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