The car arrived on Friday the 20th and from now on rather than me entering the date I will put the week of the build. I will exclude weeks that I am away, like holidays. This will give an idea as to the time it takes me to complete the build, excluding holidays.
The first job was to build a trolley to mount the car so that I did not end up breaking my back working on the car, I have a very stiff back anyway and the car can be moved around the garage it has large wheels, all steerable. On opposite corners there are breaks, and the other corner the wheels can be locked straight to help me steer, unlike a shopping trolley. The car was lifted onto the table with he use of a couple of gantries and 4 pulley blocks. It was a good thing that the GT40 has a hole in the boot and bonnet to allow the chains to go down to the chassis. If you do it yourself don't skimp on gear. The hire was not cheap but the car is expensive.
For those with sharp eyes will notice that I have done some fiberglass work on the front right headlight. This is a light mold that will help me select some headlights that will fit from a scrap yard.
Over the weekend there was a lot of measuring of the engine bay to calculate the container dimensions for the batteries. I need to fit in 192 batteries. For wiring sense containers should have batches of batteries devisable by 12. There is also a big question. "Do I have spacing between the batteries to assist cooling?"
The bottom line is that the 192 batteries could not be fitted into the engine bay, even without spacing, but the extras could be placed in the door sills. So the decision to have spaces was made. Each battery will have a 10mm strip of hard foam, 4.5mm thick, along the top and bottom of the battery allowing air to flow from front to back of the box. Pictures will to come later. After much calculating, what I hope was the ideal box dimensions was decided on. In addition, the dimensions of the copper plates to join the batteries together were drawn up and a friend of mine in Sydney drew up the CAD design. (I have a free copy of Sketchup but it can not work to finer than 1 mm. The diameter of a 5mm hole is 2.5mm!)
The control board arrived for the Tesla motor, supplied by Tim at EVWorks. This replaces the Tesla that can not be used as access to its brains is not available to non Tesla products.
In the mean time the MoTeC wiring system continues with Great help from Glen. I have got to the stage of working on the display, getting flash indicators, main beam etc. to display.
Tim from EV Works. came on Thursday to help me replace the Tesla differential with the Quafe Limited Slip Diff. There are good instructions on the EVTV Motor Verks web site that are easy to follow.
We did the replacement on the floor as I was concerned that the weight of the Tesla motor would be too heavy for my work bench. It was probably better as in that position it was easier to maneuver into position.
The pulling of the old bearings needed a bit of "Aussie know how" (The ability to fix something when there is not a perfect tool for the job.) So put your brain into gear and don't expect a garage to do the job for you.
The only issue we had was lining all the components up, on either side of the two castings. My suggestion is that you have half a dozen over length bolts to initially hold the casings together and gradually align everything bit by bit. We also had a 5 minute gasket seal that was used to seal the two halves of the motor together. You will not do the job in 5 minutes.
Once the diff was replaced Tim replaced the Tesla power board with an alternate version that fits in place beautifully, replacing the Tesla board. The reason for the replacement is that Tesla will not allow you to have access to the electronic drive brains of the system. The replacement will give us that ability.