This blog documents the restoration, and conversion, of a 1965 Humber (Singer) Vogue to a fully electric vehicle. The Vogue will be powered by an 11kW(modified), 3 phase industrial AC motor, controlled by an industry standard Variable Speed Drive (VSD) or Inverter. To be able to produce the 400 volts phase to phase the VSD will need about 600 VDC of batteries. A big thanks to the contributors on the AEVA forum: http://forums.aeva.asn.au/forums/

Friday, May 4, 2012

Steering Wheel Restoration

Last weekend I temporarily installed the dash/speedo and tried it out. The good news is that nothing bad happened and I even had the current sensing the right way around.
The bad news is that I was dismayed with the battery current indication. It varied from -1.5 to +0.9 Amps erratically. I added smoothing to the Hall effect device output in the engine bay and it totally settled down UNTIL I started the controller. Then it was erratic again. The DC Bus readout was also all over the place (actually the controller is outputting a signal representing accelerator torque demand at the moment so I'm not sure where that problem really is).

That started me fiddling with the speedo cluster. I added RC integration to both analog inputs and also did some averaging in software for both of them. They both now average over about one second. I'll try it again soon but there is not much more I can do. I also refined the low-trip-value range estimation - in fact I supressed the range display for the first km travelled on the trip meter.

Meantime, I took a small hacksaw to the narrow cracks in the steering wheel and filled them with epoxy putty. I'll file them out and sand the whole wheel this weekend and try to find a warm enough place to prime it. We have already purchased a custom made leather steering wheel cover from the UK.

Note how bad the rim was under the previous cover - I haven't sanded it yet, just cleaned it up with water and a light rub with a scotch-bright.


The old steering wheel cover.


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