Heater Installed

I installed the heater box on the cabin side of the firewall on the weekend. It's all wired up to the traction battery system but not tested yet. I want the DC current metering installed (dashboard required)  before I try it. I did try the 12V blower - it's a bit rumbly. Somewhere I saw replacement vibration mounts for the fan motor but I can't remember where. It's easy enough to do another time.

One Finished Armrest

Look Ma - no wrinkles.
Three more to go.
It took about an hour to do this one. I avoided getting any glue on the foam underneath so it's only glued to the flat metal base of the top part. That way it can be easily recovered in the future. It took a lot of patient stretching of the material and 'V' cuts to get it to fit perfectly.

Armrests as internal door pulls

The Vogue originally had little chrome handles mounted just under the door wind-up windows that were used to pull the doors closed - as in this before picture.

Note that the door section above the wood trim is black vinyl. When we had the Vogue resprayed we chose to have this section in the same metallic blue as the lower section of the car - no vinyl. That would mean that every time someone closed the door, they would scratch the paint with their fingernails. Since the Humber Super Snipe (my other car) does not have these handles I decided to leave them off the Vogue as well, so the holes were filled prior to painting.
Now to the point! The armrests will be used to close the door, same as the Snipe.

This is the red vinyl armrest. The vinyl has shrunk a fair bit.

 The upper and lower section of the armrest are held together like a clamshell with two screws.
 When you remove the screws, and peel off the red vinyl you are left with this upper section. I had to be careful not to damage the foam too much or the new velour would appear "bumpy".

 We have chosen to use the blue velour on the armrests as it will be a little bit more forgiving of dirty hands. Here is my blue velour - cut to shape.

The lower section of the armrest is black plastic and while all of them are is pretty good condition, they have become slightly transparent so I have coated this first one with a vinyl paint on the inside. I came across this vinyl paint when my daughter needed some cheap black shoes of a certain style for waitressing and she could only buy white shoes. The paint is water based and intended for vinyl, leather and plastic and sticks very well. The inside of the armrest will be a pretty safe place for it.
Pictures coming...

Still Progressing

The driver's seat was set back slightly after Laurel had sewed in one side of the seat-back zips. She realised that she hadn't used a "zipper foot" on the passenger seat, so she will have to unpick the driver's zip and re-do it. That and me stuffing my back moving a set of drawers (my back nearly better), meant that the last two days of my week off were not productive.
I did manage to crawl under the car and plan the route for the heater wiring. It can't run near any low voltage or signalling wires as it will radiate a bit of noise and I was concerned that there wasn't a suitable path for it - there is! I also pulled the heater apart again and added some extra mica sheet insulation around the inside of the box to protect the high voltage wiring from arcing to ground. I'm getting a bit paranoid about DC arcing - fuses or not.
More soon.

New Seatbelts

The seatbelts that came out of the Vogue were way past their use-by. The front ones were very faded and the rear were not much better - and they didn't match the front. From out of the blue I had an offer from one of the AEVA members that reads this blog (and incidently developed the speadsheet that the Vogue motor/controller specifications were designed from), for a set of seatbelts. It seemed he had been shipped the wrong ones from the USA and was instructed not to bother to return them. They have chrome buckles and are a great period match for the car.
Here is one with the front passenger seat. They are a perfect match for colour scheme in the Vogue.

Even Xena (the rag stealer) likes them. Thanks Anthony.

Passenger seat finished, Driver seat halfway

It's been all upholstery this week. I have done a small amout of trimming on the actual car but mostly it's been seats.
This is the finished front passenger seat. It sits in our lounge room until the windscreen is in the car in a day or so. Of course the windscreen has to wait until the drivers seat is finished so that laurel can breathe a sign of relief.

The current state of the drivers seat. We didn't make the same mistake twice and we waited until the seat was foamed up before pinning the fabric correctly using the seat as the final pattern.

Since this picture was taken, the seat base fabric has been finished (but not clipped in yet) and the seat back foam has had the extra bits added and is ready to upholster.

Front passenger seat base fabric finished.

We clipped the fabric to the seat base last night and cut it to fit around the fiddly bits.

Charger fan replaced. Seat clips de-rusted.

I installed the replacement fan in the charger last night - all good.
When I collected the container of clips for front passenger and driver seats I realised that I had rust-converted them but not painted them (I haven't found a replacement clip of this size so I have to reclaim them). So last night I painted all the clips. I will be re-assembling the front seats with the same thing in mind as the rear - minimal or no glue (except on the silver area) so they can be disassembled to adjust the fabric if required.

I put the MGB seat diaphragms on eBay a few days ago. I might come close to no-loss. They have already had a bid. No takers yet on the VW Polo accelerator pedal that I bought before the Audi pedal that I ended up using.

Charger Fan failed!

The car is not even quite on the road and I have had my first electronic failure. A couple of weeks ago I was doing a top up charge on the batteries. It's pretty easy to check if all the packs are at charge completion because the chargers stop cycling on and off. When they cycle on it's obvious because, in the quiet of the garage at night, you can hear the charger's fan - and the fan only starts when the pack allows full current during charge. I happened to be around the back of the car when I saw the charger for Pack #2 light it's red LED - but no fan noise. So last week I pulled the charger out and removed the fan.
The faulty fan.

Fortunately for me there has been a large project at work that used these 40mm, 10mm thick 12V fans so I asked today if there were spares - and there were (thanks Brian). The replacement is 0.8W and the bad one is 0.06A (0.72W) but the extra 6.7mA should be OK.

The new fan.

Seat Fabric glue improvements.

One of the things that did not go as well as I would have liked on the rear seats was that we were after a particular look with the silver seat inserts that was difficult to get. The problem is that the silver part needs to be glued to the foam underneath but in so doing, the slight plush effect is easy to lose. With the rear seat we sprayed glue on the foam but tried only to bring the silver fabric in contact with the glue at the seams.
The raised sections you see below are easily lost if the whole lot gets glued down.

To make this job simpler on the front seats, we decided to glue some poly-cotton fabric to the seams in advance. That way the final job of gluing the whole lot to the seat foam would be simpler. (Later addition to post 03-Apr-2012: We cut the poly-cotton squares at 45 degrees to the weave to allow it to stretch easily.)

I used thin cardboard to mask in between the seams and sprayed 3M High Tack just on the seams. Then the cardboard was removed and the poly cotton pressed down on the seams.

Once the glue was dry, I trimmed the poly-cotton close to the edges of the silver fabric. We glued it onto the front passenger seat base last night and it was a LOT easier.

I'll clip the rest up tonight and post some pics.

I have also disassembled the drivers seat, de-rusted, rust-convert painted then final black painted. it.

There was one broken spring (there are four springs across the front), but fortunately I have a spare back seat under the house and the springs are the same type just with more curvy bits. A quick hacksaw and I now have four springs for the drivers seat. Now that the passenger front seat fabric looks like it's fitting nicely, we will cut up the blue fabric for the drivers seat and Laurel will sew up the drivers seat upholstery during the Easter break. The silver pieced sections for the drivers seat are already sewed.