openinverter forum

after that, things escalated pretty quickly and more carnage ensued

I was spit ballin' using everything at my disposal for ideas (not all of them good ones)

finally settling on making a plate to re clock the pivot bracket (not for tilt per say but to help get the angle during mounting) something to hang it up with sorta speak

just trying to see if I can install this thing in more steps than Rotbox Metalworks

Captain's Log

it has been 857 Earth days since we landed on planet EPAS, and what started out as a standard recon mission has lets just say escalated

the threaded rod is for photo opp only


we aint really gonna run that fugly PRIUS steering wheel, it's just there as a prop

so let's adopt this to that, as I am sure Grant makes an adapter for their Hot Rod wheels to a Prius for sure, but going that route would be cheating

I know right?! four spokes, chics luv four spokes!


oh that's cute, Grant is using metric hexeseseses so my 'merican ones don't work, great!

so how do we adopt this to that?
hmmmm, two holes align...

time for the plasma cutter

like a surgeon

ah, it's temporary

and the problems kept on coming

my rod was too short [where have I heard that before?]

this is just a mock up

one of the challenges I'm facing with the steering in a truck is the sheer length of the steering shafts, think of the Prius as a pug and my truck as a Borzoi wolfhound (yes that took seconds of Googling dog images to find - you're welcome)

so the long steering rod connects to the steering box using something called a rag joint (you can't make this stuff up folks) basically a round piece of an old tire, ha ha that's supposed to absorb some of the vibrations as the farmer goes down the dirt road in one of them trucks, folks these days replace them with U joints (defeating their original shock absorption purpose) and I may do the same (but probably not)

the long "intermediate" steering shaft that runs from the rag joint on up to the steering column inside the firewall is really made up of two pieces, designed to slide inside each other incase of a head on collision allowing the driver to be decapitated by the hood (ahem bonnet) instead, so I am keeping that rod and will just have to extend it 6 inches, or I may replace the Prius "intermediate" shaft with one from her sister car a Corolla

so much math

anyways, so I cleaned the garage yesterday and found this:

I believe it's called a "floor"

Never seen one of them before, what do you do with it?

mjc506 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 29, 2022 6:12 pm Never seen one of them before, what do you do with it?

apparently cover it up !

johu wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 7:27 pm

Gregski wrote: ↑Sat Apr 23, 2022 7:22 pm so is it going to be A or B as I have not decided on an onboard charger and or DC-DC converter yet?

A - proven and thus very boring
B - might not work if on the wrong OEM firmware - so very interesting! (Or have you test run it?)

so what I'm hearing is, go out and get more chargers and converters, message received Captain my Captain

so since our son is home from Uni for the weekend I am using that as an excuse to stay quiet and clean this whole weekend so no cutting, drilling, or grinding

so it's time to fandangle with the Chevy Volt onboard battery charger, I put it off long enuff

my logic went like this, hey you're converting a Chevy truck, wouldn't it be cool to use some electric Chevy parts on it...

this thing has more tantacles than a Syberian octopus, so we start with the one that runs from the onboard charger to the "traction" battery

traction is just a fancy way of saying the big high voltage battery pack

this thing is incased in an aluminum pipe for you know Armageddon

I wasted many a beers trying to unpin that thing, as it proved futile, so I cut it in half and will offer 50% of the cable to the highest bidder, or the best dirty joke muszyngr at yahoo dot com

my 8 track collection

looks like the Barberians cut the proximity wires from the charge port, so I chased those down

and lastly I divorced the 12 volt battery leads from the CAN control side wires

so then I hooketized it all...

and quickly learned that my trusty and very pink CANalyst-II gizmo CAN Bus reader tool is NOT the tool for the job to control aka send CAN Bus commands to the charger, yes it reads them, and yes it can pretty much send one command at a time, but not multiple ones at once type of thing

File that under Lessons Learned

at this point I was having so much fun I decided to do a little tutorial write up where I document my failures in public in a thread entitles: I think I CAN, I think I CAN...

armed with another CAN Bus analyzing tool, let's see what this MICROCHIP can do, it's black so it's gotta be good