Can I fit Tesla Batteries in my Electric Hummer?! - Battery Box Build

so a lot of vehicles have a hole in their roof which is what we would call a sunroof my electric hummer has a hole in the floor which is what we would call a problem before we talk about what makes my hummer all holy [Music] i need to tell you about my wallet i've carried this ridge wallet in my pocket for a little over three years now so while ridge is indeed the sponsor of this video they've also done a great job of making something i use every day i have the burnt titanium version and after being in my pants for a little over a thousand days it looks a little hammered compared to a brand new one but that's life though and i kind of like the worn out aesthetic i do keep my wallet in the same pocket as my keys and my knife though my phone is in the other side the new black damascus and forged ember look pretty sweet it holds up to 12 cards has a cash clip or strap and comes in 30 different styles plus it blocks rfid scanners so you don't have to worry about digital pickpockets i'm not going to lie these wallets are not cheap but as you can see they last for a really long time which makes sense because they do come with a lifetime warranty use the code jerryrig to get 10 off of your order with a link down in the description ridge also has a 45 day return window so if you don't like it you can return it for a full refund just a warning though my 45 days turned into 1 000. huge thanks to ridge for supporting the channel now let's see what this holiness is all about let's [Music] [Applause] [Music] so in the last video you saw us connect a bunch of batteries together and get the motor spinning a huge milestone when building an ev we have disassembled that and today we're going to build the battery boxes the correct way and mount them in the passenger locations behind the driver and shotgun plus we'll be talking about the 450 volts worth of batteries that we'll be putting in those boxes right around 100 kilowatt hours it's a lot of power and remember as i talk through this video i'm not an expert in any of this i'm just taking what i read on the internet and learning as i go so take anything i say at your own risk and you should probably double check everything so throughout all my videos you've probably seen these 18 tesla battery modules spread out all over my workstation each of them store about 5.6 kilowatt hours worth of energy and when i say kilowatt hours it just means 5 600 watt hours worth of energy one kilowatt is 1000 watts each module is made up of 444 18650 cylindrical cells these super shiny things you see inside of the battery modules and when all these little cylinders are connected together my hummer will be running on 7992 tiny batteries there's a metaphor in there somewhere about little things working together to accomplish great things anyway when we do the math 18 battery modules at 5.6 kilowatt hours each we end up with 100 kilowatt hours of usable energy which is the exact same battery pack size that we see inside of my wife's model x and what's interesting is is that my wife's model x and my military humvee are gonna weigh about the same when i'm finished it's helpful that my military humvee is pretty bare bones and the entire outside is made from aluminum the cool thing is that each one of these 444 little cells are held together with an astronomical amount of glue and metal plus each one individually has a tiny little wire attaching it to the whole module and that little wire is a fuse so if too much current flows from that little battery for too long the fuse breaks separating it from the module and helps prevent thermal runaway tesla says that their electric vehicles are 10 times less likely to have a vehicle fire than gas-powered vehicles and that's in part due to all the safety features built into the battery module and that gas power vehicles literally run off of explosions and even though i'm using tesla battery modules in my electric humvee i can't promise that my ev is 10 times less likely to catch on fire mostly because i built it here in my garage but it is nice to know that there is safety built into the modules that i'm using as a little side note what's inside actually did take one of these modules and threw it off of his roof hitting his driveway and the thing mostly stayed together so their durability has been tested and is very substantial long story short i'm not worried about their durability especially because we have this as you can see on the back of all of these modules we actually have liquid cooling tubing that runs in between all of the cells to help keep the cells cool while they're under load lithium likes to operate in the same temperature range that humans like to operate which is why we have liquid cooling for the batteries and most electric vehicles also have battery heating for operation and cold environments mine doesn't have that yet but we probably will in the future since i do live in utah and while the modules are pretty durable it is still 100 kilowatt hours which is enough electricity to power the average american house for three days and a wise man once said with great power comes great responsibility long story short one module probably won't kill you but two would and we have 18. each of these battery modules weighs about 50 pounds so when added all up i'll have about a thousand pounds worth of batteries in the humvee and i could have done this project with lead acid batteries but i would have had to use around two or three thousand pounds worth of batteries to get the same energy lithium batteries are just lighter and can fit more energy into a smaller space speaking of the differences between lead acid and lithium ion batteries i decided to switch out the lead acid i have beneath the passenger seat and i'm replacing it with a 12 volt lithium ion battery that's the same size the perks of having lithium is that it's half the weight while providing the same amount of power weight of course is one reason for me to switch out the lead acid with the lithium ion another one though is that lead acid is a little finicky when it's discharging if it discharges completely it's never quite the same again where lithium ion since this has an onboard bms can discharge completely just fine and has more usable power as it's discharging the downside though of a 12 volt lithium ion though before you start thinking about putting one in your own car is that it doesn't have any cold cranking amps meaning that it can't start a gas-powered vehicle but since mine is not gas-powered anymore i can use the lithium-ion just fine and it's also why most electric vehicles including teslas have switched to 12-volt lithium-ion batteries for their low-voltage systems i chose the larger safari 1300 with 105 amp hours but i do think they have some smaller ones as well i'll leave a link in the description and i know i'm talking a lot but i'm hoping that my videos end up being the type of videos that i wish i would have had before starting this project when someone says they have a 12 volt car battery it's not actually 12 volts the entire time it ranges from 13 down to 11 and that voltage range between 13 and 11 tells you how much the battery is depleted these lithium batteries operate in the same way fully charged at 100 percent they are 25.2 volts and fully discharged they're around 18 or 19. so if we do the math when all of these are wired together we will have 453 volts when fully charged and 324 volts when fully discharged it's super important that the modules never dip below that 18 volts because it could cause very permanent damage and might kill them completely my motor though if you can see it under all these wires that i haven't cleaned up yet operates between 440 volts and 250 volts so it'll always be able to operate no matter what my battery pack is charged to the nice thing about the motor only using 440 volts is that now i don't have to charge my battery pack up to its full 453 because lithium batteries are most dangerous when punctured overheated or overcharged but mostly overcharged which is where my battery management system comes into play it monitors the charge and discharge of the battery the modules can handle 225 amps continuous or 1500 amps for 3 seconds my motor and inverter can handle about 500 amps peak so it's well within the limits of these tesla battery modules the bms system also manages the temperature each of the tesla battery modules has a little thermistor or a little temperature sensor inside of it the chemistry inside of the batteries can only be charged at zero degrees celsius up to 45 degrees celsius so if it's below freezing outside i cannot charge my hummer or else i'll damage the batteries production vehicles like tesla rivian and the ford mustang all get around this by heating up the battery if it's too cold outside by running hot liquid through the cooling chambers we saw earlier so while the charging window is narrower at 0 to 45 the operational window is larger and that goes all the way from negative 20 to 60. here in utah i don't think we've ever exceeded either of those temperatures so the only thing i have to worry about is not charging below freezing but how does the battery management system communicate with tesla batteries and their proprietary hardware we have to hack it a little bit in order for us to hack these tesla battery modules to extract their useful power we have to replace the circuit boards this right here is a circuit board attached to the tesla battery module and we're replacing it with something much simpler there's a bunch of different manufacturers that make these basically it just redirects the wires from the different cells and the thermistors to a place where our battery management system can read it and i'll talk more about that in a second remember these battery modules came out of a tesla model s which also the tesla model x used the same batteries the tesla model 3s and the cyber truck will be different and i'm sure someone at some point is going to figure out how to hack those but right now we're sticking with these i've already replaced the boards on several of these modules i'm going to do this one show you how it works and show what worked best for me the yellow tape is called capped tape and it's relatively common used across electronics and cell phones all over the world it's holding the two plastic casings of the battery together that plastic covering is just protecting all the individual batteries and their connections up top if i set something metal down on top of this right now boom this is the little cell ribbon that comes to the top of the board and we have to reach a little pry tool inside of there to disconnect the blue part from the red part these plugs and ribbons are extremely fragile and we need them so we got to be careful and again we repeat the same thing with this blue and red connector here there's probably multiple good ways of doing this but once i've removed the top plug and bottom plug the cell taps then i can remove the center black pin from each of the four corner posts after the center pin is removed i can remove the post itself and on the last post make sure to hold the board so it doesn't get yanked away from the battery all we have left is the thermistor connection which has a funny little white bracket that slides out the latch lifts up and then the plug is released freeing tesla's complex battery board that we can't use so we can install the more simple bms board that we can utilize and then once everything's flipped back over we can grab one of these little gizmos right here which is just a cell meter and we can plug it into the board and see if it's working and it looks like we are reading 4.09 volts on basically every cell this is a very simple version of the battery management system that we're going to be using later and that is how you install the bms board on the tesla battery module now we just have to do it 18 more times the metal box that's going to hold all these batteries is rather complex and of course we're going to build it with lasers it'll make more sense as you see it completed and everything's assembled but long story short we're going with a triple box setup each with a sandwich design each of the side boxes will hold seven modules while the center box will hold four the top and bottom pieces are laser cut out of half inch aluminum with little slots for each of the modules to slide into the top and bottom will then be securely held in place by aluminum sides which are welded and the whole thing will be made water tight with the thinner plate screwed into the top and bottom with some waterproofing adhesive slathered on the seams the waterproofing will have to wait till the boxes are built though but you might be like hey jerry why are the boxes water tight when you're going to be running liquid cooling through them anyway well two things the liquid cooling does run through the batteries but it doesn't actually touch the batteries themselves and also the liquid cooling isn't conducted so even if it does leak electricity won't flow through it oshko.com has been a huge help getting all my parts cut and shipped to me very quickly which is pretty nice since we're in a bit of a time crunch trying to get this thing rolling by the end of the year oshkosh even has a massive brake press which we do need for the center box and you'll see what this is for in a second [Music] after laser cutting the boxes we need to assemble them and we're going to do that with a little bit of overkill by using 72 flat socket cap screws which means that we need to drill and tap a lot of holes what that means is we take one size of drill bit and countersink a little starting point then grab the tapping drill bit and drill a normal hole which is just barely smaller than the threads on the tap itself the tap is a weird looking drill bit with four sides it's what adds the threads to the inside of the hole that the screws will grip onto when we finally assemble the box each time i drill or tap a hole i add a little lubricant which just helps things go in and out easier there will be about 200 screws holding all three boxes together the two side boxes one behind the driver and one behind the passenger are pretty much identical except for the coolant lines that come out the sides i'll cover that in a different video the center box is probably the most important that's what'll be holding all of the switches and the high voltage components we've assembled the box you can see we've countersunk the screw holes so that the screws sit flush inside and with the box being built it gives us a perfect edge for welding once the sides are screwed into the top and bottom we can weld it and everything will stay square you can see the slits in the bottom that are mirrored on the top piece that'll keep the battery modules vertical while we're driving down the road and all the metal pieces keep everything sandwiched super tight so there's no vibrations or fluctuations inside the box so right now we have two of the battery boxes built this one goes behind the driver seat and this one goes behind the passenger seat in these two very convenient compartments right here and here but those two compartments only hold 14 of the modules and we have 18 which means four more modules have to go in the center section which we haven't cut out yet we will the center box is going to be a little more unique one it only needs to hold four modules and two it has to accommodate for the drive shaft which is why we have this section right here three modules on this side one module on this side with the drive shaft going through the center and the center box will have the slits for the modules down inside as well as up on top that kind of pinch them together like a sandwich it'll make more sense when we put the battery modules into the boxes but first we have to finish the boxes and where they mount [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] as i was cutting i could hear something rattling around in here oh my gosh dude this is huge it's from a machine gun or something do you think this is a belt fed 50 maybe so you know how my hummer has the turret hole up top well it looks like that i mean the 250s are mine but this clip that we found in the floor over here looks like the exact same one that was used on the humvee so a little bit of history there a relic back to cutting [Music] [Music] oh that does some sand in there it's a good looking hole and now we officially have the passenger box the center box and the driver side box plenty of room for 100 kilowatts worth of tesla battery modules and 450 volts so that lever right there is the parking brake which comes along here and goes out to the rear tires but unfortunately it is in the way of our center battery box so we do have to move this parking brakes are relatively important so we will probably put it back at some point you want to pull the parking brake forward oh just kidding i got it [Music] that a boy yeah there we have the center box this is obviously just temporary placement but it's going to be resting on this beam here and then we will have another piece resting on this big beam back here and then right here inside of this window above the drive shaft is where all the contactors are going to be basically all the high voltage components are inside a battery box which makes it a little more safe and easier since we don't have to manage high voltage in other places as much now we just need the passenger box and the driver box it'll take us a couple minutes but for you guys and now all the boxes are in place that looks pretty sweet i mean we're gonna put a top plate over this but all of the bed space will be usable because the whole point of turning a truck into an electric vehicle is so we can keep using it as a truck especially when rivien's delayed the cyber truck is delayed and there is no electric trucks available yet and of course it's a little bit easier to see from back here but i will be chopping the roof off about right there and turning it into a two-door instead of a four-door on this side you can see that the boxes are held in place by a half inch piece of aluminum that's bolted into another half piece of aluminum and it's all resting on this solid piece of metal that crosses the whole humvee so now that we know all the boxes fit we have to find a way to mount it along this back support which means we have to take them out and weld a piece of angle iron to the back but that's fine because we have to put all the batteries in there anyway [Music] so this is what the battery modules are going to look like on the base plate of the battery box and if we look right here we can see the metal terminal and there's quite a bit of space between the terminal and the metal base plate and while nothing will probably happen it's always better to err on the safe side when dealing with 450 volts so what i'm going to do is router out a little channel underneath those terminals and put a piece of rubber that way if by accident any of the terminals ever do come loose we have one more additional layer of protection between the terminal and the metal box the nice thing about aluminum is that we get the structural strength of metal but we can actually work it with woodworking tools i have a router that's usually used with wood and i can use it to mill out the channel on that metal plate and honestly that's not too bad we got quite a lot of chips on the ground but a milled channel in our battery box because things are a little more safe with a little piece of rubber [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so and there you have it the battery boxes are ready for the battery modules to be installed i have them laid out here on the table in the exact same footprint that they'll be behind the driver passenger and center hole it'll make a bit more sense when you see it actually installed we could have used wire connections for the two watt cables and the bms but that would have been about 180 connectors built into each side of the plugs and we can solve that with just one piece of conduit along with the conduit the rest of the boxes are going to be watertight as well but that'll be easier to explain after we put the modules in the modules will rest here along with the rubber strip in the bottom with the two watt wires and the bms going through the sides here connecting all three boxes together and we have the little tunnel down here for the drive shaft underneath the humvee the boxes will all rest on the metal cross beam here with the half inch plates and then the back ends will rest here on the 3 16 inch aluminum welded to the box and of course we'll have a few more plugs into the back of here to connect the bms to the system as well as the charger and the dc to dc converter you can tell from the center box that all the modules will be on their sides sandwiched between the top and bottom piece very tightly and here in the center box is where we will have all of our high voltage junction points like the bms the contactors the fuse and of course i'll be putting a piece of clear polycarbonate over the top so we can see those in actions because transparent tech is the best tech so while this holy humvee might look like there's a problem it most definitely will not be in the future there seems to be quite a lot of miscommunication hit that subscribe button if you haven't already come hang out with me on instagram and twitter hit that notification button so you don't miss any future updates and thanks a ton for watching i'll see you around

Channel: JerryRigEverything

Views: 999,685

Keywords: Electric Hummer, Hummer EV, DIY HUmmer, Electric conversion, Electric Truck, Rivian, Hummer, Cybertruck, tesla, Ford lightning, ev conversion, electric vehicle, electric hmmwv, gmc hummer, high voltage, battery box build, electric truck off road, electric truck towing

Id: yoczz5A-FDI

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021