Battery Vehicle Society

Fixed normal car, collected pallet truck, revising method, start tomorrow with clear head.......to be continued....

All pipes and hand brake cable free, this is easy so far, until....
Dumb question....so I've found no mention of cable removal. Do the fuse and Barre holders just come off with cables attached, mine aren't and i can't find any reference on this forum

Cables come out of the barre / fuse. You need a decent torx driver. If the end of yours is at all worn dont use it as the torx head in the fuse etc is quite shallow. I tend to use a driver rather than a fan out set for these as they need to be treated with care.
Dont lose the metal clips on the coolant hoses.
Grumpy-b

Well, the dreaded centre coffin is out. Thanks for all the tips, it's easy when you know how. My internet is limited to intermittent 3g on a so called smart phone but I will try to put some pics on here.
What a sense of achievement
One cell was obviously un well, split case around top and no coolant. Took some removing as it had melted into it's neighbour....

berlingoian wrote:Well, the dreaded centre coffin is out. Thanks for all the tips, it's easy when you know how. My internet is limited to intermittent 3g on a so called smart phone but I will try to put some pics on here.
What a sense of achievement
One cell was obviously un well, split case around top and no coolant. Took some removing as it had melted into it's neighbour....

Well done,keep it up don' forget hammer the buggers load every one of them good style, and find out why that cell melted, GRUMPY will guide you, cheers HARRY.

Thats what comes of letting the electrolyte get too low and what can take place not just driving but when you try and charge . Make sure the adjacent cells are OK. Its likely that the cells downstream of the damaged cell havnt been watered as it may well have come out through this damaged cell. So do re water after you sort this out.
Rebuild the centre pack with cells from the rear pack and then its an easy step when the new ones are obtained. The center pack can be put back in and the van can go back down on wheels.
If a cell is badly melted to its neighbour, I would be tempted to change that as well if you have enough spares, if not put it in the back pack.

Grumpy-b

So, how do I know if electrolyte is/has been too low.
I have been pretty gentle driving 50 miles and generally top up with water @ 500.
This current (pun intended) issue came spectacularly oUt of the blue, which I intuit as sudden failure of case, thus losing coolant and overheating, rather than being low on electrolyte, overheating then spilling coolant from cracked case. Chicken & egg?


I have no spare batteries
Any offers?

What I was saying was that if you have had a physical failure like this and the battery had been holed, the watering of the string of cells may not have been completed as the water would have been unable to get to the cells beyond the damaged one. So just decide if the damage would have prevented the water from flowing to the subsequent cell. It can only do that if a cell is full and the water then progresses along the pipe to the next cell and so on until it goes out of the overflow tube. It cant do that if the cell is holed and leaking badly.

Grumpy-b

Aha! I see. I take your point ....when I last watered, day or so after the initial problem, it took 12 l and overflowed from the bank ,as expected.
I'm wondering now if it lost some coolant, took the watering, lost sime more, then melted....that would explain sequence of events..

If it overflowed then it must have passed through to the other cells. So they should have been watered OK.

Grumpy-b