jonny69

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

I remember reading about that years ago - they made a rubber mould of the car, sucked the air out of it with a giant vacuum cleaner to make it crumple up, then played the film backwards.  Very clever idea.

Remember watching  a "the making of" the original, way before CGi.. the scene where the car is smashed up in Darnells was filmed and played backwards so the car "repairs" itself. Cool to watch!

This is one of the gr9test threads on here m7. Love threads like this 👍

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

Calling that fixed. Battery is working the best I think I’ve ever seen it. No issues on a 10 mile test drive with a few restarts thrown in the mix. Motorway fine and it’s healthily dipping in and out of the battery on acceleration and deceleration. Got a clear stretch on a local bypass where I could nail it for a good 15 seconds before I had to smash the brakes and it was happy putting out the full 100A of assist for all of that. It’s also using full regen on hard braking which it won’t always do if the battery is out of whack. I’m happy/relieved/drained
Now need to clean it up because it’s absolutely caked in shite from the last 3-odd months of neglect. 

It’s in. Top-up charge overnight and test drive tomorrow…

It’s in. Top-up charge overnight and test drive tomorrow…

It’s in. Top-up charge overnight and test drive tomorrow…

Comfort break update. It’s taking a spectacularly long time to do this today because I’m having to do this on the kitchen table and I’m getting a lot of help from little interested hands. Screws and tools keep moving and interested little faces keep getting in the way. It’s frustrating but at the same time I secretly want them to be involved so I can’t get too angry at them. 

So, the pack is now assembled and ready to put in the car. I chose to swap the best six sticks from the second HCH pack with the weakest six sticks from the original Insight pack. That seemed to be where the crossover point was in terms of stick performance. Then I put them all in order of voltage drop under load and paired them up one from each end until I got to the middle. The logic here is the car monitors them in pairs, so I want the pair voltages to match as closely as I can get them. Then it was just a matter of double check I got the stick pairs in the right places in the pack based on the connections on the board in the back of the pack which links the sticks together. 

It’s in. Top-up charge overnight and test drive tomorrow…

It’s in. Top-up charge overnight and test drive tomorrow…

Comfort break update. It’s taking a spectacularly long time to do this today because I’m having to do this on the kitchen table and I’m getting a lot of help from little interested hands. Screws and tools keep moving and interested little faces keep getting in the way. It’s frustrating but at the same time I secretly want them to be involved so I can’t get too angry at them. 

So, the pack is now assembled and ready to put in the car. I chose to swap the best six sticks from the second HCH pack with the weakest six sticks from the original Insight pack. That seemed to be where the crossover point was in terms of stick performance. Then I put them all in order of voltage drop under load and paired them up one from each end until I got to the middle. The logic here is the car monitors them in pairs, so I want the pair voltages to match as closely as I can get them. Then it was just a matter of double check I got the stick pairs in the right places in the pack based on the connections on the board in the back of the pack which links the sticks together. 

Comfort break update. It’s taking a spectacularly long time to do this today because I’m having to do this on the kitchen table and I’m getting a lot of help from little interested hands. Screws and tools keep moving and interested little faces keep getting in the way. It’s frustrating but at the same time I secretly want them to be involved so I can’t get too angry at them. 

So, the pack is now assembled and ready to put in the car. I chose to swap the best six sticks from the second HCH pack with the weakest six sticks from the original Insight pack. That seemed to be where the crossover point was in terms of stick performance. Then I put them all in order of voltage drop under load and paired them up one from each end until I got to the middle. The logic here is the car monitors them in pairs, so I want the pair voltages to match as closely as I can get them. Then it was just a matter of double check I got the stick pairs in the right places in the pack based on the connections on the board in the back of the pack which links the sticks together. 

Still working on this. I got the 3rd pack apart and tested on Friday. More of a mixed bag in that pack but plenty of strong-looking sticks and I’m more confident I can make a good pack now with what I’ve got. 
I’m planning to make the pack up today, so overnight I’ve re-charged one of the sticks I’m planning to use that I’d fully discharged. I borrowed the bench supply from work, set the current control to 0.5A and put it on a mechanical timer overnight (in the socket):

Bit hokey but nothing exploded overnight. That also means nobody got hurt and nobody died, so I should be good to go. 

Still working on this. I got the 3rd pack apart and tested on Friday. More of a mixed bag in that pack but plenty of strong-looking sticks and I’m more confident I can make a good pack now with what I’ve got. 
I’m planning to make the pack up today, so overnight I’ve re-charged one of the sticks I’m planning to use that I’d fully discharged. I borrowed the bench supply from work, set the current control to 0.5A and put it on a mechanical timer overnight (in the socket):

Bit hokey but nothing exploded overnight. That also means nobody got hurt and nobody died, so I should be good to go. 

I had a look with the scope attached but it didn't actually tell me anything extra that was useful. Good stick followed by 'bad' stick:


I guess what it has told me is that the voltage drop when the load is connected is almost instantaneous, as it happens in about 5ms. I was expecting it to be slower than that. So having cleared that up, I tested all the sticks using the basic voltmeter method, making a note of the resting voltage and the voltage after 5 seconds with the load connected. That resulted in 17 sticks which were almost identical and 3 outliers which dropped more voltage. So what I did on the outliers was got a leather punch and made some small holes in the heatshrink so I could measure the voltage across the individual cells while they had a load attached. I did the same on a good stick so I had something to compare it to. It basically showed that the bad sticks had a single weak cell in them that was dropping a lot more voltage under load:
Good one, voltages written above the holes, all about the same:

Bad one, with one weak cell showing about 0.3V instead of 1.3V:

The other two bad sticks looked exactly the same. So that leaves me with what look like 17 good sticks and 3 bad ones:

What I really need to do now, is get the other pack out the car and do the same on those sticks, and get the third pack charged and cycled a few times so I can do the same on that one. In the meantime, I've also rigged up a capacity checker with a cheap Chinese eBay current and voltmeter. It's got a shunt so it can measure current and will log battery capacity. I've got it wired up on a good stick with an 8 Ohm resistor doing the discharging (about 1A when the stick is charged) to have a look at what it does:

Still working on this. I got the 3rd pack apart and tested on Friday. More of a mixed bag in that pack but plenty of strong-looking sticks and I’m more confident I can make a good pack now with what I’ve got. 
I’m planning to make the pack up today, so overnight I’ve re-charged one of the sticks I’m planning to use that I’d fully discharged. I borrowed the bench supply from work, set the current control to 0.5A and put it on a mechanical timer overnight (in the socket):

Bit hokey but nothing exploded overnight. That also means nobody got hurt and nobody died, so I should be good to go. 

Still working on this. I got the 3rd pack apart and tested on Friday. More of a mixed bag in that pack but plenty of strong-looking sticks and I’m more confident I can make a good pack now with what I’ve got. 
I’m planning to make the pack up today, so overnight I’ve re-charged one of the sticks I’m planning to use that I’d fully discharged. I borrowed the bench supply from work, set the current control to 0.5A and put it on a mechanical timer overnight (in the socket):

Bit hokey but nothing exploded overnight. That also means nobody got hurt and nobody died, so I should be good to go. 

Literally no idea if this has ever been posted, but here it is again if so...
 

Literally no idea if this has ever been posted, but here it is again if so...
 

Literally no idea if this has ever been posted, but here it is again if so...