Thanks,

I'm trying to keep the car and the conversion to show standard, as I'd like to maybe show the car in a concours event, modified class at some future date.

Regards Paul

So, the first job on the instrument cluster was to strip it down and remove the fuel and temperature gauge's. Here they are now surplus to requirements:

The resulting holes in the instrument face plate panel needed to be made good with matching material. I scratched my head for a bit until discovering that 3.5 inch floppy disk case plastic was exactly right for this, so got busy cutting up a couple of old floppy's to salvage the plastic. This was cut to suit to both blank the original holes and provide new apertures of exactly the right size needed to install the new temperature gauges. The new guages were then installed into the face plate using appropriate bonding sealant.

Once the sealant had cured, a little modification using a dremmel tool was needed to the plastic casing of the instrument cluster to allow clearance for the back of the right hand meter where a moulding for the low petrol warning light had once been!

The finishing touch prior to re-assembly was to add the "C" & "M" logo's under the gauges to signify which is which for the motor and controller. These are the same size and font as the MPH under the speedo, they are also exactly in line with the original lettering under the speedo, hopefully this adds to the "original" feel of the job.

Following this, all the parts were carefully cleaned and the instrument panel re-assembled. The gauge supply wiring was then soldered to the appropriate part of the circuit board at the rear via the small 5v-12v converter. The temperature probe wires were fed through the bulkhead to the engine bay and all was re-assembled. You can see the finished results below:

Again, I'm very happy with the results, and the colours and style of these gauges when lit (see earlier post) go quite well with the existing clocks in the binnacle.

More soon...

Edited 30 September, 200916 yr by favguy

OMG dude that is amazing!!!! I'm ainiming to have my Favorit perfect one day.

Great stuff!!!

if i may, i have a few questions, how is the electric motor coupled to the skoda transmission/gearbox?

i presume the original accelerator pedal is attached to some kind of resistor array to aid low speed running which gradually steps out the resistance as the speed increases??

Hi Teflontom,

The motor will be mounted to the transmission via a heavy alloy plate machined to suit, then a coupling will be made up utilising part of the original clutch disk to connect the output shaft of the motor to the transmission. No clutch will be used as there is no engine and flywheel under power/creating inertia to need one, once the throttle is released and thus electicity to the motor gone, there is effectively just a few Kilo's of armature connected to and spinning with the output shaft of the transmission, therefore gears can be changed without the need for a clutch

The throttle is connected to a potentiometer, (actually very similar to a TPS sensor) that tells the motor controller the throttle position.

If you have any further questions, let me know

Best regards

Paul

Edited 25 September, 200916 yr by favguy

i presume the original accelerator pedal is attached to some kind of resistor array to aid low speed running which gradually steps out the resistance as the speed increases??

I think that's how Scalectrix works?

Project coming along very well, extremely interesting.

Hi Teflontom,

The motor will be mounted to the transmission via a heavy alloy plate machined to suit, then a coupling will be made up utilising part of the original clutch disk to connect the output shaft of the motor to the transmission. No clutch will be used as there is no engine and flywheel under power/creating inertia to need one, once the throttle is released and thus electicity to the motor gone, there is effectively just a few Kilo's of armature connected to and spinning withh the output shaft of the transmission, therefore gears can be changed without the need for a clutch

The throttle is connected to a potentiometer, (actually very similar to a TPS sensor) that tells the motor controller the throttle position.

If you have any further questions, let me know

Best regards

Paul

:confused::confused::confused: I didn't get that

so effectively you will remove all the friction material from the clutch plate, then drill the centre plates of the clutch plate to accept a drive flange which is attached to the motor shaft? maybe a driveshaft hub flange with a spline the same same (18mm iirc) would be better to slide over the end of the gearbox input shaft?

will the gear oil be hot enough to work effieciently allowing smooth gear changes?

Captain Sisko, you didn't get which bit? The reason for not needing the clutch? If so let me know and I'll try to elaborate further:thumbup:

Paul

Teflontom,

Something like that yes! The output shaft of the motor is a 1&1/8" keyed shaft, a machine shop will make up a suitable coupling to go from this to the splined input shaft of the trans. using the centre of the clutch plate with the friction material machined off and bolted to the coupling face.This is a good option because you get the benefit of the springs in the clutch disk allowing a little give when taking up drive.

I'm buying this in made to spec. from a company in the US who are supplying my motor, there are several ways of doing this, but this method has proved successfull over time, if I can I'll try to find you a pic of the finished coupling, will make things clearer.

Regarding the transmission oil, it will run at the same temp. give or take, as with a petrol engine, the reason you can shift gears without a clutch is you don't have a rotating powered mass to remove as with an engine, so the existing sychro's that let you change gear with the clutch on a petrol engined car (remember the transmission gears continue to rotate whilst you do this!) can handle the now very small amount of extra unpowered rotating mass still on the end of the transmission input shaft (ie, the unpowered armature of the motor)

It did take me me a while to grasp the concept of why it works without the clutch, I must confess!

Paul

sounds like a genius system to me. is there a switch on the pedal to disengage power from the motor and letting it freewheel whilst you are changing gear?

Ok, time for a bit more on the instruments.

I took the opportunity to include the facility to see the outside ambient temperature, pressing this switch will allow you to toggle between motor and outside temperature. (The plastic blank you can see to the right of this fills what was the original immobiliser keyslot for those who were wondering):

The following before and after pictures show the old headlamp adjustment switch and then the new cruise control panel, this was screwed to the original stripped out headlighht switch panel, again with the help of some floppy disk plastic to finish the job!

Beneath this you can see the emergency stop pull. (This is in exactly the same position as the choke cable on the Mk1 Favorit, the support moulding was still in the dash plastic for this!) The other end of this cable activates the main breaker, isolating the main battery pack voltage from the system. This is just for use in the case of a catastrophic emergency where the controller has failed with full power to the motor and the electrically operated solenoids have welded shut and failed to release via the ignition key, hopefully it'll never need to be used lol!!! :

Before:

And after:

Ok, so next we're on to the battery monitor array...

Edited 25 September, 200916 yr by favguy

Hi Teflontom,

Releasing the throttle automatically removes all power from the motor, remember, there is no "idle" or "tickover" to keep the engine going as with petrol or diesel.

The concept is really different to fuel burning engines. For example you start with 100% torque at zero RPM, then unlike petrol or diesel, it drops away as the motors RPM increases. You could even get an example where you wanted more power to overtake quickly and you would change up a gear not down!!:eek:

You almost never set off in first, as you'd literally burn rubber all the way down the road! Normally set off in second or third, depending on type of road, and only need to change up one or two gears, will probably never need fifth at all either.

That electric Lotus Elise has one gear, so is directly driven, would it not be easier to do that? Or would the addition of the gear box give the car a longer range?

Hi Babs,

Well you could just go with direct drive through a reduction box, but it's much easier to engineer using the original transmission and gives more flexibility having the use of gears.

You also need a much higher end motor to give adequate torque and very high RPM ability over the whole range of speed if you go the no transmission route and that means ££££ more in costs.

*Updated 23/05/2011* Wasn't at all happy with the original, so rebuilt it better, re-write & pics below:

Ok, so onto the battery monitor array. This had to be built from scratch and actually turned into quite a fun project, at least it gave me plenty of opportunity to practice my soldering skills!

Firstly the centre console was dismantled and the centre section removed for attention. The top section of the console that was initially used for storing cassettes (like we need them now!! lol!!) was sacrificed to house the array. I started by cutting out the rear of the cassette box as needed. I then made up a front plate from appropriate sheet plastic and bonded it to the console. A main on/off switch for the array was then fitted to the lower centre of the cut out.

The next job was to create a tinted face plate for the display, 2mm clear perspex was cut for this then tinted using light tint spray to the correct shade, so the LED displays show through very nicely when lit, but it doesn't show through when turned off.

I then got to work making up the array. Stripboard for circuit building was cut up to the right size to accomodate a total of 24 circuits, with 2 to each board, one above the other, this meant a total of 12 boards. The copper strips were cut in various places on all of the boards and several jump links per board were also added to create the necessary circuit pathways. Following on from this, the 20 segment LED's were soldered in place, each of these provides for 2 of the readouts. The 24 control chips were then added to the boards, followed by several resisters, 2 potentiometers, a diode and capacitor per circuit. From start to finish of all the individual boards took the best part of 4 days of assembly and soldering!

The boards were superglued together via the LED displays to form the array and additional stripboards were also glued to the top, bottom & rear of the unit to give rigidity and allow for mounting. The circuit on/off relays are glued to the rear of the back board.

All the displays were temporarily hooked up in parallel and calibrated using a bench variable DC supply to set the upper and lower voltage limits.

After this another few very tedious hours ensued as the temporary parallel conections were unsoldered and the circuits were wired to the appropriate relays and in turn, the relays wired to the master switch and output plugs that will eventually go to the individual batteries.

The complete array was then mounted into the rear of the console.

And the finished result from the rear:

And in the car:

And for those of you that can't remember my first effort, here it is for comparison, yeuch!

So there you have it, definately my favourite display now

Edited 24 May, 201115 yr by favguy

Hi Simbo99,

Yes I'll definately be taking it to local meets. Re-gen won't be used as I'm using a series wound DC motor that won't support it, the concensus with regen in general is that it can give up to about 10% extra range, but only if you're in a hilly area, locally it would be marginal and it would have meant using a much more expensive AC setup, so I decided against it

Paul

Edited 28 September, 200916 yr by favguy

So that's the dashboard alterations and instrumentation finished! Hopefully it has a professional look to it, I'm quite happy with it, and it looks really nice lit up in the dark. Below is the only picture I currently have of the finished item:

I'll try and post some better pictures shortly including a "lit up" picture if the camara will let me.

I'd really appreciate any feedback as to wheather or not you think I've acheived a "factory original" look to the dash, or for that matter if you think the end result is good, bad, or ugly lol!!

Regards

Paul

Edited 26 September, 200916 yr by favguy

I think that that interior looks fantastic and you've done a remarkable job. I hope you manage to get this car to a Briskoda meet in the future so people can see it in the flesh

This Favorit is awesome!! I'm in Lincolnshire mate I'd love to see it in the flesh sometime!

The quality on the finish is sublime.

Can I be the first to say that the dashboard's looking dashing?

:iagree:

Will have some more minor updates soon, but no more major work just yet, need to get some more money in to buy kit :-(

Regards

Paul

Hi all, Well I thought I'd give you all a bit of an update on the Favorit. It's not on the electric conversion itself, but on the audio system.

I wanted to upgrade from the original system for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was only a two channel head unit running the two front door speakers.

Secondly it was only a puny 10 watt peak power output.

Thirdly, there was no option for connecting a cd changer to it.

Also, and this might sound strange, it had orange backlighting, which I always thought looked odd as the rest of the dash backlighting is green. (Although the new meters are backlit in Blue (no green available!) this seems to work with green, orange doesn't!)

So I needed to find a newer, more powerful head unit that was still in keeping with the look of the dash and backlit in green. Turns out that daewoo's from around 2004 had a suitable head unit, made by Blaupunkt with a four channel 40 watt output and CD changer connectivity, old school looks and I found a nice one on ebay for very little. Matches the dash really well I think.

Bought a nice Blaupunkt 10 cd changer to mate up to it, again from ebay.

Also speakers for the rear of the car.

And finally tweeters to supplement the original front speakers.

I decided to keep the original front speakers, I don't know what the power output is, but they have pretty large magnets and can cope with the new system turned right up to more than I'd ever play it at with no distortion!

Edited 2 November, 200916 yr by favguy

I started by running the new rear speaker and CD changer cables from the dash to the boot area. Then I needed to run a dash lighting feed and ignition switched 12v+ feed to the radio area as the original unit didn't require them. spliced everything up and taped it nicey into a loom to plug into the new head unit and fitted it.

Here's a shot of the radio fitted.

The rear speakers were cut into the parcel shelf as shown in the pictures below. I had to come up with a solution to allow the parcel shelf to be removed, so jack plug sockets were fitted into the plastic side panels at each side of the shelf, just in front of the hinge mount position. The speaker wires are glued to the underside of the shelf and then run under the hinges to hold them in place. They were terminated wth 90 degree jack plugs. The end result is, I think quite neat, I may look out for some suitable size covers to go over the exposed speaker backs, but I don't think they look too offensive as is.

The speakers are Kenwood three way and more than capable of handling the maximum output from the new headunit.

The CD changer was fitted next. There was a nice spot to the left of the battery box just begging to be used for something. A nice flat pressing on the floor made fitting of this very easy using suitable plated self tapping screws after drilling the holes. the screws and hole edges were doused in cavity wax during installation to avoid the possibility of causing any future rust, also the screws actually go into a box section cavity so no protruding screws under the car

As said earlier, the nice dual cone front "Skodasound" woofers seemed well up to the task of coping with the new output, but I thought the sound quality would benefit from a nice pair of tweeters, so these were installed in parallel (with appropriate crossover capacitors) high up in the front door panels. I think they look in keeping with the existing front speakers.

Hopefully the end result is quite "factory" looking, which is always my intention, and the sound quality is simply amazing now, at least by my standards! (I'm sure you big amp and subwoofer guys will laugh at its punyness!!!).

Also, If I ever get properly into the 21st century with everyone else, the headunit has an aux. input at the rear that could be hooked up to an ipod, or else I can just insert one of the cassette to ipod adapters into the cassette slot.

Thats it for now, I'll try to get back soon.

Paul

Edited 2 November, 200916 yr by favguy