EVCCON 2015 - Day 4

This morning the schedule shows the Car Show at Jack's house from 9 AM - 2 PM.  For the majority of us, it meant a well-deserved sleep-in and then hang out in the workshop until 2 PM.

Ray and Nabil got their motorbike-of-death running.  It's a frankenbike made with a Kelly controller and an automotive alternator wired backwards.

Among the goodies found around the shop was this Chinese motor controller from a company called Shinry.  Yes, the jokes just write themselves folks.  The specs seem good, liquid cooled and even includes a DC-DC converter so if it tests out well it could be a viable controller.

This is a section of Tesla battery pack, made from 18650 form-factor Lithium Ion batteries.  Every one of those holes is a battery and there's a tiny wire welded from the battery to the metal backplate, acting like a fuse.  If a battery goes runaway, the wire will melt and the battery will be taken out of the circuit in the pack.

This is the guts of a 10 KW Tesla battery charger.  Time will tell if Jack and the team can reverse engineer it and install it into a vehicle.

At 2 PM, Jack kicked off the awards.  This year, the awards are small and engraved plastic rather than the huge softball-championship-trophies in years past.

Awards were given for the top 3 attending cars but the drag strip and autocross trophies went un-awarded as those events were cancelled this year.

Steve West and Nick Smith and their Charge.net.nz organization won the Electric Vehicle Evangelist of the Year award, well-deserved.

Kevin Smith, leader of the Illuminati Motor Works team that came *this* close to winning the Progressive Automotive X Prize, won for Technical Innovation.

Second year in a row, I snagged the Furthest Travelled Attendee, or as Jack called it this year, "Global Visionary (Furtherest Travelator).  Nick Smith went the long way around through the UK to try to beat me, but my 3 months on the road from door to door added up to 27,418 miles, longer than the earth is around.  He'll have to step up his game next year.

After the awards, most of us headed over to Sikeston to Dyno Dom's drag race track.  Most years we went on Sunday morning but Jack decided to go on Saturday night this year.  The dinosaur-juice folks were out in force, while we made up a small EV contingent, under the official auspices of NEDRA.

After waiting for about an hour and a half in frigid cold and cloudy skies, Dyno Dom cancelled the whole day on account of rain which didn't really exist.  The lady at the ticket gate refused to give us each our $15 back, but did write on them that we could come back later.  We explained we only come once a year but she wouldn't relent.  Screwed again...

Most folks headed back to the hotel for free "kickback" drinks and buffet of tremendously fattening American food.  I couldn't get anybody interested in going out for the evening so many goodbyes were said.  The Drury Lodge is scheduled soon for demolition and rebuild into an 8 storey hotel so we'll have to find a new place to stay next year and possibly the year after that if their schedule slips.

All in all a great week, with the hard-core EVCCON folks showing up despite cancellation and we managed to safely get liquored up and play with high voltage again.  Until next year...