Tesluar

14months, i thought it was worse.
For all my spare time i now have a lovely new bathroom and renovated part of my house. Now thats done, i can get back to this.

i have the battery boxes made and their mounting frames. You can see two of the three locations mocked up with cardboard boxes. I'm pretty excited to have a frunk. Although in Australia, it would be called a froot.

I'm close to a solution for AC, i found a great company that lists all the individual parts with dimensions and that has been incredible to have when retrofitting something that never had AC!

Today i mocked the motor up into position, you can see i've made a rough jig to hold the wheel hubs in place while i build everything around them. The engineer is coming in 4 days to discuss the rear suspension, i have something i think will work but it really needs his eye to review it, he's forgotten more than i'll ever know about suspension design.

Some good progress recently. I’ve found a rear suspension solution and worked towards it and got some more parts and solved some future brake problems.

Suspension
The engineer changed my rear suspension design to be harder to make but stronger. I was hoping for a sexy space frame rear setup but he encouraged me to look for OEM parts I could adapt to fit. I found a tutor to walk me through autocad to design the parts but stumbled across another solution. I found out the tesla I have parts for uses 120x5 pcd similar to my jaguar. For shits and giggles I put the rear tesla hubs in my hub jig and with the motor roughly in place found the upper and lower control arms actually fit really well. Using the complete Tesla rear hub, brakes and control arms will save a lot of time and money, both of which I can better spend elsewhere.
That makes a new problem that I either modify the rear brakes to be smaller (originally 355mm, Jag rotors are 280mm) or modify the front (which are 280mm). Seems stupid to downgrade brakes so I think I’ll put Tesla brakes on the front, 355mm rotors (which almost fit) and use an adapter to fit the tesla caliper. I think that will look good, I’m already using the Tesla brake booster so basically a whole system swap which is helpful for brake bias issues too. Briefly look at stand alone ABS (since the rears already have the hardware but quicly shelved the idea… well maybe in the future).

jig
This weekend I’ve made a ridiculous jig to align the wheel hubs and motor and copy the Tesla suspension mounting points to be able to translate them to the Jag. Its taken two weeks of brainstorming to make a workable design and another several hours to build. The suspension mounts need to be able to move inward to accommodate the smaller track width of the jag, as well as being able to move down because the jag is lower. The motor also needs to move up, I’ve raised it to improve clearance as directed by the engineer. I’m working on this build being really high quality so even though it’s a temporary jog, I paid a lot of attention to detail. I hope it pays off. I even added adjustable bolts so I can level the jig in two axis. The cars have also been levelled. Photos are of the completed ‘negative’ jig that fits within the chassis side suspension mounts. I need to add a ‘positive’ jig to locate it in the jag based on the control arms attached to the hubs in the hub jig.

@Bryson, Thanks for the tip, actually the lower radiator mount was dented when i got the car, i remade it from scratch with thicker steel. for batteries I’ll be using 16 tesla modules for a standard 400v Tesla battery pack. I’ve also got a Tesla charger I’ll hack with a Zero EV board. I got a bunch of coolant pumps, a radiator and condenser that may be too big but were free and a Astra power steering pump that I thought about swapping for electrically assisted steering but not convinced I want to. Would like to for efficiency but want to stay to keep road feel and I have the pump already… open to ideas.