eBay Auctions for Un-needed Parts

I did my first round of eBay auctions for parts I won't be needing.  This included the gas tank and accessories, aftermarket side view mirrors, starter motor, fuel pump, racing harness bar and racing belts.  I wasn't able to sell the ash tray, cigarette lighter, rollbar vinyl trim, engine computer, front brake calipers, spark plugs and an oil filter.  I guess I'll relist that stuff in a while.

Well I sure learned a lot about selling stuff on eBay. 

1. Get accurate weights on the parts, including the boxes and packing material so your shipping estimates are close.  
2. Include extra costs to cover any cardboard boxes you might need to buy to do the shipping.  
3. Beware someone from Spain bidding on your parts because they might win the auction but then back out because of the shipping cost.  You thought it was going to be cheap?
4. Beware people with no bidding history winning an auction then vanishing off the face of the earth when they're supposed to pay.  You don't understand the eBay contract?
5. Understand the maximum box sizes for the Post Office and UPS so they don't try to hit you with a $44 surcharge for being 2 inches over the limit.  Is the Post Office out of their mind?
6. Packing and labeling and taking stuff to the shipping point is a pain in the ass.

In the end I've got around $300 to use for the project which is good, and some people have parts that they can use in their projects.

I have another batch of parts, including high-value chrome trim for the rollbar and the original side-view mirrors.  If you're interested, check out the auctions or contact me for the stuff that didn't sell.

Body is at the Blaster

I stopped in at Rainbow today and heard from Mike that he had completed all of the metal rehabilitation on the body and it had been trailered over to the blasting company.

They will do two kinds of blasting:
- soda blasting: gentler particles used on outside bodywork to avoid rippling the metal
- sand blasting: coarser particles used on surface rust and nooks and crannies deep inside the engine compartment.

I don't know how long it will take, but they had to wait for an available work window to open up before taking it over so I can't see it being more than a few days.  Then they'll bring it back and start the bodywork and painting processes.

Comment Spam

First it was political ads, now it's some clown trying to put links to "little blue pills" in the Comments.  I've had to turn Comment Moderation on to put a stop to it.  If your comment is even loosely on-topic, I will approve it.  Sorry for the hassle.

Political Ads

Well I've been invaded by political ads...  I've gone into the ad customization settings and disabled the Politics category so hopefully they will stop showing up soon.

You might be able to guess my political views based on my job and my electric car efforts here, but this is not meant to be a viewport to the political crap we're getting flooded with on TV, radio and mailings.  This will all go away in November one way or the other, so please bear with me.

My Visit to Electro Automotive

I am getting close to the point where I had to order the electric component kits from ElectroAutomotive, so they'll arrive around the same time the car is done at the body shop.

I had a meeting in Los Gatos in the south part of the Bay Area and EA's workshop is in nearby Felton, so I gave them a call to see if I could stop by to talk about the final details of my project and finalize the order.  Mike agreed, so after my meeting I headed over and found his place in a great hilly forested area a few miles from the ocean.

Mike showed me around his workshop, which was frankly spotless.  Operating room machine shop clean.  Shocking!  As we went through each big item in the kit, he showed me the part if he already had it in stock, and explained its history and pros and cons.  After we came to the decision on the DC kit, with 20 6V batteries targeting range over top speed, we deleted a few components that I already have to save a bit of money.  Mike's wife Shari then hit the spreadsheet and presented me with my grand total.  I agreed to arrange for an electronic check for half of the amount as soon as I got home, with the other half coming in about a month after I sold some stock.

They explained that the parts for the kit should all be ordered and received in about 6 weeks.  I will drive my pickup up to their place on a Saturday afternoon and we'll load up everything for the drive home.

I tried to take a picture to prove how clean the shop is, but the battery on my Droid gave out, sorry!

All in all it was a great visit with Mike and Shari, and now I'm committed to the kit and making the car a reality!

Article in the June 2010 Porsche Club Newsletter

I attended Gary King's car get-together at his shop at G-Rides on May 8, 2010.  There were several Porsches, a Viper, a couple of Ferraris, a hand-control-adapted Nissan 370Z and several other beautiful cars.  He also had some vendors in attendance including Brembo brakes (and the rep was a woodworker!) and a very cool battery charger/conditioner product called Save-A-Battery. 

I was discussing the 914 conversion to electric drive project with the rep from the charger company when Milt Worthy joined the conversation.  Milt is the Co-Editor of the "Coastalaire", the newsletter of the California Central Coast Region of the Porsche Club of America.  As we got deeper into the conversation, Milt asked if he could write an article about my restoration and electric conversion project in the June issue.  I said sure, and we met later the next week for about an hour to go into more detail about the project.  Two days later Milt emailed me the proposed story and I was amazed at his skills as a writer.  CCA region members should be receiving their printed newsletter soon, but the article is already available on page 13 of the June 2010 newsletter.

Thanks to Milt for his interest in the project, and getting the word out to the other members of the local Porsche Club chapter.

First View of the Metal Work

I stopped in at the body shop on the way to work this morning and met Mike for the first time.  He had already repaired the caulking hole behind the passenger door latch, and was making progress on the other places as you can see below.

After the metal work is done, it will go off for blasting to get down to the metal, then priming, painting and clearcoat.

It's At the Body Shop!

I finally got the entire car stripped and ready for the body shop.  My neighbour helped me get the car down to Rainbow with his flatbed trailer.  Here she is ready for the trip.

Tom Stainbrook, owner of the Rainbow body shop, said he's bringing in his brother Mike to repair the rusty metal, as he's the best metal guy on the team.  Mike starts work at 6AM, so I should be able to stop in for quick visits on my way to work.

At Long Last, Ready for the Body Shop

Sorry for the long time between posts, but not much has happened physically on the car.  Our winter was very rainy so I didn't get a lot of good weather to do work on the car.  I did spend a lot of hours on improving the code for the Android battery pack monitoring app though.  It's pretty much ready to go, waiting for real batteries to watch.

When the weather broke a couple of weekends ago, I dove back in and removed the flywheel from the engine.  I installed the flywheel lock and it came off very easily.

 
Then I got the rest of the car stripped.  The only stuff I can't remove is:

- wiring harness - don't want to pull it if I don't have to as it snakes all over the car
- brake fluid reservoir and brake lines - again, don't want to
- drive shafts - the axle nut is frozen on both shafts.  I've tried WD-40, Liquid Wrench, a heat gun and a 2' breaker bar on the socket.  I hope the body shop can get these off because I'd like to clean them up.

I've found a highly recommended body shop right here in town - Rainbow Marine/Auto Body & Painting.  No web site, but phone is (805)239-3791.  They're going to media blast, repair the rust spots, prime, undercoat, paint and clear coat it.  My buddy Gary at G-Rides does a lot of work on a Porsche Turbo that is painted "Meteor Grey Metallic".  It still keeps the silver theme on my car, but a darker, more metallic shade.  I think it will look really good.

Here are a few pictures to show the state of the car before it goes off to the shop.  I promise I'll peel off the carpet first!

Well that's it.  More details as the shop gets to work.

Launch of Development of the PakTrakr application

Sorry for the long wait between posts.  I spent a week at the insanity called Disneyland, then had a very relaxing week between Christmas and going back to work on January 4.  I didn't do any physical work on the car in that time, but I did spent a lot of time on the development of of a program that reads the data out of the PakTrakr battery monitoring system that I'll be buying later on in the process.  The PakTrakr has a small dashboard display, but it also outputs a data stream each second on a serial port.  My idea is to read that raw data and build an application that would show the data in an improved manner, and also derive important user information like distance to "empty".

See this blog post for the details on my choice of device.

I first had to download and install the free software development kit.  Then I started playing with sample code, and slowly build up the features of my application.  After a couple of weeks of learning, searching and experimentation, I've got a lot of stuff done.  I ported the PakTrakr parsing code from Doug Teeple.  I then built the application skeleton based on a series of tabs.  The first tab will exploit the GPS and mapping functionality to track the progress of each trip:

The next tab will show the readings of the battery pack as a whole, in analog gauge format.  I couldn't find any gauge controls in the Android toolkit or on the web, so I wrote my own.  There's a Percentage of Charge gauge, pack temperature, pack voltage and another custom gauge I wrote that shows the flow of current into the pack during charging, or out of the pack during driving:

The next tab will show the details on each battery in the system, with voltage readings and any errors:

The next tab will show a list of current and past problems with the batteries.  I'm still working on that so there's nothing to show.

The last tab will show the settings controls.  Right now, most are used only during development of the code, but others will be used in the course of running the app during driving and charging.

More updates on the code as things progress.