README: Some common troubleshooting for a CityEl.

Own the fantastic City El trike ?
This is an area for you to hang out in.
User avatar
aminorjourney
Posts: 1084
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:24 am
Location: Bristol
Contact:

README: Some common troubleshooting for a CityEl.

Postby aminorjourney » Sun May 27, 2007 9:49 am

The City El (or Mini-El) is a great car for running around town in. Most of the time the car is great fun to drive and very easy to maintain. It rarely has any problems but if you're about to buy a second-hand one you may find some common problems need fixing before you can enjoy electric CityEl motoring!

If you're an owner already please post in this topic things you have come across during your ownership and how you fix them, along with perhaps what to look out for when buying so you know how to spot a problem before you spend money on a new car!

For those who are thinking about a City El please don't worry! Most problems can be fixed rather easily and I am working on getting a stock of parts in the UK so we don't have to wait for them to arrive from Germany!

Nikki.
Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield

EVangelist and Media Relations Coordinator, www.ZeroCarbonWorld.org
Host, www.transportevolved.com

http://about.me/aminorjourney/bio

User avatar
aminorjourney
Posts: 1084
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2006 5:24 am
Location: Bristol
Contact:

Broken Hood Switch

Postby aminorjourney » Mon May 28, 2007 7:26 am

If your City El turns on, lights up, but won't go anywhere when you select a gear and put your foot down then it's worth checking a few microswitches in the car before taking it apart and blaming something at the back.

The first of these is the hood Switch
Image
The switch is a saftey device designed to prevent the el from working if the roof is up. It stops you driving down the road and then suddenly having the roof raise up!

it's a simple lever arm switch and you can buy replacements from any electronic components place for a few £s. If you test the switch and it's broken you can temporarily bypass the switch by joining the two wires which go to it together, as shown in the photo. (The red wire with two spade connectors on it joining two wires!)
Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield

EVangelist and Media Relations Coordinator, www.ZeroCarbonWorld.org
Host, www.transportevolved.com

http://about.me/aminorjourney/bio

User avatar
booboo
Posts: 429
Joined: Fri May 25, 2007 8:08 am
Location: Creepy Crawley,West Sussex
Contact:

Postby booboo » Sun Jun 17, 2007 1:21 pm

At the moment my biggest hassle is the amount of time it takes for any spares to actually arrive. :wink:


I'm considering ordering a small stockpile of spares to keep "downtime" to a minimal if/when things break. :shock:


What should I put on my wishlist? I was guessing something like a few inner tubes,a drive belt etc.. :?:
London to Brighton on a Sinclair C5 - 6/5/07 - what a trip !
Ford Explorer 4.0 v6 petrol for everyday abuse - thank God for LPG
Sinclair C5's (Plus "c5alive.co.uk" ) as a hobby

anachrocomputer
Posts: 120
Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 9:17 pm
Location: Bristol, UK
Contact:

Postby anachrocomputer » Wed Jul 11, 2007 12:42 pm

There's a slight design flaw in the wiring of the brake lights of the City-El/Mini-El. All the current for the left-hand brake light flows through the connector behind the right-hand brake light. This means that a single faulty connector (on the right) will cause both lights to fail. And, one connector contact is carrying twice the current, so it does tend to fail.

Nikki has a photoset on Flickr that shows the source of the trouble:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aminorjourney/sets/72157594446482301/

I did think about bypassing the connector on my car, so that at least one brake light would continue to work, even with a bad connector. I havn't actually done that yet, though.
1994 Suzuki Cappuccino
1992 Mini-El electric bubblecar

User avatar
booboo
Posts: 429
Joined: Fri May 25, 2007 8:08 am
Location: Creepy Crawley,West Sussex
Contact:

Postby booboo » Mon Jul 30, 2007 9:57 pm

I noticed that the bracket holding the horn on Nikki's Cityel failed at Handcross during the London-Brighton run.

Whilst restoring my own mini-el I had to replace the defective horn and noticed that the bracket was made of two stips of metal "sandwiched" together.

One of the strips had already fractured, suggesting it might be an item worth checking on a regular basis.
London to Brighton on a Sinclair C5 - 6/5/07 - what a trip !
Ford Explorer 4.0 v6 petrol for everyday abuse - thank God for LPG
Sinclair C5's (Plus "c5alive.co.uk" ) as a hobby

anachrocomputer
Posts: 120
Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 9:17 pm
Location: Bristol, UK
Contact:

Postby anachrocomputer » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:22 pm

A quick fault report for one of the City-Els that we fixed at the El Weekend '08 in Bristol. This car was a Series III, and therefore had the newer-style relay board. The symptom was that the car would blow fuse F5 as soon as the main switch was turned on. This fuse is in the 12V feed to the instrument panel and also powers some of the relays that operate the heater and it also feeds the intermittent wiper circuit.

We removed the relay board for a closer inspection, suspecting a back-EMF diode on one of the heater relay coils. However, the fault was in a transient suppression diode near the intermittent wiper circuit. This circuit is based on a 555 timer chip. The dud diode was a dead short across the 12V power supply.

The diode part number was 1.5KE 15A, a number that made no sense to me at all, at first. another number on the part was 1N6275A. These numbers refer to a special type of zener-like transient suppression diode with a nominal voltage of 15V. Maplin's lists the diode as discontinued, but we were able to get the last two in stock at the Bristol branch (46p each).

Fitting the new diode cured the problem and all the City-El's instruments and accessories worked properly.
1994 Suzuki Cappuccino

1992 Mini-El electric bubblecar

anachrocomputer
Posts: 120
Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 9:17 pm
Location: Bristol, UK
Contact:

Postby anachrocomputer » Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:27 pm

Another fault report from the El Weekend '08, Bristol. We returned from testing one of the City-Els, and it failed on the driveway. We didn't hear the "clunk" of the contactors, so we immediately suspected the throttle pedal microswitch. However, that wasn't it.

The roof-open microswitch had been bypassed, as many have been, with a paper clip. This paper clip was making strong mechanical contact with the connectors, but not good electrical contact. We removed it and fitted a short length of wire with a male quarter-inch blade connector on each end.

Make sure that any switch by-pass wiring is sound! Probably a good idea to carry a short wire by-pass jumper in the car, in case of microswitch failure.
1994 Suzuki Cappuccino

1992 Mini-El electric bubblecar


Return to “City El”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests