take them apart again and paint them for waterproofing. Next I can install the batteries and get them cabled together, and get the regulators and charger installed and see how they work.

And eventually I’ll be burning rubber on the street instead of my garage.

20:20:24 30 Jan 2005 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Christmas Begins
So yesterday we spent getting ready for Christmas. We’re spending the week with my parents in Portland. My sister Charis will be arriving too, but no grandmas this year.

We had a lot of packages to wrap, and some of them were biggies. I sent Anna out to shop for the things we hadn’t picked up yet while I wrapped and packed. We finally got everything done and set out on our three-hour drive at 9:30pm. Fortunately traffic was light (Monday night at midnight is apparently not a popular hour for driving through the mountains, imagine that) and we made good time. I didn’t fall asleep and drive off into either solid rock or empty air, either, which is always a good thing.

We arrived at a darkened house and crept upstairs and into our bed.

This morning I awoke to find Mom gone to a Gideons meeting and Dad gone to do a grandma swap. Dad’s mom Ida lives in Portland and is spending Christmas with my uncle Darwin in Medford (to the south). Mom’s mom Phyllis lives in Eugene and is spending Christmas with my aunt Louise in Vancouver, WA (to the north). So Dad gets to drive Ida to Eugene and hand her off to Darwin, and pick up Phyllis and drive her back to Vancouver and hand her off to Louise. He’ll be back home around 5:00pm this evening.

Meanwhile, Anna has opened up her laptop and fired up Geneforge and I have been catching up on my email. The hospital seems to be carrying on without me.

Now let’s see if this remote blogging trick works. Hello, world.

10:20:00 21 Dec 2004 /family | writeback | permanent link

Half a loaf is better than none
I’ve managed several small work-on-the-Ghia sessons this month. I haven’t gotten a whole lot done, but at least it’s something.

Here’s a brief list of progress made since the last post.

• The battery regulator heat sink can be moved by loosening the nut and moving the heat sink to a different hole. This clears the mounting hole on the circuit board, so I won’t need to do any grinding.
• Rich Rudman replied to my list of questions regarding the regulators, so I have a better idea of how they should be installed and used. He hasn’t replied to my followup questions, though.
• I’ve given up on the allthread hold-downs for the batteries. I measured how long they had to be and they were exactly eight inches, so I bought 32 8-inch 5/16 bolts from Fastenal. They work perfectly, and take up less room than wing nuts or homemade knobs, leaving more room to mount the regulators on top of the batteries.
• Made contact with Randy Holmquist at Canadian EV and inquired about their prewired electrical boxes, containing all manner of parts such as contactors and relays. I can order up what I want and they’ll build it, and I can just bolt it in and hook it up. Jonathan has one and it’s great — very nice and neat. They also have an electric heater and one remaining DCP DC-DC converter, which I’m considering purchasing.
• Jonathan came by to visit and check out the charger and regulators. He was favorably impressed. He also really likes how I am managing to fit 16 batteries into a Ghia. We talked about how to mount his controller in the Ghia when I’m ready for it. I’ll need to replicate his heat sink since he doesn’t have another one.
• Built brackets to hold down the front shelf. They’re just four one-foot long pieces of angle iron that will bolt together in pairs, one on the inside of the wheel well and one on the inside of the front trunk. The pieces inside the trunk will hold down the shelf, the ones in the wheel wells will stiffen the body and help prevent things from tearing loose in a wreck.

13:24:34 19 Dec 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Still crazy after all these months
I’m finding out that when a huge project ends, all is not beer and skittles. Now you have to do all the things that stacked up behind the huge project. I expect that when that’s finished I’ll have to do the things that stacked up while I was catching up. I feel like Achilles trying to catch the tortoise.

Fortunately, calculus proves that the Greek will eventually catch up to and pass the reptile, so surely the Geek will eventually catch up with and complete the hospital network project list.

In the meantime, I managed to coax a week of vacation out of my corporate overlords and will be sneaking off to Portland for Thanksgiving with the parents this afternoon.

And I finally found some time to work on the Ghia. I didn’t get much done, but it was the first time in two months.

I made a drilling jig to drill properly-spaced holes in the front battery shelf. The ones I did by hand and eyeball on the back shelf didn’t line up very straight and caused some problems. The jig made the holes for the front shelf come out much better.

While I was working on this, the UPS driver brought me my battery regulators! I needed to have these in order to finalize the battery mounting scheme. It’s best to mount them directly to the batteries, but the top of the batteries will be taken up with the wingnuts that will hold the batteries down. I need to work out some sort of bracket, probably something that will in turn be held down by the wingnuts, and help spread the hold-down force over a larger area so the battery doesn’t get cracked open.

As this picture shows, the upper right mounting hole is obscured by the heat sink. I’ll need to solve this little problem. Perhaps a circlip would work.

The (MS Word document warning) documentation that came with the regulators is not very good, I’m afraid. It contains many references to an earlier version of the regulator, and leaves out all the new features of the current version. I don’t know what the LEDs signify, nor can I determine the best way to wire them up. Fortunately, the designer Rich Rudman is easily contacted for questions, which I did last night via email. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve rethought the placement of the PFC-20 charger. I think it will go into the nose of the Ghia instead of between the batteries and the dashboard. The space is just too tight and I need to put other things there, such as contactors and heaters and ductwork and dashboard wiring. Having the charger in the nose is worrisome because it will be the first component mashed if I get into a wreck, and it’s the single most expensive component. Of course, crunching the nose of the Ghia would pretty much total the car, since they’re so hard to repair. No spares, and hand-shaped by German craftsmen. I think I’ll just continue to avoid accidents.

I’m getting pretty close to wiring up the batteries and the charging system. Next big item - the controller.

Oops, time to close — Anna just brought in a Harbor Freight catalog with today’s mail.

12:01:15 23 Nov 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

It’s been crazy around here
Wow, no updates for almost a month and a half. I’ve been consumed with work, staying late every evening trying to make sure the hospital network will be ready for the Electronic Medical Record project in November. I think we’ll make it, but it’s going to be close.

So let’s see — what have I been up to?

• Dad came over and helped me turn my scheme for holding down the Exide Orbital batteries into an actual workable plan. We managed to mostly finish the back battery shelf.
• I finished it off myself after he went back home to Portland. It looks like it will work perfectly. I started the front shelf but haven’t touched it in weeks.
• After a lot of soul-searching, I decided to get the Manzanita Micro PFC-20 charger and a set of battery regulators, one for each battery. I ordered it all from EV Parts.
• Jay Donnaway came to visit. He’s also converting a Karmann Ghia. He found this website while he was in Georgia, and has since taken a job in Portland. He stayed at our house for a couple of days, during which we hung out in the garage a lot talking about Ghias and EVs. He gave me some good tips on the automotive parts of this task, like how to replace a wiring harness.
• Went to Portland for the OEVA EV Awareness Day show. Saw a lot of EVs, including one that has nearly the same components that I’m fitting into my Ghia. I like my arrangement (and vehicle) better, but that’s to be expected. It was encouraging to see that the problems I’m facing are demonstrably solvable. Also nice to see Jay again, and meet some of the faces behind the names on the EV List.
• The charger arrived! It looks like it will be a tight fit, but it should go between the batteries in the front and the windshield wiper motor.

22:39:07 14 Sep 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

On my own again
I heard back from Bob Batson. He needs to spend his time on better-paying projects, and I think he’s tired of dealing with me. I keep not taking his advice, and my car isn’t the sort of vehicle he’s equipped to support. He can’t sell me most of the parts I need, since his stock is geared to lower-voltage vehicles.

He recommended against the Zivan charger. At 120v in and 192v out, Bob says I’ll only get about 7 amps of charging. That sounds about right, but I’m not sure if this is a problem or not. I need to calculate how long it will take to charge the battery pack at this current.

So I’m on my own now. I’m concentrating on getting the batteries mounted, and then I’ll revisit the charger question again.

10:36:59 24 Jul 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Virtual battery boxes
Our nephew Kevin’s visiting for the weekend, as is Anna’s Aunt Lillian. The guys are downstairs on the computers, and the girls are upstairs making origami boxes.

James Jarret on the EV List posted about eMachineShop, an online machine shop. You download their no-charge CAD software (Windows only, yuck) and design the part of your dreams, then upload it to them. They make it and sent it back to you.

They have a lot of interesting machines you can use to build your part. Turret punch, laser and water-jet cutters, benders, threaders, 3-axis CNC mill, etc. I was up past 2:00am playing around with their software. This might be a reason to get VirtualPC. (We already have it, for just such an occasion as this.) It’s got its share of the usual Windows annoyances, but it’s surprisingly spare and well designed. It’s also chock full of help for those who have never used CAD software before. The last copy of AutoCAD I touched was back in the DOS days, so the help was welcome.

The software lets you choose your material and which tool will do which task on which line of your drawing. Then it can calculate the cost for various quantities. It also offers suggestions on how to lower your cost — use a different machine, change your material, diagonally chamfer your corners instead of rounding them off with a curve. The frosting on the cake is the various finishing options (powder coat, brush, polish, plate) and a number of packaging choices.

I designed a tray for holding a single Exide Orbital battery. It’s got vertical sides to keep the battery from sliding around, and six holes you can use to bolt it down to the surface of your choice. The bolt heads stick up into the voids between the cylindrical cells in the Orbital. Since there’s one tray per battery, you can arrange them in all sorts of ways to make your battery boxes. Modular design is good.

To hold the battery down, you use two pieces of allthread with wing nuts welded to the top. These go through the holes in the battery and into tee nuts. It’s either welding-style tee nuts welded to the bottom of the tray, or wood-style tee nuts embedded into the plywood underneath the tray. Or whatever scheme you can come up with.

To that end, I’ve posted the CAD file and a screen shot of the 3D rendering. That extra floating piece is the hold-down plate that goes on top of the battery. I’m considering adding knobs for the top of the allthread, but I’m having trouble coming up with a good design.

As soon as I can get Kevin off of the main iMac, I’ll post a message to the EV List and see if anyone has feedback for me. Perhaps enough people would be interested to make a large purchase worthwhile.

14:06:38 18 Jul 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

4th of July with the Rocket Guy
The week before the 4th I was tickled to get an invitation to Brian Walker’s 4th of July party. Brian Walker is better known as Rocket Guy, the millionaire toy inventor who’s designing and building his own rocket to take him into space.

I met him last year at the Space Access ‘03 conference in Scottsdale, AZ. He’s a great speaker. He lives in Bend, so we talked a lot. He invited Anna and I out to the Walker Compound to see the rocket and get a tour of the Rocket Garden. He’s built himself a centrifuge and a multi-axis disorienter, so he can train himself for his rocket launch. It’s just amazingly cool, and I ache to help him with the project. However, he doesn’t need me — he’s doing it all himself.

Anyway, the party was a lot of fun. As the guests filed in Brian gave tours. I often tagged along to hear the spiel again. He’s got a model of his latest invention, an air cannon that shoots giant water balloons at forest fires from miles away. His jet-powered go-kart is to the point where the engines will start — once. I got to see and hear it fire up. He just bought a laser light show machine from China off of eBay, and he’s still figuring out how it works (instructions in Chinese). We saw his new ultralight, which folds up for transport. And of course we saw the rocket on its launch trailer, and the fuel distillation shed where he makes the hydrogen peroxide fuel.

As the night began to fall we climbed up to his observatory he built on top of his geodesic dome workshop and watched the fireworks show.

It’s a good holiday. This is a good country. It produces people like Brian Walker.

22:16:49 11 Jul 2004 /culture/bend | writeback | permanent link

Busy weekend
Anna and I did more actual productive work this weekend than we’re used to. Anna painted the front steps, added some color to the garage doorframe, and prototyped a dramatic color panel between the cupboards and the counter in the kitchen.

The batteries for my Ghia arrived this week. This weekend I figured out where to put the batteries in the Ghia, and made some prototypes of the structures and hardware that will keep the batteries in place.

My back and shoulders will probably be complaining for the next couple of days. I moved a lot of batteries yesterday and today.

The plan is to put eight batteries behind the rear seat and eight under the front hood. Both sets of batteries will be over their respective wheels. I’m hoping that the car will still handle well.

The batteries have two holes through them, as previously described. I made a couple of the allthread hold-downs and they seemed to work as planned. I’m not sure about the best way to do the knob. I built a couple out of scraps of wood, tee nuts, and regular nuts and washers. Too many components. I might get Clem to weld wingnuts to the tops instead.

The batteries will be sitting on a piece of 3/4in plywood, with tee nuts underneath to accept the allthread hold-downs. Lee Hart on the EV List doesn’t like this scheme — he says that the plywood will rot and the tee nuts are too weak, and everything will come apart in an accident. I decided that I’ll paint and inspect the plywood and replace it if it starts to rot, and as for the tee nuts, I decided to do a strength test.

I put a tee nut into a piece of scrap 1/2in plywood left over from a house-roofing project and threaded an eyebolt into it. Then I stiffened it with a pair of 2x4s and put my homemade motor hoist on top of it. The Harbor Freight winch is rated at 1000lbs, and I had about gotten to the point of not being able to crank the handle any more when the eyebolt broke. The tee nut looked fine, and the plywood was a bit cracked but still intact.

Next I used some allthread and the stand of a jack stand. I put a nut on the allthread and threaded it through a block of wood and the jack stand, then screwed it into the tee nut (in a different location on the plywood so it wasn’t near the previous stressed spot). Tightening the nut agains the block of wood pulled up on the allthread and thus the tee nut. This gave me a large mechanical advantage, but even so it was gettng pretty difficult to turn that nut before there was a loud cracking sound and the tee nut came up through the plywood unscathed.

This tells me that the plywood is the weak link in this plan, so I’ll be sure to get really good plywood. I’ll also need a sack of good quality tee nuts — Fastenal has them.

Next I needed to know exactly where the batteries would be placed. I cut some cardboard cutouts into rectangles the size of my batteries and fooled around with getting them to fit. Then I cut some shelves out of 1/2in plywood and make sure they fit, then loaded them up with the batteries. The car sank 1 inch in the rear and half an inch in the front, but everything seems to fit just fine.

It’s great to have some visible progress on the car. The batteries look ready for business, and I can easily imagine driving away with the batteries feeding power to the wheels.

C’mon, Bob, I need to hear from you. I’ve got parts to buy.

19:55:47 11 Jul 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Changing horsepower in mid-stream
Last week I ordered the batteries for the Ghia. Whee! Progress!

Of course, there’s more to the story.

I’ve been watching the exploits of the amp-heads building and racing electric race cars, and reading their stories on the EV discussion list. There’s a new battery in town, and it’s better than the Optima. So I decided to switch my car over to the Exide Orbital Marine Deep Cycle Battery.

There were several reasons for this late decision.

• More power than the Optima.
• Less weight than the Optima.
• Somewhat cheaper, too.
• Not well tested in on-road EVs yet, which oddly enough is yet another advantage. I wish to contribute something to the EV community, and this seems like a good way to do it. We’ll see how well the Orbitals work in my otherwise fairly standard EV.

Remember that cool front battery box that Clem welded for me? Well, kiss it bye-bye. I believe I’ll be replacing it with a sheet of plywood. The good news is that this solves the design problem of getting two extra batteries under the front hood. I now think I know where to store 16 traction batteries in my little Ghia. This new scheme also defines the rear battery box - it’ll be a sheet of plywood, too.

The Orbital has its terminals too close to the edge of the battery to allow an angle-iron frame to hold the battery down. It would touch and cause a catastrophic short circuit. However, it does have two holes clean through it, from top to bottom, large enough for a piece of 5/8in allthread to go through. My plan is to put tee nuts in the plywood, put a small steel hold-down plate on the top of the battery, and tighten the battery directly to the plywood with two pieces of allthread with knobs attached.

I ordered the batteries from Specialty Auto Electric here in Bend. Very friendly to work with, and filled with parts and expertise that will come in very handy in the upcoming hook-everything-together phase of the conversion.

I’ve also contacted Bob Batson at EV America and asked for a shopping list of things, like a Zivan NG3 charger (another change of plan) and all the other bits and bobs needed to make the car go. I’m still getting the controller from Jonathan, but I want to get everything else from Bob. He’s supposed to keep me from making any more stupid mistakes.

He’s got a big job ahead of him.

23:28:15 6 Jul 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Back on the air
It’s difficult to start posting again after a long absence. A larger amount of stuff has happened, and writing it all down feels like a larger and larger chore as time goes on. As I’m the type who keeps putting off chores, the gap just got larger. Then my Fahrenheit 9/11 article broke the logjam and it’s easier to post again.

So, we were in Albuquerque. Here’s a quick recap of the rest of the trip.

• Drove back towards Las Vegas, stoppng at Meteor Crater. That’s something to see. We (that is, the Earth) are about due for another impact of the same size. I hope it doesn’t hit anyone.
• Spent the night in Flagstaff, a comfortable town. Lovely downtown with good restaurants.
• Arrived in Mesquite, where Anna entered the Oasis Open poker tournament. She didn’t place in any of the events, but met lots of interesting people, learned a lot about tournaments, and had lots of fun.
• We had two more days of vacation, so we went back to Las Vegas and stayed in the Luxor pyramid! Finally! I’ve wanted to do that since I first laid eyes on the place. Unfortunately, our room was infested with ants. They comped us one day’s lodging, which was nice. Absent the ants it was a great room in a great hotel and casino.
• Washed the ants out of Anna’s purse and came home.

21:55:55 6 Jul 2004 /travel | writeback | permanent link

Fahrenheit 9/11
This isn’t exactly a review, although it will give you some information about Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 that should aid you as you decide whether or not to see it. What this blog entry is about is the way F9/11 made me feel as I watched it.

Amused.

Intrigued.

Incredulous.

Astonished.

Disgusted.

Horrified.

Ashamed.

Weeping and wracked with guilt.

More or less in that order.

After Anna drove me home, I hung around the house for a while while my mind tried to find some way to get a grip on what I had just experienced. I ate dinner, vacuumed the house, petted the cats, browsed Michael Moore’s web site. I eventually settled on writing this blog entry. As I started to write, I began to do some Internet research. The rigors of scholarship and critical thinking began to do their magic and calmed me down and dried the tears, and I can function as a person again. It might be a bit difficult getting to work on time tomorrow morning, though.

OK, let’s get the obvious questions out of the way. Is the movie a “pack of lies” as Rush Limbaugh and Christopher Hitchens say, or is it telling us the truth? Well, I’m just an average Joe and certainly wasn’t present at any of the events depicted in the film, but I do remember most of the events as they happened and were reported in the media and on the Internet. I can dispose of Rush fairly quickly: the two points he picks out as lies are completely irrelevant to the main thrust of the film. Having listened to a few Limbaugh radio shows, I can confidently state that Rush needs to read Matthew 7:3-5.

Christoper Hitchens is harder to refute. He does write that Moore claims that “Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American.” I wondered about that statement in the movie, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear the “even threatened” part. Hitchens then spends a long paragraph on how Iraq threatened a lot of Americans that were in Kuwait during Desert Storm, or who live in Jerusalem, or are Jewish. But this is a minor point, and I’m not even 100% sure that Moore didn’t use the “or threatened” phrase.

The most telling point that Hitchens makes is that Moore isn’t playing fair. He tries to have it both ways. Hitchens contends that matter how Bush handled a particular issue, Moore makes him out as the chump, in a “heads I win, tails you lose” sort of game that Moore controls. In Hitchen’s view, if (for example) Bush hadn’t sat uselessly on a stool for over seven minutes after being informed that the World Trade Center had been attacked and had instead sprang into action, Moore would have vilified Bush as prematurely plunging us into war.

I have my own doubts about the way Moore attempts to manipulate the audience. I suspect that Hitchens is correct, that Moore slanted everything to make Bush look bad. (This is a film, he’s the director, and it’s his artistic vision that Bush should be made to look like a corrupt nincompoop.) But you’ll note that this issue is not about fact versus fiction, but about how a fact is presented to the audience.

A few minutes’ work with Google will turn up tons of opinions on both sides about what is true and false in Fahrenheit 9/11. I have fought my way out of this thicket by focusing on a few facts that are widely held to be true.

• Osama Bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks.
• He is thought to be in Afghanistan.
• Bush began demonizing Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, claiming that Iraq is secretly building weapons of mass destruction and is tied to Al Qaeda.
• We invaded Iraq on these premises.
• We ignored the protests of the United Nations.
• We didn’t find the WoMD. We never found evidence of ties to Al Qaeda.
• We defeated the Iraqi military, caught Saddam Hussein and restructured the Iraqi government.
• In the process, thousands of people have been killed, and the killing continues. Body counts are not being published, the US having learned at least one lesson from the Vietnam War.
• Iraq is full of oil.
• Bush is tied to oil companies.
• Afghanistan has no oil to speak of.
• Osama Bin Laden is still at large.

This has run on far too long. Congratulations to those who have stuck with me so far, and bonus points to readers who followed the links. I leave you with this, the one, central insight I took away from this film, the one that made my body shake with suppressed sobs.

Near the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore says something close to this: “The men and women of the US military fight and die for us, so we don’t have to. All they ask is that we only use them when it’s absolutely necessary.” Having grown up in a military family, I know this statement to be true. And as I sat in the thankfully dark theater, I felt the crushing guilt of being a citizen of the USA that has so shamefully misused its own soldiers. I can barely imagine what the soldiers and their families feel.

I’ve been to other countries. I’ve been an ambassador of America every time I spoke to a citizen of some other nation. I felt the responsibility keenly, and never found it a burden, for I loved and believed in my country.

George W. Bush and his business partners have stolen this from me. I want it back. I want his administration out of Washington, so we can start acting like America again instead of like Earth’s biggest mugger.

If you are thinking of voting for Bush this year, go see Fahrenheit 9/11. See if the film doesn’t change your mind, or at least raise some doubts. Go on, I dare you. What are you afraid of?

00:36:22 6 Jul 2004 /culture/movies | writeback | permanent link

Albuquerque
We made it to David and Susan’s house this morning. We got out of Las Vegas too late (note to self: don’t stop at Fry’s Electronics on the way out of town) and decided to stop in Gallup for the night. Good thing we did - we’d forgotten about the time change and would have arrived after local midnight. We’re off to see Santa Fe - more later.

14:06:45 16 May 2004 /travel | writeback | permanent link

We’re off to Las Vegas!
We leave shortly. The first week is Networld+Interop for me, and probably lots of poker for Anna. Then it’s off to visit David, and then to Mesquite for more poker for Anna.

We’ll see if I can figure out how to post to my blog from somewhere else.

Ta ta!

23:21:04 7 May 2004 /travel | writeback | permanent link

The car is moving
Tonight I lowered the Ghia back to the floor and moved it backwards and forwards using its new electric motor. It’s alive! Of course with the 12v battery charger as a power source it won’t be winning any races, even considering the length of extension cord that would be needed.

Which brings me to the next topic. I need to build the rear battery box — all the books say that the battery boxes are the next step after installing the motor. (Then you worry about the cabling, then the placement of the rest of the components like the controller, the contactors, etc. Then you can work on little things like the heating system.)

I’ve been mulling over the rear battery box. I wanted to make it a pull-out drawer so I can work on the batteries easily. However, I’ve been unable to think up a design that I consider to be sufficiently elegant, so I’ve been kind of stalled.

On Sunday, Anna’s father Dennis came by to buy us lunch in thanks for helping him with his new iBook. He advised me to “just stuff the batteries in there and get on the road”. So I thought about this for a bit. The batteries will only be stacked two deep. At worst I only need to pull out one extra battery to get to the one I need to work on or replace. There seems to be enough headroom to use wrenches on the battery terminals. I think it’s feasible to build a fixed battery box out of angle iron.

So this evening I went out to the garage and took a look at the Ghia up on its jack stands. You already know about the moving-under-her-own-power bit, so I won’t describe it again. (But it was so cool!)

I decided the next thing to do was to remove that roll bar, so I can have some room to work in the back seat area. Well, this turned out to be harder than I thought. It was standing upright in the tallest part of the car and I couldn’t lift it over the door sills. It wouldn’t tilt backwards at all. I tried removing the rear view mirror and tilting it forward, but it ran into the windshield before I had enough room.

While I was horsing around with it, I heard a sharp -crack- sound. A bad sound. The roll bar had gotten a corner wedged up against the windshield, and when I lifted one end of the roll bar to try to lift it over the door sill, I’d put enough pressure on the windshield to crack it. Well, heck. That’s going to cost some money to fix. (Around $200 to replace. Perhaps it can be repaired.)

I got out of the car to survey the damage. The rubber gasket around the windshield was dry and brittle and had popped out a bit. Another item to replace. I thought about it a bit and got out the box knife and cut the rubber away and lifted out the windshield and carefully placed it on a shelf at the back of the garage. Now there was plenty of maneuvering room to get the roll bar out of the car, which I did in a jiffy.

Ahh, that feels much better. More headroom. I can tilt the seat back all the way down. I can get into and out of the back seat with a bit more grace, although it’s still pretty awkward putting full-sized people back there.

I put the batteries in the back and checked depth and headroom. It looks like it’s going to work. Next step: talk to Clem the welder.

Oh yeah, while fooling around with moving the Ghia backwards and forwards under power (whee!) I took a look at the shift mechanism. The broken reverse lockout looks pretty simple to fix. There’s a missing hinge pin, which I should be able to replace with a piece of coat hanger (the urban equivalent to baling wire).

And I’ll need a new windshield and gasket. Oh well, live and learn. That gasket would have leaked like a sieve in the rain anyway, right?

01:04:29 6 Apr 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

The wheels are turning
No, the Ghia’s not yet moving, but the wheels do turn under power.

I got the motor installed yesterday. It was a pretty long day, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was sort of hoping I’d have some help, but my father called in sick and so did Jonathan, who came off of his airplane from Asia with an an unwanted souvenir virus. I carried on alone.

Fortunately, one of the many items I failed to post about in the last two weeks was my construction of a small crane, to help lift the motor into place. I had a phone conversation with Dad and he gave me a good tip on how to construct it that eliminated several parts and a shopping trip. I went right out to the garage and built the crane out of a sawhorse kit, some 2x4s, and a cheap winch from Harbor Freight. I made a slight mistake — I sized the crane to fit in the engine bay, but I measured while the car was sitting on its tires and not up on jackstands. The crane turned out to be tall enough, but only just.

The other major thing I failed to post about was the arrival of the new motor ring for the motor adapter from Electro Automotive. Well, it arrived. Compared to the last thing I ordered from them, it was hardly late at all. Apparently their machinist was sick, not using rubber tools as I speculated in a previous post. Rereading the last couple of sentences, they sound somewhat harsh. Let me be clear — I’m very pleased with the motor adapter, and I wish them well and I’ll probably order stuff from them in the future, but the fact remains that it took them from early November to late January to deliver an item they initially told me would arrive in three weeks. OK, let’s move on.

The new motor ring is about .6 inches deeper than the one I originally ordered by mistake. It went onto the motor, then the transmission profile plate attached to the motor ring. Next came the taperlock hub. I had a lot of trouble getting the hub on at the correct depth — the tapered split bushing kept sliding backwards on the shaft when I put on the hub. Finally I bashed it with a rubber hammer to close the split a small amount, and then it grabbed the shaft nicely and the hub went right on.

Next the flywheel bolts to the hub using the gland nut and steel dowels I got from Terry Hooker. I don’t have a torque wrench that goes up to 235 ft/lbs, so I used a pair of six-foot cheater bars. One of them fastened to the flywheel, the other to the breaker bar. (This trick comes from the VW Idiot Book.) I squeezed them together until they started to bend, and that’s as good as I can do in my garage. I may drive the Ghia to a shop someday and have them do it up right.

Then I installed the clutch disc and pressure plate. I don’t have a clutch alignment tool, so I used a plastic tube and my eyeballs. I used a trick to balance the clutch — I spun it up by connecting my battery charger to the motor and felt for vibration. If it vibrated I tapped it with the rubber hammer until the pressure plate moved enough to compensate, then I centered the clutch disc again. Eventually it was pretty smooth, so I carefully tightened the bolts to the correct torque. This trick would be a big nuisance with a gas engine. Another win for the electric motor!

Next I turned my attention to the transmission. The car had been towed from Paisley to Bend without an engine, the the transmission bell was full of grime. I used half a can of Gunk Engine Brite on it and stunk up the garage something fierce, but I got it pretty clean.

And now for the finale! I moved the crane into position and put a folded cargo blanket on the floor underneath, to help cusion any accidents (and my knees). Then I was faced with the problem of moving the motor from the folding WorkMate bench to the crane. My chiropractor scolded me the last time I attempted this on my own. What I finally did was to carefully collapse the WorkMate with the motor still on it, then shove the flattened assembly up to the back of the crane. Then I looped the cable around the motor and winched it forward, off of the workbench and onto the blanket. No harm, no foul, no ambulance, as Chick Hearn used to say. Then I cranked the motor up into position, and with a little bit of wiggling, it slid into position. Hooray! I had lined the clutch up correctly.

When I went back to the workbench for the bolts, I found the clutch throwout bearing that I had removed during the deGunking phase. Oops. I dropped the motor again, reinstalled the throwout bearing, and put the motor back on. The winch makes it easy.

Then I crawled underneath everything to put the bolts in. The Fastenal guy sold me Toplock lock nuts, because they were the only ones in his catalog that were listed as Grade 8. They’ve had their tops squeezed to an oval shape. They’re not supposed to come off by themselves, and they can stand up to more heat than a Nylock nut can. That may be true, but they’re sure a pain in the butt to use. You can’t just spin them on with your fingers, you’ve got to use your wrenches to get them to turn at all. Next time I’ll forego the lock nuts and ask the bolt guy to find me some normal ones.

Finally it was time for the smoke test. I hooked up the battery charger and threw the switch. The motor started turning smoothly, and the wheels began to rotate. No grinding noises, jerks, or hesitations; just a nice steady flow of power. I was able to go through the gears and check out the transmission. It appears to be working OK, although the reverse lockout isn’t working. I’ll need to look into that.

Then I did a small amount of garage cleanup and staggered into the house for a shower and some dinner.

It was a long day, but a good one.

17:16:26 21 Mar 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Wires-B-Gone
Anna made an offhand comment about wanting to be able to play online poker upstairs, away from the other computers and their Internet connection. Well, that was all I needed.

MacInTouch pointed me to Amazon.com, which had the Netgear WGR614 on sa le for $65 with a $20 mail-in rebate. Add in an Apple Airport Extreme card for Anna’s iBook, and badabing-badaboom, instant mobile poker.

It took me a few hours to figure out that the routines that Mac OS X and Netgear use to turn a password into a WEP key are different, and therefore generate different and incompatible keys from the same password. The solution was to type in the WEP key in hex and not use the password feature.

It also took me a few hours and a call to tech support to figure out why I was having trouble upgrading the firmware. Apparently there have been four or five versions of the router, and the firmware is different for each one. There was no clue on the box that I had v4, and the tech needed the serial number to figure this out for me. Once I had the correct firmware identified on the website, I was able to see that the firmware I had was current and didn’t need to be upgraded anyway. Better to be safe than sorry, I guess.

So the new router works great. Anna can get a good signal anywhere in our house, and with the WPA security, hopefully nobody else can get one. My favorite feature: support for Dynamic DNS from DynDNS.org.

So tell me again: why does Cisco charge over $600 for their access point?

12:06:31 8 Mar 2004 /computers | writeback | permanent link

Steel-B-Gone
On our trip to Fastenal to pick up the motor mounting bolts, Anna noticed that they carry saw blades. I bought a pack of metal-cutting blades for the Electronic Hacksaw so I could finish removing the rear deck on the Ghia.

The new blades are so much nicer than the one that came with the saw. It whizzed right through the metal, and I lifted out the offending piece of rusty steel that was making it difficult to install the motor. I can now walk right up to the transmission (if I stoop so I fit under the trunk lid).

On my last trip to Harbor Freight I picked up a winch that was on sale with the intent of mounting it on a framework of lumber to form a motor-lifting crane. I still need a pulley and a block with a hook on it, and they need to hold at least 200 pounds of expensive parts above a concrete floor. Home Depot only had clothesline-rated pulleys.

I spent some of my Sears gift card (thanks, Dad!) and bought a sturdy-looking sawhorse kit. I’ll cut 2x4s to the proper length to make my crane. Perhaps I can get this done this weekend. Then I just have to wait some more for Electro Automotive to finish and ship me my revised motor adapter. They must be trying to mill the aluminum with an old Bic pen and a kitchen spatula. Grumble. They should try buying some actual metal tools — it might make the work go a little faster.

They need to take a trip to Harbor Freight. But then, who doesn’t?

00:59:24 6 Mar 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

The stench of burning metal
I took the Electronic Hacksaw to the back of the Ghia this evening. It was ripping right through the metal at an amazing clip until it ran into a big blob of welded steel and stopped. I pushed harder and was rewarded by a string of sparks and a strong, distinctive smell.

I shut it off and pulled the blade out of the hole and saw that the teeth in the middle of the blade were now smoothly rounded instead of sharp and jagged. Hmm. Maybe I should have been adding oil? Or maybe the cheap Chinese blade that came with the cheap Chinese reciprocating saw needs to be replaced with something of a somewhat higher grade.

Anyway, I managed to remove the body panel above the exhaust pipes (it’s called the apron) and I managed to detach one side of the piece I need to remove to install the motor. The other side will need to wait until I can get a new saw blade.

00:10:01 25 Feb 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Bee-wildered
About a week ago, my employer (St. Charles Medical Center) had a prequalifying spelling test to select a spelling team for a Spelling Bee Challenge, held as a benefit for the Bend-LaPine school district. I’ve always been a pretty good speller, so I entered, and qualified for our three-person team.

A spelling bee as a benefit? Yes. They sold tickets, asked the sponsoring businesses to buy a place for each contestant ($375), and held reverse auctions and cajoled the audience into buying textbooks, study aids, and musical instruments for the school system.

It was fun. They held it in the basketball court at the Athletic Club of Bend, a swanky health club that holds a lot of events like this one. There was free wine and snacks donated by local merchants and the cooking class students respectively.

The contest went like this. They split the teams up into rounds, roughly corresponding to profession. All the bankers ran against each other, the health care folks, the merchants, the government agencies, etc. St. Charles was in round 4 with the other medicos, so I got a chance to see how it worked.

Elise Michaels, a local radio personality (it said so on the brochure) read the word, defined it, used it in a sentence, and read it again. The teams then got 25 seconds to decide how to spell the word and write it on a whiteboard. When the judge banged the pot with the big spoon (I guess they forgot to provide a bell or a buzzer) the team captain held the whiteboard aloft for all to see, while behind us a large screen projected the correct spelling of the word. If a team got the word wrong, they were out, unless they cashed in their mulligan (purchased beforehand for $75). If they all got it wrong, they got a new word.

How did we do? We washed out on our first word. Can you spell the name of the currency of Venezuela, pronounced by Elise as “bawl-i-vur”? (Give it a try before you click here to see the correct spelling.) Well, whether or not you can, we couldn’t, and since St. Charles didn’t see fit to buy us a mulligan, we were back in the audience before we had a chance to get used to the spotlights.

Ah well. Maybe we’ll do better next year. It would help to start a bit early in order to get some studying done, too. And of course, buying a mulligan would not be amiss.

The rest of the medical people (mostly doctors) did really well. They all had mulligans to get them past the first word, and then they got a string of words based on Latin and Greek roots and were able to figure out the ones that weren’t already medical in nature. They all stayed in untl they hit a French word (quatrefoil), which left just one group standing.

The championship went to Wells Fargo’s team. Sorry, I don’t remember the word they won with. I spelled it correctly from the audience, though.

15:08:03 22 Feb 2004 /culture/bend | writeback | permanent link

My message to the Commission
I was delighted to learn that the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond is accepting public comments. I have no idea what they’ll do with it, but I sent them the following message.

I’m a member of Oregon L5 Society, a chapter of the National Space Society. OL5 has done a lot of work on designing a lunar base inside the lunar lava tube caves that we expect to find on the moon. Paul Spudis may remember working with us on our project of searching the Clementine dataset for evidence of lunar lava tube caves. Our web site is www.oregonl5.org .

There are many benefits to building a base inside a lunar lava tube cave. You will have a solid and safe shelter, for these caves will have been standing for billions of years. You get radiation and micrometeor shielding for free, and you’re shielded from temperature extremes as well. You can probably start with an inflatable habitat, which has huge transportation advantages over a prefab “steel can”-type shelter. The inside of a lunar lava tube cave is also an obvious place to look for water ice, as it’s permanently shielded from sunlight. You’ll have plenty of room inside, too. Calculations and photographic evidence suggest that kilometers-long open cave spans exceeding one kilometer in width are possible.

For more information, check out our Lunar Base Research Team’s web pages at www.oregonl5.org/lbrt .

But before we can start planning in earnest, we must confirm that these lunar lava tubes exist.

I suggest that one or more of the upcoming lunar survey missions include the ability to find and positively identify these valuable pieces of real estate. Many possibilities exist, such as looking for temperature differentials between the constant temperature of the cave and the lunar surface, a laser altimeter that looks for the rimless craters of skylight openings in the cave roof, sideways-looking cameras to detect the dark cave openings during lunar daylight, and kinetic-energy-powered “radar flashbulbs”, which fall to the lunar surface and emit a large radar pulse that should reveal any subsurface voids to detectors on Earth or a lunar-orbiting spacecraft.

Ultimately, we need ground truth. After locating likely prospects with remote sensing, we will need to send robots or people to verify and characterize the caves.

But the first step is to find them. I urge the Commision to solicit and prioritize missions that can find lunar lava tube caves.

Thank you for this historic opportunity to contribute my opinions on America’s new emphasis on manned space exploration.

Doug Weathers
dougw@spamcop.net

Why not drop the Commission a line yourself? Tell them that you support the President’s latest space initiative. You could even tell them why. If you’re very conceited, you might even want to tell them what to do :)

You’re welcome to post it as a writeback to this post, if you want your work online somewhere. If you want to keep it, you should probably compose the message in a text editor and then paste it into the web form. If you forget to save your message before clicking Submit, you can get it back with your browser’s Back button. Guess how I figured this out.

I was pleased with my message. I hope someone at the Commission reads it, and remembers it when it’s time to design or select a mission.

23:56:12 12 Feb 2004 /space | writeback | permanent link

It gets worse
I’m feeling like a total dumbass right now.

I bought the motor from EV America, as regular readers (Hi, Dad!) will know. It was originally built for the dead-but-struggling-to-be-reborn Corbin Sparrow, and is a slight modification of a standard 8inch diameter motor from ADC.

Then I bought the motor adapter from Electro Automotive. Now here’s the dumbass part — I didn’t tell them that it was a Sparrow motor, I told them it was the standard motor. I thought they were close enough it didn’t make any difference. Of course it turns out that the Sparrow motor shaft is 0.6 inches longer than the standard motor, which helps to explain why I wasn’t able to install it in my Ghia. The flywheel sticks out 0.6 inches too far.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I can power up the motor and hold a hacksaw to the motor shaft and cut it off to the correct length. I can pay Electro Automotive $300 for the motor collar for my motor instead of the one I don’t have. I can stick a spacer in there, but it wouldn’t be as sturdy. Someone on the EV list suggested finding the armature from a standard motor and putting it in my motor, and someone else suggested selling him the motor cheap and buying the correct one. Smartass.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a smartass instead of a dumbass?

Well, I’ll figure out what to do and move ahead. Larry Niven once wrote that all learning experiences are painful. Although I don’t agree with him, this particular learning experience stung quite a bit.

23:25:28 10 Feb 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Garage angst
Last weekend I attempted to install the motor into the Ghia. I was so despondent about the results that I couldn’t bring myself to post until tonight, after two beers and a screening of Amelie.

Well, OK, it’s not that bad, actually.

I’ve got nothing to complain about, really. Just because my birthday was spoiled yesterday by diarrhea attacks and a midnight network crash at work is no reason to get all weepy. See? I’ve got my happy face on today! :) :) :)

It was a teeny bit depressing to work like a stevedore (who was Steve Dore, anyway?) moving about 200 pounds of motor around the garage and discover that the motor doesn’t fit in my Ghia. It’s too long to install. It’d fit just fine if I took the body off of the chassis, installed the motor, then put the body back. But this will not happen, even if I thought it was a good idea, which it isn’t.

The problem is that strip of rusty steel that the trunk latch is fastened to. The back of the engine deck. It gets in the way, and I can’t raise the motor into position to slide the clutch onto the transmission shaft.

Ah, but the solution — the solution is the Electric Hacksaw.

Life is good.

23:07:26 6 Feb 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Ceramic heater — exposed!
Another discussion about PTC heaters started up on the EV list. This time I got up the gumption to take apart my Home Depot el cheapo heater and document its innards with my digital camera.

The ceramic heater element itself is live when there’s power flowing, so it needs to be insulated. Inside the heater, it’s held between two halves of a brittle, heat-resistant black plastic. The back half is nicely set up — it’s an even height, and the back is circular to match the fan. It should be possible to mate it to ductwork.

The front part is curved in a fashion that makes it hard to use. Perhaps someone with a Dremel and lots of imagination can manage it. It would be easier to use two back halves, but that means buying two heaters and throwing away most of the second one. And this assembly would need to be put in a box to protect the brittle plastic from damage.

My best plan so far leaves the heater almost completely intact. Take out the AC fan, and fasten the blower duct to the back of the heater. I can put screws right into the soft plastic of the heater case. I’d need to fabricate some ductwork to adapt the front of the heater to a heater duct. Strap one each of these babies under the Ghia’s rear seat and we’re ready to go.

I mentioned a blower in the previous paragraph. Of course I don’t have one — Ghias used the engine fan to move the so-called “hot” air into the cabin. I’ll need a nice big fan that can feed two air ducts, that runs on 12V, and has multiple speeds. Does anyone have any suggestions?

23:11:08 29 Jan 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Front battery box is in
Clem finished welding up the front battery box! I took it home and dropped it into the hole where the fuel tank was. It fit nearly perfectly - a little work with a hammer and it was in.

It’s very solid, and there’s plenty of room for the four batteries and insulation.

Next step is to install some Allthread and threaded knobs to hold down the angle iron frame around the top of the batteries. I think I’ll wait until I get my actual batteries.

And somewhere in there I need to waterproof it. Clem recommends a can of Krylon paint. I’m wondering about powder-coating.

I guess nothing’s ever really finished when you’re building it yourself.

09:30:48 25 Jan 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Motor adapter arrives
And there was much rejoicing.

The motor adapter from Electro Automotive consists of two big chunks of aluminum, some bolts, and a highly-modified end of a VW crankshaft. The design is very simple and elegant.

There’s a transmission profile plate, which is a 7/8in thick sheet of aluminum that bolts to the bell housing of the transmission. Then there’s a really thick collar (like three inches) that bolts to the electric motor and in turn bolts to the profile plate.

The crankshaft end is the taperlock hub. There’s a split, cone-shaped bushing that fits onto the motor’s output shaft. The crankshaft end has been bored out to match. You fit them onto the end of the output shaft and pull the bushing into the crankshaft end by tightening four bolts. Then you bolt the flywheel to it just as if it were a VW engine.

And there’s the rub — I left the parts to bolt it to the flywheel with the engine in Paisley, at Albert’s shop.

So Saturday I went to our local NAPA and asked if they had any air-cooled VW parts. They told me they didn’t have any and sent me to the machine shop around back, where a friendly fellow named Don said they didn’t have any, but there’s this guy named Terry Hooker who builds VW racecars and he’d probably be able to help me. There are definitely advantages to living in a small town.

I called him up and he allowed that he had the parts and gave me directions to his shop in Deschutes Woods. Since Saturday was Anna and my anniversary (we had a nice dinner at the Jackalope Grill, thanks for asking), I made an appointment to head over on Sunday.

It was great! Terry’s retired and spends his time rebuilding VW engines and making race cars. He’s got a huge shop full of VW parts. He uses higher-performance parts, so he gave me the gland nut and the steel dowels that I needed, and we spent about three hours talking about my car and his projects and VWs in general. He’s got a shelf of trophies and a wall of pictures. Terry was working on a crankcase that was giving him some problems, and his wife was sanding and prepping a fiberglass-bodied roadster kit car (on a VW chassis, of course).

I think Terry will be a great resource. He’s a great guy, and he knows VWs inside and out. He mostly works on the engines, but he has a complete transmission from a ‘71 Ghia he’d sell me if I need it. He gave me the name of the only VW transmission place in Central Oregon, German Transaxles of America, right here in Bend.

So much to learn. Whee!

00:23:15 19 Jan 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Modular charging
I started a discussion thread on the EV list about how I keep thinking about distributed systems on EVs, specifically chargers and motor controllers. I got two very interesting responses, which I’d like to share with you now.

The first one was from Brad Waddell, who wrote to say that someone has already built a distributed controller. The URL is www.redrok.com/ev.htm. He did it, surprisingly, for cost reasons — it was cheaper to use the lower-rated components needed for switching individual batteries than it was to use the big components for switching the entire battery string.

The second one, which led to an offline discussion, was a surprise announcement from list god Lee Hart. I quote it here:

Well, we’re working on such a system for the Tango right now. It’s an open design, in case anyone wants to duplicate it. But it will cost you upwards of $150 per module.

Each battery gets a 12v 15amp charger, and microcomputer to monitor and control it. They are networked together to a central microcomputer running Linux. These modular chargers are about 6.5” x 3” x 1” and sit right on each 12v battery. They are powered by a PFC front end from 90-265vac (while charging), or by the DC pack voltage as a whole (while driving or for balancing).

(The Tango is a very exciting no-compromises EV being built in Washington right now. “PFC” means Power Factor Controlled, which means the charger uses electricity more efficiently.)

It would be significantly more expensive to put a $150-$200 module on each of my 14 batteries instead of the single charger that Jonathan suggests. However, I get several benefits: per-battery instrumentation, battery regulation, software-controlled charging profiles, high-tech coolness, and furthering EV research by trying out something new.

I might just buy one of them and use it for my DC-DC converter to keep the auxiliary battery charged.

09:37:43 4 Jan 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Ghia progress report
I’ve had the car for four months. Not much has been done to it yet — I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and planning and waiting for parts.

All the ICE components have been removed.

The motor has arrived.

We’re still fabricating the front battery box. The first attempt didn’t quite fit.

The motor adapter still isn’t here, but I did heard back from Electro Automotive on Monday. They told me that they might have the adapter on Wednesday, after which they need to do a few things to it before they ship it off. I haven’t heard if they got it or not. At least some progress seems to be happening.

I’ve received my documentation package from Bob Batson at EV America. Lots of good stuff in there, but I want to do some things differently than he recommends. I hope he’ll be flexible.

I’m thinking a lot about wiring at the moment. The wiring harness in the rear compartment is all burned, so it needs replacing. I’m wondering if I should just buy a new Ghia harness for $274 that includes a lot of useless wires for ICE components, or if I should build my own. Well, that question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it? Plus I got a wire stripper and crimper for Christmas. There’s a great discussion on the EV discussion list about wiring for your EV.

The next step will be to finish the front battery box. Then the motor adapter should arrive, and I can actually get the motor installed. Whee!

18:21:04 1 Jan 2004 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Christmas 2003 Report
This post is mostly redundant, because Anna has already covered it in her blog. Let’s see — what did she miss?

Well, on two separate occasions, deer came from the golf course behind our units and ate out of our hands.

I had a very useful present haul — clothes for me and tools for the Ghia project. I’ve also been playing Ratchet and Clank pretty much non-stop since we got home.

We had my parents, my sister, and both of my grandparents there. It was wonderful to have the whole crew in one place.

On the way home, the bottle of water in the cupholder in the dash was frozen solid. I reached blindly behind me to get another one to check if it was liquid — it was, so I put it back. A few seconds later Anna wanted some water, so I grabbed it again and gave it to her. It was frozen solid.

I thought for a second (could it be…?) and then reached back and grabbed a new one. It was liquid, like the first one had been. I gave it to Anna, and sure enough, it froze solid before our eyes. The water had gone below its freezing point without actually freezing, a phenomenon called supercooling. It was extremely nifty to watch, although Anna didn’t get to drink her water for a little while.

I hope you all enjoyed the holidays. OK everyone, back on your heads.

18:00:29 1 Jan 2004 /family | writeback | permanent link

All is not yet lost
Electro Automotive finally got back in touch with me. They claimed they’ve been having answering machine and email problems, and besides that, the machinist who’s building my motor adapter has been having equipment problems.

Apparently the machinist is back on line, and they expect to ship my precious motor adapter Christmas week. We’ll see — I just might get it before Christmas.

23:32:25 17 Dec 2003 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Tom Swift and his Electronic Hacksaw
Things have been moving very slowly on the electric Ghia project. I’m still waiting for the motor adapter from Electro Automotive, and they’re not answering my phone calls or emails. Grrr.

Clem has welded together the box part of the front battery box, and needs me to bring my cardboard template back to the shop so he can finish the thing. I’m walking to work tomorrow — the cardboard will be a bit awkward to carry, but if it’s not too wet or windy I shouldn’t have much trouble.

Scott Brown, VP of Information Systems at the hospital, asked me about my Tom Swift project (“Tom Swift and his Electric Ghia”), and I had to confess that it’s not progressing as quickly as I’d hoped, as I’m waiting on parts.

Anyway, when I got home I was ready to do something in the garage, so I decided to make sure all the stuff I bought at Harbor Freight the day after Thanksgiving worked right.

First, the $10 angle grinder. There’s a spare set of motor brushes in the box, a nice touch. The manual says there’s no grinding wheel included, but there is. The assembly instructions were pretty sparse, but the exploded diagram of the grinder gave me enough information to put the grinding wheel on the correct side up. It makes a lot of noise, but it seems to work perfectly well. I ground down the edge of a chunk of aluminum angle iron I had lying around and got used to the feel of an angle grinder. I’ve never used one before. You can’t see what you’re doing very well — the work piece is behind the grinding wheel. I think I’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

The $17 digital battery load tester shows that both of the dead batteries that Jonathan gave me are in fact dead. One of them’s better than the other, though - it’s showing around 10 volts, sagging to 8v when I switch in the heater. It might be useful to test the low-voltage wiring, or perhaps it could be the auxiliary battery. The deader one starts out at 7v and goes away completely under load (meter display goes blank). I dug out our old car battery charger and fed some current into the two batteries. The dead one didn’t notice, but the not-quite-dead one started warming up and the voltage increased a bit. Time to start learning about how to treat Optimas.

The $20 electric reciprocating saw also came with spare motor brushes. Since I still had that poor chunk of aluminum clamped to the workbench I installed the metal cutting blade instead of the wood blade. The saw has an on-off trigger and a speed control that goes all the way up to 8. I turned it up to about 6 and laid into the aluminum, which gave way like an environmental law during a Republican administration. “Wow, an electric hacksaw!”, I thought to myself. Very cool. It should make short work of the rusty sheet metal in the back of the Ghia should I decide to remove it.

I put away my toys and looked at the battery charger, and then over at the 8inch ADC traction motor. And then back at the battery charger, and back to the motor. Then I went inside and looked up the wiring diagram for the high-voltage systems and figured out how to hook things up to make it turn. Sure enough, it whirred into action when I turned on the charger. Hooray, it works! I had lots of fun making it go around backwards and forwards. When I flick the switch on the charger to “Start”, the motor goes faster and the ammeter on the charger pegs past 50 amps.

Well, that was fun. I feel better now. Maybe next week I’ll get the front battery box installed, and there’s always a chance that I’ll find out what’s happened to my $800 motor adapter.

00:19:41 12 Dec 2003 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Anna’s new laptop
It kinda makes you realize how good a poker player Anna is when you realize she just bought a brand-new 12inch iBook G4 with (some of) her poker winnings.

It arrived the day before she took off for Portland, and she took it with her of course. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it. Argh — the newest computer in the house, and it’s not mine!

She’ll be using it for playing poker online while travelling, and for writing, and for digitally recording our old records and filk tapes. And for the occasional game of Heroes IV, I’m sure.

Anna now has three different portables — an AlphaSmart “smart keyboard”, an old PowerBook 190cs, and the iBook.

I’m sure you’ll agree with me that this is just too many.

23:24:13 11 Dec 2003 /computers/macs | writeback | permanent link

Sheet metal
I’ve been talking to Clem Ryan, who works in the shop at the hospital where I work. He’s an excellent welder, and I want his help in building the battery boxes and doing any other welding and fabricating tasks I’ll run into.

Originally I was planning to use angle iron to build the front battery box, but that’s not a good idea. The area under the front hood is open to the passenger compartment, and the hole where the gas tank used to be is open to the road. Freezing cold air and leaves will come blasting under the dash unless I seal up that hole.

What to do? As is so often the case, the answer to this question is “bend some sheet metal”.

Instead of an open framework of welded angle iron, Clem will build me a sheet metal box that fits in where the fuel tank was and holds four Optima batteries. I spent Wednesday evening measuring, cutting cardboard, and using my new creeper to roll under the Ghia to draw outlines of the fuel tank hole from underneath. Thursday we both had to work. Well we both had to BE at work — actually working was pretty unnecessary since most everyone was gone. We met up in the shop and I showed him the cardboard mockups and dimensions, and he allowed that it looked pretty doable.

He’s going to order the materials, have me write a check, and weld it up for me. Hopefully I’ll have within a week or two. It will be nice to actually install something into the car instead of just taking stuff out.

18:16:29 29 Nov 2003 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Door Busting
On my last trip to Harbor Freight I learned that there was going to be a sale the day after Thanksgiving, and I planned to show up at 7:00am when they opened. Anna tells me that this is called “Door Busting”.

It was fun. About 20 people were waiting outside for the doors to open, bundled up against the cold. We all filed in and rapidly split off, headed for our various objectives before anyone else could buy them.

I picked up a $10 angle grinder, a $20 reciprocating saw (Sawzall), and a $17 digital battery tester with a big heater in it to check the battery under load. Also a handful of other stuff like jumper cables, a tool tray for my creeper, a box knife. Got out of there at 8:00am for less than $70 and went to work.

Ah, I love the smell of machine oil in the morning.

17:28:31 29 Nov 2003 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Hard Charging
Sorry about the lack of posts this month. Things got pretty busy around here and only recently let up.

So, what’s new on the Ghia project? I’ll tell you.

I have not yet received the motor adapter from Electro Automotive. It’s about a week late. Of course there’s the Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll check back with them next week and see how it’s going.

I’ve been thinking about my options for a charger and battery management and haven’t been able to make up my mind. Here are my choices:

• Bob Batson of EV America recommends a Zivan NG3 charger with no battery regulation.
• Several (vocal) members of the EV list suggest the PFC20 charger and regulators from Manzanita Micro.
• Jonathan Dodge would like to help me build a charger with a pulsed charge algorithm that should eliminate the need for battery regulators.
• I could get a small battery charger for each battery and charge them in parallel, thus also eliminating the need for battery regulation.

The batteries are connected in series, all daisy-chained together to raise the voltage of the pack so you can get highways speeds. You generally use a single charger that charges the whole pack as a unit. However, the batteries will differ slightly in capacity due to manufacturing variations and temperature differences, and this causes problems.

It’s bad to overcharge a battery, especially a sealed battery like the Optimas I’ll be using. They heat up and vent steam that can’t be replaced. It’s also bad to chronically undercharge a battery, because you’ll shorten its life due to something called sulfation. Now consider the battery in the pack with the lowest capacity. It will become fully charged first, before the rest of the pack is finished. So now what do you do? Keep charging and damage this battery, or stop charging and reduce the life of the rest of the pack? To maximize the life of your expensive batteries you need to solve this problem. This is battery management.

There are several ways to manage your batteries. Here’s a brief description of some of them.

Battery Balancers

A battery balancer is a computerized system that periodically checks each battery and sends some charging current to it if it’s low. If the battery is full, no current is sent. When the last battery is full, charging stops. There are no longer any of these being made commercially, although Lee Hart has placed his design in the public domain. This would be a very difficult project for me, and it wouldn’t be particularly cheap either. I’ve been investigating using National Instruments hardware and software to build a balancer out of plug-together modules, but the cost is astronomical. I’m waiting to hear back from the salesperson to see if they can sell me anything at all that fits into my budget. I’m not holding my breath.

There’s another balancer — the PowerCheq. These modules fit between the batteries and allow power to flow from the one that’s full into the one that’s low, until they’re the same. Given some time, all the batteries will equalize. It’s a great idea — scalable and simple. However, the modules don’t seem to be available any more, and the EV list has a pretty low opinion of them. For one thing, they can’t be turned off, and they’ll drain your entire pack trying to fill up a dead battery. They’re expensive, and they also have reliability issues and a tendency to burst into flame. Sounds like a product to avoid, but I bet that someone will eventually make this idea work.

Battery Regulators

These are fairly simple devices that attach to a battery and detect when it’s full. When the battery fills up and can’t take any more charge, the regulator throws away the charging current by dumping it into a resistor. When all the regulators are doing their thing, the batteries are equalized. The Rudman Regulators talk to the PFC20 charger and tell it to stop charging, which is nice. However, the regulators are bare circuit boards, and the PFC20 is the most expensive charger I’ve looked at. Lee Hart has a very simple regulator design that consists of two diodes and a flashlight bulb — I think I could handle those.

Pulsed charging algorithm

Also called a current-interrupted or CI algorithm. This pulses current into the pack, say 5 seconds on and 5 seconds off. The off times allow the fully-charged batteries to cool down and avoid damage. The drawback is that it takes longer to equalize the pack. Also, no commercial chargers seem to be available that implement this algorithm. If you know of one, please let me know.

Modular charging system

This avoids the whole problem by charging each battery individually. Each charger just charges the battery until it’s full, then shuts off. John Bryan used this system in his Ghia. Problems include inefficiency (all those redundant power supplies), weight (extra cases and power cables), and reliability — what happens if a charger fails? That battery will quickly die, possibly very messily. It’s pretty difficult to automate and manage a system built out of off-the-shelf chargers that are designed as stand-alone devices.

So during a long drive I asked Anna for her wisdom. She reminded me that I was doing this to Learn Something, and that I probably ought to accept Jonathan’s offer of help to design and build a charger with a pulsed charging algorithm. I’ll get a system designed the way I want it, and I’ll learn quite a bit about the electronics without having to worry about doing it on my own. Plus, it’s likely to be the least expensive solution too.

I married a good one, no doubt about that. I think I’ll ask Jonathan if he still wants to help me build a charger. Another load off of my mind.

Next up: battery boxes.

21:58:12 28 Nov 2003 /ghia | writeback | permanent link

Thanksgiving 2003
We had a full house again this year. Anna’s family traditionally gathers in Bend on the weekend before the actual holiday, which is usually a better schedule for everyone.

Sandie’s kids came to stay with us early, along with KC’s girlfriend Stephanie. They were helpful in getting the house ready for the big dinner, plus we got some good video game time in. We always enjoy their visits.

With 16 people at the table, we needed more table. Larry and Jeanie brought extra tables, chairs, and silverware, and we made a long table running into the living room. We were pretty comfortable. I like our house - it works well for us.

Let’s see, who came? There was:

• Gladys, Anna’s grandmother
• Dennis, Anna’s dad
• Jeanie, Anna’s mom
• Larry, Jeanie’s husband
• Mike, Larry’s son
• Dan, Anna&#