[BigChief]

I recently bought a 2012 Smith Newton, the box truck style from Frito Lay. Well not exactly bought... I asked the seller to only ship it when it was confirmed to be able to drive/charge correctly, but they "misunderstood" and shipped it to me anyway! I had to pay the tow truck driver $3000 and sure enough the truck wouldn't charge or drive. Well, it charged string 1 out of 4 perfectly fine, but the other strings won't budge. String 2 is at 3 bars, and strings 3/4 show completely dead. After a day the Smith display won't load when I turn the key, it only appears while charging. The seller advised I leave it on the charger for several days, and then I found a technical service bulletin that describes a condition where the batteries self-destruct when you leave it on the charger for several days! The only advice it gave was to power off the 24v and pull out the 4 pucks to stop the drain from getting worse, but did not describe a fix (I assume that would have been up to Smith techs who are all scattered to the winds).

At this point, I have no idea if these A123 batteries are ruined. What should be my next steps? Should I buy those PCAN dongles and try to run some kind of commands?

 

[BigChief]

Yes, it is A123. I am waiting on some PCAN adapters to check the states of the cells. Someone had suggested I connect jumpers between battery packs in parallel to balance them manually; what would be the easiest way to try that, open both battery box lids and carefully use jumper cables? I unplugged one of the charger plugs from a battery string and tried a multimeter on the inlets but read no voltage; are there contactors inside the battery boxes?

 

[BigChief]

I got the PCAN adapters today and ran the Smith SCANNAR. Not looking great, seems like I have 4 modules with a single bad cell, and one module with 2 bad cells (all in dark blue). I assume the A123 batteries make it too difficult to swap out single cells, and that I'll need 5 working modules to get this online again?

I wonder what would have caused individual cells to fail in such a scattered fashion like that. I can see why A123 isn't really around anymore. I emailed the skeleton crew remaining at their offices and they told me to get lost, of course.

 

[BigChief]

You can get some replacement battery's. If your interested in giving Thunderstruck a call they have some units that have taken out of the step vans. Another option is to pull the units out and manually charge those low cells.

One way would be to make a Jumper and manually jump from one pack series ( SBS1 to SBS3 for example) to another. When you look at the design for the connectors on the battery pods the + /_ are on separate ports. So one has the positive and the other has the negative. You need to be super careful doing this since you can dump all that voltage to the low packs very very quickly and possibly cause a fire from the hot connectors etc... like 600amps at a moment. Another way would be to get it up to its minimum low balance voltage and it will burn off the high cells. I think the cell in SBS2 is shot! That one is going to be your holdout.

Thanks, that is probably a last resort as it looks like I need at least 5 modules at $520 each plus the cost of a palette worth of Hazmat shipping... that's not going to be cheap.

From what I'm learning, each cell is really 3 pouch cells together in parallel, so if one pouch cell is truly dead, the diagnostics might have no way of knowing?

I don't see how manually charging the low cells would help, they are below 2500mv which is supposed be where lifepo4 takes permanent damage. I was also told by an ex-Smith tech that 2000mv is the threshold where the BMS will no longer attempt to charge the cells back up. Those reading at 1900, 1700, or 1300 have got to be pretty much toast, right? I would think if they can be brought back up they would continue to throw the whole pack out of balance going forwards.

 

[BigChief]

A few questions if anyone knows:

1 - I took a picture of a single 84v module, and took the side cover off. Is there a way to individually charge each cell from only this side? The other side seems to have a cover that's not made to come off. I have a charger that is meant for single LiFePo4 cells, so I could hook it up with alligator clips or something to bring up low cells.

2 - To readdress a module, I'm supposed to use a dongle that goes from the module's 10-pin connector (there's apparently a board on both the positive and negative side of the module), to the PCAN dongle. Does anyone know what the name of the 10-pin connector would be, and what the pinout would be to translate it to the DB-9 on the PCAN?

 

[BigChief]

Oh, thanks! I am not sure exactly how the cells are grouped, but it seems like the best hint is those little holes stamped in the middle of the rows, are exactly 26 holes, and I know it's a 26 series battery. Should I be charging them like I illustrate with the colored squares? The way I'm holding the multimeter probes in the picture was giving reverse polarity to what was marked on the battery, but by placing the probes in the matching color areas it was giving 3.3v at polarity that coincides with the battery markings.

 

[BigChief]

i have a question i hope someone can answer. i bought one of the d75 step vans and copart has apparently lost the keys. Best i can find the steering column is Daewoo Avia d series and looks to share the ignition key and lock cylinder with an Isuzu NPR. since there is little info out there and i havent found any kind of key number for the van, i amhoping someone has had to deal with this and can help me out. i am going to pull the column apart next weekend. hopefully it is something i can pick up pretty easily. Thanks in Advance for any info!

My box truck version uses the same plain metal key for the door and the ignition. If yours is like that and it almost certainly is, then you can have any competent locksmith take apart the door cylinder and reverse engineer a key from that. There are mobile automotive locksmith vans where they carry equipment for that. Ask for a quote but it shouldn't be more than $100 for the locksmith's time and trouble. Fancy keys with RFID chips in them are expensive but this key is just a hunk of steel which is a nice change of pace for typical 2010-2012 vehicles. You might as well make several copies of the new key, I had it done at the local hardware store for $2 each.

It is a X236 (HY14) key blank.

 

[BigChief]

I figured out what people were talking about with the battery groups. The trick is to criss-cross my hands as I'm going down the battery pack to read all 26 series because the the polarities flip-flop/zig-zag. Conveniently all 8 of the modules in a battery tub have the tab-side facing outwards, so as long as you can use a forklift or engine hoist to lift the pack out of the plastic tub, you can remove the plastic lids and manually check all voltages without dissembling the pack further.

I did find the cells that Smith was reporting as 4mv, but according to my multimeter they are actually 547mv. I'm using a lab DC power supply to try charging it up to 3.3v like the rest of the pack, to see what will happen. That should be fine as long as I keep an eye on it? It seems to top out at 30 watts and right now it's only charging at 5.

What would cause a single cell group to fall so far below the rest of the pack anyway? I can't imagine anything besides some actual physical damage.

Also, when removing the battery pack from the tub, I notice there's no resistive heating unit in the pack. How was anyone buying these Smith Newtons supposed to charge them when they're out in below freezing weather? Was it just wishful thinking that they would never make it out of California? It wouldn't have been expensive to add, effectively a rubber electric blanket wrapped around the pack could bring the temp up while plugged into a charger before the charging begins.

 

[BigChief]

After a lot of work, I finally got all of the cells in the packs jumped above 2.5v.

The thing is, I manually took Pack 1 out of the truck, swapped a module out and charged the low cells to be close to the rest of the battery. When I put it back and charged the truck from AC it charged that whole battery to full and eventually balanced it.

Pack 2 on the other hand, I simply "jumped" the pack voltage up. The low cells went all the way up to 3.0v and the highest cells went up to 3.2v, which should be fine.

From there I tried to put the truck back on the AC charger. When I do so however, something is weird. When I fixed Pack 1 it was willing to charge both batteries in it, but this time around it refuses to seemingly turn on the charger for Pack 2. I'm not sure if I've actually ever seen Charger #2 turn on though. The circuit breaker panel does show that Charger #2 is energized when I plug in the J1172:

Pack 2 before jumping:

Pack 2 after jumping:

System is giving Yellow "caution" flags about the voltage difference between cells, but the documentation says Yellow shouldn't be enough to stop things from functioning? Maybe Yellow is enough to disallow Chager #2 as a failsafe? I'm not sure:

I'm getting pretty close to fixing this thing! Any ideas?

 

[BigChief]

Let me pose some simpler questions to narrow this down, if anyone is still around

Two things that have me stumped are that I've never seen charging indicated on battery tub #2, and that the two strings in #2 have been showing as very low SOC percentages this whole time, even though the pack voltages are quite high.

Has anyone ever seen "Charger 2" on this screen to be active? From what I've read, the truck has two chargers, but they are both contained inside the single charger box. I'm not sure if this app considers that to all be "Charger 1", or if there is indeed a Charger 2 and it is inactive for some reason. The circuit breaker box shows a green light for Charger 02 so I'm not sure what else the issue could be:

As shown below, the SOC levels on SBS3 and SBS4 are 5% and 20% respectively, yet the minimum/average cell voltages are plenty high because I jumped the packs. What dictates the SOC? Is the battery management system storing some colomb-counting values in memory, so that it becomes confused if I manually jump a pack? That's my best guess:

 

[BigChief]

I want one of these vans

Sadly there were tons of them that people bought cheap and ripped apart to resell the batteries on eBay. I can't imagine there's more than 50 on the road at this point. Luckily there's lots of electric Class 6 trucks that are the same size and capability, but they are all 2020/2021 models from BYD, Peterbilt, Lion etc and I can only imagine that brand new they'd all run over $200,000. I've tried to get quotes to check and most people won't give me the time of day, even though owning this Smith makes me an official trucker!

If anyone else has gotten quotes for the more modern electric class 6 trucks, please share them here.

The only one I managed an actual quote on was the Kenworth K270E. They wanted over $370,000 and that's not a typo.

 

[BigChief]

hi I just bought one too. Stuck on the smith logo. Need any help I could get.

Is this a 2010-era with Valence Batteries or a 2012-era with A123 batteries?

If it is the 2012 with A123 batteries, the most important thing you'll need is a PCAN USB adapter so that you see what's going on with the individual battery levels. The official adapter is $225 and it is called the "IPEH-002021", but I found a knockoff for $55. I bought two of the knockoff and can confirm they both work fine, but the power cuts out on one of them if I wiggle the USB. For the price difference, I'm not complaining. Here's the link anyway, they ship from China so it might take a few weeks: 55.8US $ |Replace PEAK PCAN USB IPEH 002021 IPEH 002022 PCAN View|Contactors| - AliExpress

If any individual battery cells are below 2.5v, the entire truck will refuse to drive or charge. To bring up the voltage I know three methods, with varying levels of danger and expense.

 

[BigChief]

What are the options to charge them up. U willing to sell me one of the connectors alibaba is saying deliver by nov 2

Sure, I'll sell you one for what I paid, I sent you a message.