System Refinements

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran will no longer consider a proposal to move its uranium enrichment program to Russian territory and is instead considering large scale uranium enrichment at home, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters Sunday.

It's now March 12th, 2006 and while I tinker and learn how EV's work, I read the news and watch situations like this with interest. I refuse to propagate any conspiracy theories or post any sort of doomsday rant. I'm just saying that it's nice to know that there's an alternative available to me, at least for local travel.

So far, I've logged almost 2,000 miles on the Comuta Van. Once the motor brushes were replaced, I haven't had a single blip of trouble. The weather has been in the 20's and low 40's for about a month now. This has reduced my range from around 40 miles to 26-28 miles. This isn't enough to get me to the Metrorail station but it is more than enough to get me to the heavy rail MARC train station. The MARC system leases track time from Amtrak and CSX. These are full-sized trains with big, comfy cars that are far cleaner and populated with far nicer people than the DC subway system. I really enjoy riding it but the downside is, it runs far few trains, costs a little more and requires much tighter timing of my daily schedule. Even so, it's a good deal because my company pays my rail costs 100%. Fortunately for me and Northrop Grumman, I've proven myself to be worth it.

I believe that in an EV, conserving every amp can help so I've replaced a lot of the exterior lighting with LED's. They last forever, draw almost no power and are almost as bright as lightbulbs if you get the clustered type. The Comuta Van, being an ex-Postal van had a lot of "marker lights". Take a look at a modern Postal truck and you'll see what I mean. Replacing all of these little guys will ease the load on the accessory battery.

I was only able to drive the van in warm (70 degrees F) weather a few times before winter set in. The motor controller it turns out, is not mounted in the best way. The thing gets very hot channeling all of those amps through to the motor and it should be mounted to a large, metal surface to draw off the heat. Whoever installed the controller here, mounted it to a ABS plastic surface. A few times while driving up long hills, I drove the controller into overheat protection mode. At first, it emits a tone by shifting the switching speed to warn you, but after that it automatically begins cutting back on the amperage to the motor. The effect is similar to running out of juice. You have to stop for a few minutes to let it cool down before it'll give you full power again. To combat this, I mounted a large heatsink to the controller and installed a muffin fan above it to keep the controller cool. I plan on re-mounting it to the firewall, which is a large aluminum surface.

The 25 year old brake master cylinder started leaking but a replacement was readily available at Advance Auto for $19.95. The Comuta Van was built with a lot of "of-the-shelf" parts from other common vehicles so I'm hoping to minimize the amount of hunting I have to do.


The Curtis battery gauge arrived and installed well. It took me a couple of tries to connect it to the traction pack correctly. I had a brain cramp and couldn't figure out which was the first or last in the daisy-chain.

I installed a shifter boot to keep the dust and road noise out. One day, a darling family member was sick of the split seat vinyl and bought me a "flaming dice" seat cover. As a joke, I completed the theme complete with dice tire valve stem caps, dice license plate screws, fuzzy dice, a giant dice gear-shift knob and a chrome, lo-rider steering wheel.


My other big improvement will be to replace the old glass type Buss-fuse-and-spaghetti fuse panel with a modern, blade fuse enclosed fuse block. I'll wire up some extra slots for more accessories like a 12v outlet to charge the cell phone and cheapy stereo system.

I'm also curious to see if it's possible to add 2 or 3 batteries in parallel to some of the batteries in the traction pack. Theoretically, this will deepen my "pool" of available amps, giving me greater range. It won't increase the voltage, or give me more speed but I want range. I need the system voltage to stay the same or my charger won't be able to charge the pack anyway. I'm not sure it'll work though because I'm not certain if the pack will discharge evenly when I drive. I could end up over discharging the parallel cells, killing them quickly, wasting money.