Sparky, The Electric Vehicle (EV)

Electric Vehicle Project: Battery Box

7/13/2006 Battery Boxes--
We started the battery box assembly this past week. The majority of it was completed, we just have a few brackets to finish and we'll be ready for sand blasting and painting

This design calls for 20, 6 volt batteries. Four will live up front with the motor and control board. The remaining 16 will live in the rear underneath the bed. There will be three boxes, two in the mid frame area on either side of the drive shaft. Each will hold four batteries. The remaining eight batteries will go in the rear of frame.
The framing of the battery boxes are made up of 1.5" square tubing. 1/4 inch thick flat bar steel, two and three inches wide, is used to form a basket like structure hanging from the square tube frame. Plastic boxes will then be used to sit inside these "baskets". The batteries will sit inside these boxes along with 1" of insulating foam.

Jeff at Bud's Muffler was gracious enough to allow me to use his shop for the welding work. Jon (from Bud's Muffler) did a great job welding, cutting, grinding, and whatever else was necessary to get it done. Thanks a bunch! We had to make some minor adjustments to the design to account for a slight difference in the frames of the older and newer S-10 models.

We started with the front of vehicle, here's the before picture: Note that it shows the power steering box in still in place. Those rings where the radiator used to be were cut off. We bent and welded in two support brackets and then built a battery tray to sit on them:.
The two square posts sticking up will be used to support the control board. Note that the manual steering gear is now in place. I decided against keeping the power steering system for simplicity sake. There are numerous ways to make the power steering work, but since this is my first vehicle (who knows if there'll be another) I wanted to keep it simple and reduce the chance for problems and headaches.


Next we moved to the rear of the vehicle and started welding in the new cross members. The first cross member requires a special plate that gets welded to the front bed support The cross member then gets welded to these plates. This picture also shows the second member in place. The original cross member was then cut out so that we could add the remaining frame members. The frame had to be notched to allow the side members to pass through. This is where the design deviated a little. Originally it called for the notch to be only 1 inch deep. However, if it were left this way, the boxes would have interfered with the differential. So we increased the depth to 1.5 inches. This, however, reduced the clearance with the leaf springs. Here's the notching:
Here's the completed frame:

The rear frame only consisted of 2 tubes. They were welded in before we cut out the remaining cross members. Note the change in the shock mounting bracket. The previous picture also shows the first basket strap to be put in place.

These remaining pictures show the completed baskets: Next: Finish welding details, Sandblast, Paint

7/29/2006 Frame Painting--
Well "Sparky" made it home this week. I had American Sandblasting sandblast the frame. What a great job they did!!! I have never seen a frame so clean.

I primed the frame Friday night and got the painting done on Saturday. The results are shown in the pictures below: