April | 2014 | TESFALIA

Good Progress

The Wreckla is almost ready to start its transmogrification into the Stretchla. It feels like progress is picking up lately. Although one might think it counterintuitive that I get more productive when allergy season hits, it makes sense when you consider that the small amount of Pseudoephedrine I take for allergies is basically some form of speed.

Air Conditioning

I wanted to insure the AC is working and also get comfortable with AC systems so I can modify them someday. To do that I needed an AC condenser on the left side of the Wreckla. I was resisting this a bit since the support that holds that part on the car was long gone. Fortunately a small plywood addition to my 2X6 DF headlight bracket plus a number of fresh bungee cords made for a surprisingly strong mount and it only took a few minutes to make. Road testing shows that it holds up to wind loading well above the speed limit.

Hacked installation of new AC condenser

Since the system had been open for a long time, I replaced the filter and dryer which are located in the right side condenser on the Model S.

Modern style AC dryer and filter

My friend Ross owns Horton’s German Auto Repair and fortunately he’s a great guy willing to help me out with his AC service machine. Per his suggestion we left the car on the vacuum pump overnight and charged it up in the morning after a leak check. It’s a good feeling to have it charged up since the AC now works well and I assume that the system is required for Supercharging.

Setting the Caster

I wanted to set the caster on the front suspension. It was not really necessary at this stage, but I knew I’d feel better understanding how to do it. Many thanks to Christopher Schimke for his write-up on The Samba on DIY Wheel Alignment. Christopher supplies parts to help out many Vanagon owners with his company T3Technique.com. I already have a very nice super level diamond polished floor, but one of the great ideas I picked up from his post was to put wax paper under the tires to let them slide in place much easier. I found that half a turn of the Model S steering wheel is about 20 degrees and so I recorded a bunch of caster measurements at neutral and +- 20 degrees of turning, adjusting the front suspension until they were balanced left to right and camber was in spec. Years ago I made an addition to my digital level, adding bolts to contact the wheel rim of the Stretch, fortunately the mod also fits well on these 19″ Tesla wheels.

Setting caster Charge Port Installation

I was concerned that people might get a bit freaked out if I were to pull up to the Supercharger and drape the cord into the rear hatch with highly visible orange high voltage cables (I’m sure the wrecked front of the car surprises people enough), so I spent a little time on “bodywork” to make the charge port and cover flap work properly in the original position. Along the way I discovered that the cover sensor is quite sensitive to the flap sitting flat on its latch. A little loosening of the flap mounting screws took care of the car warnings for the charge port being open. Not that it really matters, the car drives fine even if it thinks the port is open. The inlet was mostly undamaged in the accident but the impact did break half the mounting tabs. For now I used plastic repair epoxy to fix the broken tabs, but I’m concerned they won’t be strong enough for more than gentle handling. Although a new inlet assembly costs about the same as one from Nissan for a Chademo inlet, it’s almost a thousand dollars that I’d rather not spend for a couple broken tabs, so I’m still contemplating options to restore it to original strength.

Charge port and cover in close to the proper location

As for the Tesla taillight that I bought for such a great deal on ebay, it turns out that despite the sellers insistence that it was a US version, it wasn’t. It seems “ECE” does stand for European. Once I installed it I got an orange turn signal light which also lit up with the brake lights. It looked really cool, but for legality I went back to my US red light with the missing outer cover.

Louvers

I wired up the replacement louvers (also bought off ebay) with some connectors from Newark to replace the missing section of wiring harness. These are the two for the AC condensers and they seem to operate normally. I assume that installing them fixed a couple error codes, but I’ll have to wait until I get a report before I know for sure.

Collecting louvers

To the Supercharger!

With systems looking pretty good I headed off to my nearby Supercharger in Springfield Oregon. I was topping off the pack at home before I left just in case I couldn’t charge there and to allow for high energy use on the trip due to poor aerodynamics. In retrospect that was not needed and may not have been such a great idea for testing the Supercharging function.

Wreckla plugs in

I arrived and plugged it in.

Supercharging at 110 Amps and 394 Volts, the battery was already pretty full

The car ramped up to 43kW charge rate which is probably normal considering it was over 80% full when I started. I was a bit surprised that the AC did not kick in to pre-cool the battery. I wonder if that was normal for a cool battery and low charge rate, or maybe something is not quite right yet with the system. I don’t know the car well enough yet but eventually I’ll get an error report to see how it performed.

Supercharging the Wreckla

Now that the car is running pretty well I’m excited to start preparing the Stretch Vanagon body for the swap. Maybe it’s time to take some base weight measurements and start cleaning it out. The real adventure is about to begin!

-Otmar

Life is good and progress is fun!

Over the past few weeks I collected more parts, did some “mechanicing” and now the wrecked Model S that I’m calling “the Wreckla” is running around town. It’s not pretty, but it is running pretty well.

While waiting for parts I got one of those random late night urges to work on it and ended up doing some rough body shaping on the left rear corner. My goals were only for the hatch to close, the taillight to point approximately in the right direction and the charge port to fit. I’ve been eyeing the porta-power type jacks at Harbor Freight for weeks, but when it came down to the wire I grabbed the 20 ton jack from my gear press and some handy wood scraps to do the job. Mostly it worked. Of course this sort of work goes much faster when you don’t care about the looks or long term integrity of the car. I still need to do a little more shaping before the charge port fits properly.

The latest suspension parts arrived at the Tesla service center quickly. John “Plasma Boy” Wayland offered to ferry them south from Portland. John and I appreciate any excuse like this one to hang out and plot epic projects. Deb was also here that day we all went out for Chinese food. John tells excellent stories . As usual we all had a great time.

Pretty soon I set aside a little time for good old wrench turning. With such a unique project it feels a bit anticlimactic to do simple parts replacement. There was one unfortunately installed bolt in the lower suspension that made things interesting. It seems that the lower control arm bolt would do better to be inserted from the front in order to avoid having to cut it, or drop the battery pack for control arm replacement. I’m told that engineering at Tesla has been notified of the concern. It feels great to have a car company that responds in a positive way to input from customers! Not having an extra suspension bolt handy, I chose to drop the main pack instead. This had the side benefit of giving me the opportunity to properly install the pack in a way that was safe for driving and was on my to-do list anyway. I replaced the bolt from the front when I put it back together and it’s a good thing I did since shortly after I reinstalled the high voltage battery I discovered I had mounted that suspension arm upside down. With the bolt in the “right” way it was an easy matter to flip it over.

When I tried to install the new fan controller I discovered the studs that hold it to the aluminum frame had both been sheared off. This presented an opportunity to use one of my favorite fasteners, the rivet nut. I love rivnuts for putting threads in sheet metal. They are very handy, especially in automotive modifications. I use the Zink Yellow-Chromate plated steel ones to reduce dissimilar metal effects on aluminum.

The suspension went together smoothly as expected. I chose to replace the hub assembly just in case the bearings were damaged in the accident. I replaced the ride height and wheel speed sensors, bled the brakes and discovered that the front sway bar was bent more than I remembered. I’ll probably want to replace that. I was surprised that I could bend it back into shape at all, but I didn’t move it far enough and having been bent once I no longer trust its integrity.

Once the car was sitting on four wheels again (the first time since the accident!) I worked a bit on ride height and basic alignment. I’ve worked out simple ways to set toe in and camber in the shop (much of that can be done by eye if you know where to look) but caster is something I have not yet set using my simple tools. Maybe I’ll learn to do that on this project since the car is pulling slightly to the right. I think it’s not that important until I get the suspension installed under the Stretch.

Now that it was ready to drive, I needed to quickly get it looking quasi legal since it was Friday and the DMV was about to close for the weekend. So far the Tesla had not complained that I used a Vanagon heater core as it’s “radiator” so I went a bit further and “installed” a Vanagon headlight and turn signal on it. The same douglas fir 2×6 that helped straighten the rear corner was enlisted to support the lighting with the help of a C-clamp. Friends suggested I could finish the humorous look with a log strapped to the front as a bumper extension, but we never got around to that. The trip to the DMV was uneventful. Oregon seems to be one of the more free states in that way. Thier concern was that the VIN and emissions stickers were correct (emission sticker was finally found on the rear hatch) and they seemed uninterested in the lack of front fender or any other safety issues. I hear that some cities in Oregon require fenders, while others do not. That makes sense since many hot rods lack fenders and here in Oregon hot rods are big business.

At this point the ride height was still a bit off, so I spent some time finding the CAN packets that report ride height from the air suspension computer and then adjusted (bent) the old damaged ride height sensor bracket until the four corners were close to the same readings. I have a friend with a very expensive computer interface made for adjusting things like air ride height on luxury cars but unfortunately Tesla is not yet an option on the menus. If any of you happen to know the year make and model of car that also uses air suspension made by Continental, please let me know. I’m wishfully hoping this tool might allow me to properly adjust the ride height if I can figure out what car it should act like while connecting it to the CAN bus that is wired to the air suspension computer. Otherwise, I may run the “Wreckla” up to the Tesla service center to get it calibrated and the codes cleared.

I’ve been collecting a few more parts and tools. I recently won a louver on ebay and expect to get it any day now. Deb and I have paused our LIN work, though it’s very close to the point of testing on the car. I’m unsure if we’ll pursue that or not at this time since the running car is distracting and there are seemingly more important things to fix for now. Maybe I’ll find enough stock louvers so I can use them instead. Ironically I found a set of four air struts for less money that I paid for one new one. I bought them anyway so I’ll have spares in case I blow one out and need a replacement. On the subject of potential overload, I also bought a set of 7000lb car scales so I can keep track of weight budgets along the way.

My next priority is probably to get the cooling system worked out. That means somehow mounting the left AC condenser and charging the system. Then there won’t be much left to fix before I start moving parts to the Vanagon body. Summer is coming up quickly, I want to get some faster progress on the project so I can go camping!