Current location:	Home
Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	costly mistakes, electric vehicles, ev, oops, revolt, saturn

You ever have one of those days?
One good moment today, getting to drive the 2002 Saturn SL we've been working on converting to electric power, for the first time.



With its 144V pack, it performed pretty strongly, though not as strongly as I'd hoped. Still, it's not a bad car, and low-end acceleration is actually pretty brisk. 1st gear is a bit too low to be practical, and it's pretty easy to spin the tires so we normally start out in second gear instead.




The rest of the day wasn't quite as good. Had a guy stop by during my open garage session today, talking about free energy and over-unity devices; I let him know that this stuff is not kosher for pleasant, fruitful conversations with most EV enthusiasts, and certainly not with me personally. I need to develop a more effective routine for efficiently, cordially, and non-combatively extricating myself from such conversations. As it was, I ended up gabbing for a couple hours and not getting much done.

After the open garage session, back to Aaron's for more work on the mobile mount I'm building for our CMM arm. I should be *using* the arm this weekend to start getting 3D scan data from the inside of the Mazda3 engine bay, but because mounting the arm base on a tripod turned out not to be stable enough, I'm having to make a mount that can be clamped in various orientations to the car body itself. A better solution than the tripod in my opinion, but one I was hoping not to have to do now. Yet another setback in a timeline that just doesn't have room for any more of them.

Meanwhile, Aaron was busy fabricating a sheet metal bracket for the new electric air conditioning compressor for the Saturn. We haven't found anyone who will waterjet these for us for cheap enough, so for the moment our technique is totally ghetto. I have managed to get our [also somewhat ghetto] CAD program to print out a flat, unfolded image of a sheet metal part at a fairly accurate 1:1 scale, so we can then tape the separate sheets of paper into a single drawing if necessary and then use a low-tack spray adhesive I found to basically turn the paper into a big post-it note. It then goes onto the sheet metal, and we run the result through the bandsaw and drill press to cut out the outline and drill the bolt holes. Time consuming, but we've found it works pretty well. The results show some small signs of being "handmade" due mostly to our crappy Harbor Freight brake, but the parts are functional and holes line up.

This morning I'd told Aaron "all folds go down," when asked how the flat pattern was supposed to fold into the finished bracket. As it turns out, this was wrong. He set the bracket aside after finishing it this evening, and while I was admiring what a great job he did, I decided to take it over to the car where I noticed that it was all wrong. Nothing lined up at all. After a minute or two a rare burst of spatial/topological competence clued me in that it was folded up completely inside-out. All the folds were supposed to go *up*. So, I ended up wasting an entire day of my business partner's time, with one tiny, completely incorrect piece of advice. He took it really well.

It was nice to have a positive experience after that, of driving the car around on the highway and not being horrendously disappointed. Aaron's driven it a few times, but it was the first time for me since I was in San Jose when it first left the garage.