The charger

The big job on Sunday was getting the Zivan installed. As you might recall, I made a mockup of the charger out of a cardboard box and found that it fit nicely over the nose rack. Cabling-wise, this was a lot better than installing it in the trunk (as I was planning to do with the Manzanita Micro charger) because the most positive and most negative ends of the battery string are right there.
To get it installed I needed to:
1. design, bend and weld the mounting bracket
2. paint said bracket
3. wire the output cables to the battery pack
4. crimp the cables to the supplied Anderson connector.
5. wire the 220 vac cable from the charger port to the charger input.

I started by laying some old floor mats over the batteries in the nose rack. I was then able to remove the bracket I made for the high voltage component box without worrying about shorts.

The bracket design was a bit tricky. The passenger side was the easy part, I just needed to make another straight bracket like I made for the high voltage box bracket, just bent in the opposite direction. But the other end, (where you see in the picture the the red and black cables plug in) was trickier. I could have run a straight piece of steel under the charger mounts, but it would have had to bolt to the airbag sensor, and I didn't want to mess with it. So, I used a bolt hole near the center of the cross brace (to the passenger side of the airbag sensor) and ran the steel at a 45 degree angle to the box bracket. This took care of one of the charger mounts (and stiffened up the box bracket too). The other charger mount was close to where the bracket attached to the middle bolt on the nose rack. I decided to weld a tab there to hold the mount. So designing it wasn't so bad, and neither was the welding, drilling or grinding. The painting went pretty smoothly too, though it was a bit windy in the back yard...

In between squirting on the coats of primer and paint, I made the output cables up. I had bought two 60" battery cables from Kragen to use on the DC/DC converter and the charger. For the charger, the red lead went to the terminal of the most positive battery - which is just to the driver side of the charger. Black lead goes to most negative - which is the input to the contactor (you don't want the switched side of the contactor or you will only be able to charge the car with the key switched on). The contactor is in the box mounted also to the driver side of the charger, so I could have got away with about a foot of cable, but I had plenty, and thought it would be better to have enough cable to unplug it easily and put it aside. You can see in the picture there is at least 2 feet of cable there.

I was concerned about the Anderson connector. These are special 2 conductor connectors designed for high voltage. I thought my wire might be too thick for the connector at 4 gauge instead of the usual 6 gauge. Comes out it fit right in and crimped solidly with my hand crimper (not the big one I borrowed).

Once the paint was dry, I removed the mats over the batteries and carefully put the brackets in place. the holes lined up fairly well, and it even looks pretty good.

Next was wiring up the input cable to the 220 volt line. The cable from the charger port was a little shorter than I liked - it only made it to the back of the Zilla. It would have been nicer if it had been a foot longer, but it was long enough to strip back the 3 wires. Being that it's a standard US cable, the wire code was black, white, green - green being ground and the black and white connecting to hot leads (actually, each are 110 vac, just 180 degrees out of phase to make 220vac). Anyway, the Zivan, being Italian, did not have the same color code. This was a little disconcerting. But after thinking about it, I realized that only the ground mattered, the other two leads just need to be connected to 110 vac each, it doesn't matter which one. I had considered using a connector so that I could easily disconnect the charger from input power, but I couldn't think of when I would need to disconnect it. So I hard wired it with some crimp on butt connectors. A little tape and it was good to go.

Only wish I had the 220vac outlet installed in my garage so I could plug it in.
That will have to wait for next weekend.