Monday, February 04, 2008

Well, if I do say so myself, the Tercel is looking pretty good. Can you tell I like orange? Since the last post I've finished the component board mount and I have the battery racks mostly done. It's not perfect, but it'll get the job done. Since I'm going to be mounting batteries underneath the front crossmember, I had to remove the brace underneath it. I had to add a whole bunch of extra bracing to make up for it. You can see that in the pic below.
Below you can see the front battery rack. This is going to hold three batteries. I would have liked to have had four up here, but there isn't quite enough room on the left side. I can always modify it later on. Hopefully I'll eventually be able to cram one or two more in there to take some weight out of the back. There's actually quite a bit of room here- you just have to spend the time to figure out how to use it all. I'll also have to find room up here for the 12v accessory battery.
Here's a look at what I'm working on for the rear battery rack. It's really just temporary. I'm going to be stuffing 10 batteries back here. Once I get the car dialed in, and get the batteries all where I want them, I'll sink them into the floor. This should let me have almost all of the original trunk space.

I have a lot of work to do yet. I still have to run all of the wiring (something that I'm going to think through a little more with this car than I did with my truck), assemble the component board, set up the gauges, work out the vacuum system, and of course, purchase and install batteries, along with a bunch of other little stuff.

This is going a lot faster than my truck, though. It really helps to know the basics of how everything is going to go together. I'm hoping to have this car on the road by the end of the month- we'll see what happens. Now that I've gotten this far, I'm getting really anxious to get it rolling. It looks like it's going to be a really fun car. Stay tuned!