Leaf swapped Nissan 720…. On the side of the road!

[Bratitude]

So! Amongst being extremely busy, and between 3 towns all 300km ish away from each other…. I picked up a rust free 5speed Nissan/datsun 720 king cab with a blowen engine…. It was too perfect to pass up!

Only problem: it’s in the port albernie valley, and the closest place I can bring it to was the coast( where I live part of the time)

There is no garage space, and it’s middle of winter. And my collection of ev parts are about 300km away between Vancouver and Victoria.
So here’s the pan:
I’ll tow it to the coast, pull the engine, bring over the ev parts, swap it on the side of the road, and drive it 300km back to the shop, strip it down then rebuild and restore.

so let’s get to work!


Towed it back to an empty lot in town, and borrowed a friends engine hoist and got to de icing.

Just as I got the engine out it started to rain. Good timing! It’s been a long day.
The next day I took some quick measurements, and pulled the clutchdisk, then off to the big city to pickup up the drive train parts!

What have already:
-Chevy volt battery
-full leaf stack
-leaf to Nissan 5spd adapter plate
-zombieverter

Dropped the leaf coupler and clutch disk off at A&A preference chaise in Victoria, they had the coupler all welded up the next day. With the brat loaded up, back to the coast!

Leaf stack placed in the engine bay

input shaft on the gearbox needs to get cutdown as there’s not enough backspacing.

And the leaf motor fits!

[Bratitude]

pickup the volt battery, zombie and miscellaneous wiring/cooling parts.

Got everything situated, then 2 weeks of heavy rain.

Sun finally broke this week, and quickly got to work. With some scrap metal made some brackets and strapped everything down.

Let’s go for a drive!

Just like the cabriolet, very little torque in reverse. Couldn’t move the truck in first gear.

Runs smooth, needs new shocks.

And the pdm is a dud. no dcdc and charger. The leaf stack was 350$ cad, so still wining in my books!
Okay one more trip hopefully. I have a spare pdm and an outlander OBC.

[johu]

So this is the 2 day conversion then

[Bratitude]

So this is the 2 day conversion then

technically i guess so! in the amount of time actually spent in assembly...just lots of trips gathering all the parts

[Bratitude]

On the test drive after a while it just cut out, I thought my 12v was dead, but still ran the contactors. Udc dropped bellow min value…. Battery drains rather quick! Okay limped it to the charging nearby. 2 days later (rained again) I drove the brat over and set up a umbilical cord to charger it back up…

Charging at 6kw… didn’t take long to get to 390v so now I’m concerned that this volt pack has a low soh.

[Bratitude]

okay so im getting huge voltage sage. this pack seems like a dud.

might need to sit on trickle charge but at this point looks like i have to bring over the old brat pack (gen2 volt pack)

[johu]

That's pretty bad even for cold temps

[Bratitude]

Okay silly me, I routed some lines for driving the CHAdeMO relays to the pdm plug. Doing so I forgot to properly plug a connector back in. dcdc now works!

Still no charging. evse kicks on when plugged in, I can still drive, and no power is transferred. No change in web interface.

Everything is on can1, white and brown wires from pdm are connected to white and green on charge port.

[m.art.y]

white and brown wires from pdm are connected to white and green on charge port.

Try swaping those wires round? Which firmware you have on the Zombie? At least the 1.11A had a bug where AC charging didn't work on the PDM.

[Bratitude]

Updated to 2.04, I’ll try that again but the evse gives an error and locks out.

[Bratitude]

okay after letting the battery sit overnight, battery still sitting at 375v and no big voltage sag like yesterday in the parking lot. which is at the bottom of a steep hill...everything looking okay... and drove across town! yew haw!

[Bratitude]

Back at the shop, got my outlander OBC charging with the zombie.

Proximity pilot from charge port connected to analog 1in on zombie (pin 9)

Control pilot from charger port connected to outlander OBC (pin 9, blue)

Now what are the odds of when I get back to the 720 and the pdm starts charging ….


Also got sponsored by https://openvolt.xyz/, they hooked up a sweet opensource level 2 charger

[Sector7e]

Back at the shop, got my outlander OBC charging with the zombie. IMG_2091.jpeg

Proximity pilot from charge port connected to analog 1in on zombie (pin 9)

Control pilot from charger port connected to outlander OBC (pin 9, blue)

Now what are the odds of when I get back to the 720 and the pdm starts charging ….


Also got sponsored by https://openvolt.xyz/, they hooked up a sweet opensource level 2 chargerIMG_2086.jpeg

Is this the root of your charging issue? I'm hoping to try and charge my Hardbody with the ZombieVerter and PDM next week: https://github.com/damienmaguire/Stm32-vcu/issues/91

Also, do you have any pictures of the leaf motor mounts?

[Bratitude]

Few updates:

new shocks, some new front tires.
And the gen2 volt pack is now temporarily installed behind the seats in the king cab. This will get me to the shop, where I can start making boxes for a e golf pack.

And a leaf inverter coolent mod. The rear spigot was too tight to the firewall. So pulled the coolant plate off, drill a hole and welded on a threaded bung to pipe coolant in from the top.

[Iceman96]

Great progress you got going there! Out of interest - did you need to move the gearbox forward to allow the inverter to clear the firewall? And I noticed that you relocated the pdm - was that foe clearance with the bonnet?

[Bratitude]

Great progress you got going there! Out of interest - did you need to move the gearbox forward to allow the inverter to clear the firewall? And I noticed that you relocated the pdm - was that foe clearance with the bonnet?

Gearbox didn’t move, motor and inverter just fit.

I know that there are a bunch of different Nissan gearbox’s with different tail and face lengths relative to the shifter.

I’m sure there’s a bellhousing that would allow the full stack to clear the fire wall.

pdm overhangs so it hits the firewall. And bonnet dose not close.

the steering linkage is the limiting factor in lower the transmission. I may mod that to get the pdm to clear. Full leaf stack would be ideal. But also thinking of a gs450h…

[P.S.Mangelsdorf]

Somehow, I missed this build thread until just now. Also, it answer's my friend's question to me from a week ago on whether a conversion could be done in a weekend. If you do your homework and are really good, it can!

Awesome work!

[Bratitude]

Worked on the wiring harness, the coolant loop and general tidy ups, came back out to the truck after dinner and fired it up!

Wows a proper stiff battery pack really lets the leaf motor light them tires up!

No coolant yet, that’s on tomorrows todo list

very fun truck to drive!

caught the light down at the dock

[Bratitude]

Longest drive yet, 85km.

drove hard 100km/h roughly for the first 40km, and gave the girl her first wash.
What a Beautie, A buff and a wax it going to look amazing!

Stoped for a beach check on the way home, then started taking it easy, then very easy, then limped it back.

I’d say battery is 14ish kWh usable 3.0v- 4.16

I’d say that’s pretty dam good for:
-Tow truck mirrors
-no grill block( it’s a big air scoop!)
-bald old tires
-misaligned from end
-maniac driver
-stock incident lighting and other various un deleted oem 12v draws

So with some efficiency improvements, and chill driving 100km should be well with reach!

[Bratitude]

Been daily driving the truck for the past while, and slowly tidying things up.

Temporary CHAdeMO was added

Did a big round trip across Vancouver island loaded with solar, over 600km total.

engine bay:

few brackets to mount everything down, cable sheathing, and the coolant loop is updated.

Leaf charge port temporarily mounted off motor stack.

suspension:

Front: torsion bars turns down to settle ride hight, and some upper control arm shims to fix camber.

Rear: overload leaf removed, and a 1/2in spacer was added lowering the truck 1/4in, and softening up the ride.

This truck is the sd king cab, so it’s made for hauling. The suspension is very stiff. I may remove another over load leaf




started fitting a ccs port in the original filler neck location.

I maybe just get a new housing printed out of glass filled PA, then I can put in all the locating features needed. Would be much cleaner than hacking up a oem charge port to fit.


Started roughing out a battery box for under the bed of the truck, for the 35kwh e-golf pack.

The pack layout is setup some there’s an upgrade path to 96s, as the egolf pack is only 88s.
The modules follow an industry stander layout, so can upgrade to id4 modules, etc if desired.

[tom91]

Nope not upgrade able. ID4/3 /MEB are VDA599 and the EGolf are VDA355.

Ipace are not VDA355, they are slightly longer. Alot of other cars are almost VDA355 but longer.

[Bratitude]

Nope not upgrade able. ID4/3 /MEB are VDA599 and the EGolf are VDA355.

Ipace are not VDA355, they are slightly longer. Alot of other cars are almost VDA355 but longer.

Just saw an id pack, and yeah totally miss calculated. Thanks for the clarity

It’s just some calb modules that are VDA355 so it appears

[Bratitude]

okay some updates!

in spare time been designing up a battery pack that mounts between the frame rails/cradles the drive shaft. Designed some mounting plates to hold 4 full modules, which 6 of these assembly's making a full 24 module pack. as i was planning on finding another egolf pack and ditch the small modules to get to around 38kwh....so some of the packaging i started to land on resulted in:

Then I came across a deal of a life time: a full 77kwh (192s) ioniq 5 pack and 64kwh(96s) kona pack.
A BESS company got the packs for R&D for future projects but are decide they aren't a good fit for their product.

so I sold the egolf pack to a customer building a leaf swaped series 1 landy! (adapter plate coming soon )

the truck now will use half of the ioniq 5 pack (16 modules) for a total of 38.4kwh 96s.
they are 811 NMC. lots of Nickle, so pretty power capable cells....and volatile. No sweat running the peak 80kw leaf motor.

i was tempted to use the 64kwh kona pack but big range is not the goal for this truck. it will likely live on a stretch of coast with no more than 50km of rural roads.

[Bratitude]

busy as always, but picked up some iboosters for cheap.
Model 3 and y.

they seem to have a 1in bore MC
The Datsuns MC is 15/16
I’ll be upgrading to disks in the rear so this is prefect.

In the Datsun the front and rear circuits are cross linked, so I’ll need 2 residual valves installed for the rear drums brakes….as the ibooster MC dosnt have any built in like the original MC

Re made the stock mounting bracket

reused the Datsun push rod extension and pedal clevis. The datsun pushrod uses M10 threads and the ibooster uses M8. So a M8 x M10 coupling is used for now, ill machine a new one piece with the appropriate threads on ether end using some hexagon stainless rod.

Some M12x1 bubble to M10x1 inverted flare adapters for the brake lines.

everything fits very nicely. i did have to bend the original lines to work, as now the ibooster MC is sitting 2in shorter than the stock MC location. so a longer bracket and push rod would be needed to make this the perfect install.

I could have mounted the ibooster up to the firewall, but that would require new holes.
This is a no cut, no weld build so that's not happening

[Bratitude]

With the ibooster installed, next on the list is power steering.

after humming and hawing I bit the bullet and got a Mazda electric power steering pump for 80$ delivered.

the Datsun has a hydraulic steering box with a m14 inlet and m16 outlet. Mazda pump is m14 outlet.

straightforward hose to get made at a local newline.

well this thing is pretty heavy. and I’m sure it’ll make some noise. and it’ll need power steering fluid.

The local yard has a Prius power steering rack for 100$.

I’ll pick it up and see what can be done. I’m not okay with cutting and splicing up the 720 column to make it work.

A electric column would make for a lighter, and cleaner install.

okay so I need a 40a ignition switched supply for the ibooster. And 80amps for the power steering. and zombie, water pumps, etc…what dose the fuse panel have to offer?

Hmm. Well there’s a 1a parasitic draw in the original harness, and all the old ICE wiring. Then found some hokey wiring “fix’s” Let’s have a look at what we can clean up…

That escalated quickly.

Full monolithic loom pulled from the truck. Thinned out, now to add Fresh 12v + lines, and re wrap. no more parasitic draw! Just runs lights, blower, and whippers. with all the fancy timers.

the ev 12v loom will run In tandem, but separately wrapped.