Motor Adaptor

Finally, I get to do something that directly applies to the end goal - make it electric.  Charlie made my adaptor plate and associated items for less than what the retail EV parts store would cost.  You can find him online, and he specializes in VW and Porsche adaptors.  This is expensive - anywhere from $600 - $1,000.00.

The motor adaptor connects the electric motor to the transmission.  The big question most EVers have to face is whether to go clutchless or keep the clutch.  I chose to keep the clutch, primarily because it allows me to coast and given the fact I have several 6% grades in my commute I need to be able to do that.  Shifting is also easier and faster.  My previous EV, the 1984 Pulsar, had a clutch and I liked it.  Remember that's where all the electric gear is coming from - the Pulsar.

I bought my Bradley without a motor.  You need to have a clutch, pressure plate and a flywheel to make this thing work.  I had none of the above.  I ordered the clutch and pressure plate from EBay and Charlie had a flywheel that he prepped and sold to me.  So, if you buy a vehicle without a motor.....

To prep the motor I had to remove the previous adaptor, hub, clutch and flywheel.  Most of it came off pretty easy but the hub was stuck pretty good.  Eventually I had to rent the "Mother of All" pullers from the local rental shop just to get the darn thing off. It was well worth the $8, the hub was off in 30 seconds flat!

Here's how it all goes together...first here's the motor.

Now we add the adaptor plate by securing with 4 bolts that have blue locktight on them.

 
Now the Hub is added.  What you can't see is the little metal piece that marries to the shaft that looks like a rectangular block.  The hub slides right over the shaft with the block in place. The hub has a screw in the top that fastens to the shaft and a set screw on the side that needs to be tightened.  The screw in the top has blue locktight on it.

There are four dowel pins that connect the hub to the flywheel.  They are placed in their holes with Red Locktight.

Here's the flywheel, it is merely set on top of the dowel pins. 

Now we add the gland nut and washer and tighten them down.  This secures the flywheel in place. In the gland nut is a bearing that replaces the one that comes with most clutch kits. 

Next we add the clutch plate by setting on top.

Finally, we place the pressure plate on top of the clutch and secure with 6 bolts.  Use the black alignment tool to insure everything lines up.

This is assembled and ready for the hardest part, connecting to the transmission.  That's a pain.  Why, you may ask?  The motor is heavy then add the adaptor assembly and now you're talking having to rent an engine hoist so you can line it up and slide it in.  This might sound easy, but trust me there are several videos etc on the internet that exemplify what I mean.

Now if I can just finish putting in those @#$%! transaxle mounts!

Rear Coil-over Shocks

The original GTE manual suggests using air shocks and that's because you're looking at 450 lbs of batteries over the back axle.  I plan on placing 12 batteries next to the electric motor, which will actually equal the weight of a 1500 CC engine.  Then in the back seat area I'll place another 16 batteries.  This is 4 sets of 4 lithiums. This will weigh approx 116 lbs.  Even though this isn't much extra weight at all, it's a good idea to add the shocks anyway.  Coil-over shocks can be very expensive.  I bought 3 for my Sparrow a while back and spent $500.  I found these online and they were about $30 each.  They're branded as "economy" and are made in Taiwan. They sure are pretty!

The nice thing is these are adjustable.  There's a tool that comes with them.  (It's in the center) It's a good idea to adjust them before you put them on the vehicle lest you get scraped knuckles.  I placed these on my vice and they adjusted very easily.  Hmmmm the last set I adjusted coil-over shocks, they were much harder to adjust.  Maybe these will be econo-crap?

So what's the worst thing that can happen when you go to swap out shocks?   The bolt gets rusted to either the lower arm or the bushing sleeve.  During this procedure, it happened 3 times.  On two occasions the rubber bushing was so rotted, the sleeve came out.  One of the bolts was rusted to the lower arm.  Needless to say I pounded away with a 5 lb sledgehammer to no avail.  After a night of penetrating oil it finally came free. Thank God for penetrating oil!!!

Even after sitting all night in oil the sleeves will not come off the bolts. I can see I'm going to have to run to the hardware store and get some new bolts, washers and nuts.
 The metric bolts and nuts are expensive - $4 just for the bolts.  When I came home I realized that the bushing on the bottom of the shocks are wider.  The existing bolt length will not work.  The hardware store DID NOT have a longer metric bolt.  I jumped to a similar 7/16 bolt. This cost about $1 each.  Once again I used the hydraulic jack to help lift the bottom of the shock into place - the springs added a whole lot of resistance.

Of course now I'm wondering just what kind of shape the front shocks are in? They will also gain some weight from the front battery pack.  Better order them now!

Transmission Mounts

Took a couple days off.  I went skiing on Thursday then hosted the annual Christmas office party on Friday.  While all that was going on, my new transmission mounts and coil over shocks arrived.  I started in on the transmissions mounts today.  Previously we spotted that one had gone bad and really, it's a good idea to change them if you have things apart anyway.  Who knows when you'll get another chance to do this again?

The first thing you have to do is wrestle with those 27mm bolts.  Otherwise known as BAB or Big Ass Bolts!  I had already bought the 27mm socket and was ready for battle.  Little did I know that I would bend my wrench so easily.  Check it out!

$25 later I have bought one awesome breaker bar and am now ready for round 2.  I tried pulling, kicking, cursing, one came loose but the other would not budge.  They say these bolts are at 165 lbs torque.  Seems like more to me.  (Or possibly that this hasn't been done in a very, very long time. The first step when dealing with highly resistive bolts is apply the penetrating oil.  Wait.  Try again.  If no luck then turn to heat.  I used a mini flame thrower.  Everything got to smoking but still no luck.  Then I had a brainstorm.  Why not use 2 tons of pressure?  My floor jack can handle up to 2 tons so why not see if I can tap into that power?  I positioned the breaker bar with the socket securely on the bolt, then started to lift, rechecked the socket, gave it a few more pumps, then repeated.  It worked - WooHoo!!!

The mounts in the bell area were out.  Now to attack the front mount.  It is at the very front of the transmission and has 4 bolts that are not the same size.  There is also the grounding strap, if yours is corroded then you'll need to replace that as well.  Everything went smooth until I came to the nut that sits in the middle of the two curved beams.  I believe the last person to do this did not use the right size bolt.  It was thin and this made it very difficult to get a hold of.  The socket would sit squarely on the nut but the wrench when attached would not fit.  An open end wrench would not fit.  I finally was able to use the "woobly" or u-joint style extension to make it work.

Finally, comes the task of sliding the transmission forward so you can take the old mount out and put in the new. This is not as easy as it sounds.  You have to remove the clutch cable and access a panel next to the passenger seat to disconnect the shifter cable was well. This is going to take a while. On another note, it's highly recommended that you at least replace the nuts and washers, given how cruddy mine are, I'll replace the bolts too.

Lift 'em Up - Part Deux (actually three)

24 Bolts.  That's all, just 24 easy bolts that separate the body from the chassis.  Over the last few days I have fought the good fight and finished the race - victorious!  Thanks to my lovely wife who held wrenches on several occasions while I turned a wrench from underneath the car. As previously mentioned there was rust, lots and lots of rust.

Not to mention a constant lack of consistency in nuts and bolt types.  (I can't remember the last time I saw a square nut.  Neither can Chip and Dale ; )  Notice how carriage bolts were used.  I used a plastic jar gripper on the handle of my large screw driver to get a firm grip.

Two things to note:  First, there is a nut conveniently located on top of, or under, depending upon which way you are looking at it, the brake line on the back of the driver's side area.

To remove this bolt was a lesson in perseverance.  Secondly, the ones at the very front corner of the car are hard to get to.  I 'm 6 feet tall and had to cram my face into the dash so I could get the wrench to sit on the bolt. Here's a bonus, squirt the rusty bolts with WD 40 and let them sit overnight before you arm up for battle.

Already I can tell that the smaller bolts, (from the 3 inch lift kit) that are supposed to go on the rear hump, don't fit the threads that are there.  I will probably choose to drill out the existing threads so they WILL fit.

Lift'em Up Part II

Where do we start on installing the lift kit?  The seats have to come out first.  How long should that take?  Maybe 30 minutes, right?!  Try four hours.  What I discovered is the bolts were absolutely rusted.  One was bolted right next to a body bolt...now how did they do that?  Another problem is when removing those cool laid back seats, the seats limit your ability to see the bolts.

Do you like playing blind man's bluff? One of the bolts had to be pulled through the body because, whoever installed these, did not use washers.  The nut was so badly stripped, the only to get it out was pulling it through the channel.  Another bolt had to have the head cut off and then puched through to the bottom. You see how badly the brackets are rusted, this gives you some idea of just how bad the bolts were.

With the seats out of the way, I needed to peel back the carpet.  Oh look there's some foam.  Probably used for sound installation.  OK....What's under the foam?  Oh @#$%^%$#@!!!  Look at that rust!!!  OK, this is not good.  I specifically asked the guy I bought the car from if the pans were good and he said "Yes."

 Even though I was discouraged, I started to tackle the task of removing all those nuts and bolts that hold the fiberglass body to the chassis today. There are about 25 of them. Of course I'll start with the easy ones - right by the doors.  Once again more rusty bolts.  One snapped in two, and several required the help of my lovely bride.  Believe it not, she used to race stock cars when she was younger, so she knows how to turn wrenches. : )

At some point I had to face the inevitable and order new pans.  That's going to mean some adjustment to my budget.  Therefore, I can only assume that there will be many more parts to the Lift'em Up saga.

The Challenge Begins

5 Dec 2010

My Bradley GT II arrived today from Texas.  Good thing too because the snow started again right after the truck left.  My wife got into the car to steer it into the garage and thought the gull wing door was going to hit her in the head - this is a common complaint.  (I ordered the 3 inch lift kit which should solve that problem tonight.) After scrapping 2,300 miles of crud off the car, it looked pretty good.  The first order of business was to inspect and check things out.  The rear end looked funny and the tires were curved in due to the lack of the motor weight.  The trunk was inoperative.  After crawling underneath, I saw the switch, which looked like it had been cut some time ago and opened the door.  The tranny was there but no battery.  It also looks like someone added a “butt sag” bar to the frame.  Most Bradleys have a problem with the rear not being supported and the end will often sag.  This could possibly cause a problem with adding a sub frame in the future. Around to the front and I figured out how to open the tiny hood.  This is primarily used to gas up the car.

This lead to finding the little screw on the bottom of the tank underneath the car.  Since I needed to drain the tank anyway….I unscrewed and placed a bucket underneath - little did I know that there was going to be 5 gallons of gas coming out.  I hollered for my wife while I played little Dutch Boy with my finger in the dike and we managed to fill up the bucket and several empty coffee cans before it finally stopped.  I opened the garage to let some air in and poured all the gas into an empty turkey frying kettle I have.  All containers were placed outside in the snow so the garage could air out.

After about 30 minutes I got restless.  I looked at the GTE conversion manual and thought about cutting out the hood.  Someone on Bradley GT.com told me it is a lot easier to remove the tank with the hood cut out.  I looked at several of the GTEs on EV Album to see what they had.  I wanted mine to look a little different, after all, theirs were made that way - all electric, mine is a conversion.  I decided I would cut above the Bradley logo plate and retain the shape of the front edge - slightly rectangular.  The top of the hood would have to be the same since there is a wall underneath if you go any higher on the hood area. I taped the area where I was going to cut and marked it with a sharpie pen.  This keeps the paint and clear coat from cracking. I grabbed my power tool and very carefully went to work.  Lots of fiberglass dust everywhere and I had just washed the car!  Ugh!! 

The corners were done with a jig saw or regular miter saw.  I had to also cut around the bar that lifts the headlights since it goes through the fiberglass shell.  Another concern was removing the thin bar that allows the original gas hood to swing open.  A closer look and I saw I couldn’t just pull it out.  I ended up cutting it out.  (I love power tools!) There’s a switch of some type that probably aids in moving the headlights that had to be removed from the fiberglass shell as well, it only came out after I had finished cutting the hood.

Viola!  The hood is out and what do you see….one ugly gas tank, just ready for the taking.  I looked at the straps that hold it down and after you bend them down there’s two bolts that look pretty easy to take it out.  But this will wait until tomorrow night.

Lift 'em Up!

The gas struts for the gull wings doors arrived in the mail today along with the 3 inch lift kit.  First, I'll talk about  the gas struts.  Needless to say, the old ones didn't work.  Only one of the four did and that was because it had a plastic piece that, upon being extended, would act as a door stop and hold the strut to it's fully extended position.

I found the reference on what to buy at Bradley GT.com.  This took about 10 minutes to install and viola! I have gull wings doors that open and stay open.  Not too mention they open a whole lot easier. 

This reminded me that on several of the Bradleys I looked at on the internet, the back window was also supposed to open.  I looked at mine and there were no struts at all.  Since there is no handle to open the window, I had to wedge it open with a folding camping stool - how's that for out of the box thinking?!  This lead to me asking the question, will the old gull wing door struts work?  The hardware for two gas struts is still there...  And sure enough they did.  Once again this Bradley has regained some of its cool points. Let's face it, this car rocks because of the gull wing doors.  I've ever heard it referred to as a Spy Car.  (the theme music for James Bond should be playing in the background right now.)

Moving right along to the 3 inch lift kit.  It doesn't matter where I bought it, what matters is the process and problem solving to make the thing work.  In addition to the kit, I ordered the gasket kit as well to seal the chasis against water.  The kit came with bolts and washers but no nuts. Hmmmm.

So the first thing I do is seek guidance.  There is some info out there in Cyberspace but no real photo step by step approach.  The first I saw that shocked me was a small reference that stated the steering column would have to be modified with an extender.  This got me to thinking about the 3 inch gap and how do I close that up without having the steering column stay at the same angle.  I mean I looked everywhere for this mysterious column extender.  There were references to buying a whole new steering column with tilt steering but that's $400!  One possible solution is welding the shaft with u joints from a Super Beetle to this column.  That cost is about $75 -- much better.  I need to continue to work this issue.  Next, I went to see just what else would be affected by the lift and what else needs to be disconnected.  I have a butt sag bar in the back, that's going to need to be filled in maybe with some lumber.  Other items that need to be disconnected include the brake reservoir, the seats, the front bumper assembly and the 25 bolts that hold the body to the frame. This is going to take some time....

Start, Stop on the Tranny Mounts

I have a great wife.  For my Birthday she bought me some insulated overalls and a nice heater to endure the cold in the garage.  Since we live in WA state, it can be pretty chilly in the Bradley garage.

I thought I'd take a whack at removing the transmission mounts but became convinced I needed to have the right tools first -- primarily the 27MM socket to remove the transmission cradle that it sits on.  As you will find in most EV blogs there's a lot of waiting around for parts to show up. 

Can you see the difference bewteen the transmission mounts, the one on your left is good, the one on the right however is pretty much gone.  This probably why the owner complained about the tanny not staying locked into 3rd gear. 
Next, I'm going to order the coil-over shocks for the rear.  The total amount of battery weight over the rear axle will be approx 224 lbs.  Not a huge amount but Charlie, the guy that's making my adaptor plate recommends this and Manny, on his blog, did the same. There's some wisdom there.

Starter Removal

Started off the night bowing to my wife's request for Mexican food.  If you're ever in Cle Elum and have a hankering for Moicejete, go to the restaurant on the main drag.  You'll get more for your money.

Naturally I went straight to the Internet to see what's out there for tips on how to remove this Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) device.  (In other words electric cars don't need these.) I found a good "shade tree VW mechanic" site.  The most important thing is to make sure there's no electricity running at all so disconnect the battery. Why? There's a likely danger that the 12V at whatever Amp Hours you're using in your car will hit you like a ton of bricks and boy oh boy does that suck!  Hmmm, right now my Bradley has 0 batteries so I'm not worried about it.

So I jacked up the car, supported with jack stands and got ready for a good fight.  After getting a good look at the starter, I didn't see any bolts.  What the....@$%*? So I reached up and gave it a good jiggle and what do you know - it came right out in my hands.  Someone needs to slap the big red EASY button because "That was easy!"  It appears the previous owner took a high quality starter and put in a hunk of junk.  In the long run, it doesn't matter, because electric cars don't use starters. The nice thing is he left the wires.

 The thing I noticed while I was looking at the tranny was the mounts look pretty beat up.

This is another thing to add to my list.  I talked with Charlie, who is making my adaptor plate. The car was a good buy but didn't come with any motor which means no clutch or flywheel.  I think Charlie's going to help me out.  He's a pro and been working on VW conversions for long time.  I'll drop his website information at some point.

Gas Tank Removal

As I was wandering around Auto Zone I happened to spy the repair manual for the VW, which happened to be out of the plastic wrapper.  So I picked it up and quickly looked up how to remove the gas tank., seems pretty straight forward.  So I get home and plunge into it.  First I snipped the two wires going into the top of the tank.  Then I cut the fuel hose coming out of the side with some large wire snipers.  Just a small amount of gas came out.  Next, I removed the two very rusty 7/16 bolts on the bottom that keep the metal straps attached to the metal bar on the bottom. The straps then had to be bent, not difficult, and moved out of the way.  The gas tank came out rather easily.  What was funny was the two straps protruding out of the front of the car - to a creative guy like me they looked like antennae.  I have a Martian Car, "ET come get your car!" Enough silliness.  The straps came out after I removed two large bolts located on the top of the suspension, as I recall I think they were 11/16.  I also took out the bracket that was attached to the straps as well.

Since I am going to add a 3 inch body lift, I noticed the support bar for the gas tank and began to ponder whether I really need to recreate the entire subframe on most GTEs.  If the body goes up three inches, I cut the fiberglass area under the bumper (as directed in the GTE Manual) to make room and build a battery rack so it's a half a subframe that uses the gas tank support beam and the mounts in the back to the top of the suspension where the straps were.  Hmmm.  The original GTE called for almost 500 lbs of batteries under the hood.  My entire Lithium battery pack weighs less than 400 lbs.  I can easily fit 15-20 of the 48 batteries up front.  Tonight I'll take some measurements and call a welder. I also need to remove the starter from the transmission and figure out how I am going to cover the resulting hole that's left. Sounds like a plan.

Can He Do It?

Here's the deal.  I love electric cars.  I have been driving electric for about  8 years.  I started by buying a converted 1984 Nissan Pulsar while I lived in Ohio.  This was the car that I really cut my teeth on, not to mention destroyed a couple battery packs : ) The car is long gone but the electrical components have been sitting in my garage for years. Then I bought a 2001 Corbin Sparrow from a guy in California.  Zippy, fun...way too much fun, and fast.  But it only carries one person and a lot of people laugh because it's too unique to be cool.  Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed my Sparrow adventure but being called the Dr. Seuss mobile is devoid of cool points. Not to mention, one wheel traction can have it's disadvantages.

So...I found my dream car on the internet - a Bradley GT II.  I remember back in 7th grade my friends and I would talk about cars we could never afford and the Bradley GT was one of them. Back then a turn key version was $27,000. My wife always wanted a red sports car and I hope when it works that she will like this one. ; )

Here's the plan - buy my dream car and convert it to electric. So why didn't I buy a Bradley GTE to begin with? (Yes, Bradley did make electric versions) Because most of the ones for sale are still using the same technology from the 70's and usually are overpriced.  This is where the challenge comes in.  Can I take this humble $2,000 car from the 70's and transform it into a green machine and do so for a cost of under $6,000?