Powering my DIY electric Mini Cooper on a budget

i have a pretty good life i'm healthy good friends a cool dog and i have a cyber quad so i have that going for me but even with all that i'm just like everyone else sometimes i'll kick back and i'll read a wired magazine other times i'll read a car and driver and if i'm up for it i'll sit back read the boston globe or i'll throw on an old joe rogan podcast i'm just like the next guy always hunting for a good deal on something grocery shopping checks who can afford that corn biscuits it is reese's puffs how about some good old pb and c lucky charms maybe on your salary how about some magic stars and i make sure to get the frosted flakes from the bottom shelf and to wash that all down we're gonna get the bananas that someone sat on for 50 cents so life's good but i do have a job where if i don't perform then i can't put food on the table my mom still doesn't think i have a real job because i don't have a million subscribers yet but hopefully you can help me with that by hitting the subscribe button now and if i can't put food on the table my kids will have a new white dad in no time but besides living in constant fear life's still pretty good now some months of course are better than others and to make up for that i got myself a side hustle and this side hustle actually pays me more than i make on youtube what's that side hustle you ask well here's where it gets weird this is an eggplant that's a penis well no but yes and this eggplant there are seeds but this is a magic eggplant where the seeds grow into children now i take this magic eggplant to a place where you can sell eggplant seeds for money which sounds weird when you think about it but i try not to but i get paid and after a few months i bought my truck well today i got some news i walked down the same hallway i always walked down with my seed coach and he made me sit in the or in scrubs which was very odd i still can't figure that out and he gave me the news that i can't donate anymore what am i going to do how am i going to put food on the table i have to sell my i8 the rs7 the bro-dozer my electric pod racer i don't understand why this is happening he said let me draw you a picture i said this is not the type of pictionary doc he said no let me break it down for you you see this this is a seed that you give us no i said doc i don't get it he said your number's 30 richard 30 mothers have bore your children and 30 is the limit for this geographic area we put a geographic restriction on birth fathers because after too many births things start getting kind of weird then i paused for 15 minutes and i imagined the world with more than 30 of my children in it and then he asked me to leave because they were closing but i knew my new mission right after i took all the free pillows socks hand sanitizer scrubs pens dry erase markers and tape i jumped in the i8 and left the country the mission to spread my seed internationally i went to my hotel room to throw on netflix to watch from chappelle i.t crowd in portlandia and they were all shut down due to the similar geographic restrictions that prevented me from spreading my seed in the u.s but then remembered i have surf shock i may do things about protection but my web browsing is not one of them vpns are an essential to protect you and your data as it routes your device's internet connection through a private server and you can watch your favorite things anywhere sir shark is so confident that you'll like this protection that there's a 30 day money back guarantee policy because they like uncle rich in this mission so much they're offering a sizable discount and a free three month trial with promo code rich rebuilds thank you surf shark for the hook up and for sponsoring this episode so this episode in the electric mini cooper build is about battery selection and where we're at with the project i bought this mini cooper for 1500 bucks off facebook marketplace and i'm making it electric what i'm hoping for is under 5 dollars yes including the batteries now in the last episode my assistant linda ran off into the sunset so next episode i'll be paying her a visit at her home yes that's right i'll be going to lean this house next episode now this episode we're also gonna learn more about the pitfalls of doing your own ev conversion and troubleshooting some of the problems i'm running into let's take a look all right last we left off i had a whole bunch of boxes here doing absolutely nothing but now the boxes are actually doing something now so what i what i've been doing is using a lot of the old wiring that i have from that engine harness that i showed you guys from using the recycled wiring for the wiring for the zillow controller so a lot of this is just really basic stuff this is the uh the chassis ground is where you ground it to the rest of the uh the vehicle that's the positive 14 volts in this is the key input start input main contactor coil these two wires what the part is that's the potentiometer and that's what controls the uh the throttle of the vehicle so it's pretty much like a variable resistor when you step on the throttle more the resistance changes and it adds more more current going through the motor so this is pretty much all set up all i have to do now is do some mounting uh and then some more testing and then we're we're good to go in the front very nice yeah oh your crotch was really close to that oh sorry about that my apologies all wired up too my apology starts good way to meet god yeah i know right i heard he's nice you could die you could you could become a ghost and float above the globe yes looking down looking down on the earth like oh no there's so much more oh here i am wow this purgatory sucks what we need to do now is this this little cavity right here which kind of sucks that i want to put some more things down here but i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to do that the batteries are going to go on top of here so i'm going to likely lose this bottom space i was considering leaving the battery in here but that wouldn't make much sense because you would never be able to access the battery because there'd be hundreds of pounds of traction batteries on top of it well the 12 volt's dead too bad yeah it's like well the car's dead so they rest in peace so i might just take this out i'm not really sure what i could put under here that doesn't need to be accessed frequently or at all maybe some excess wiring wiring slack be tucked down here but after this is pulled out i have to relocate the battery to probably the front of the vehicle this is just the ground strap and this right here is the uh i think this is what is this actually i don't know where this goes oh that just goes to the front of the car there's a back one two i don't know where this goes i'm not really sure i think this wire goes to the maybe the front fuse box and there's two fuse boxes one under the hood and one in the lower left kick panel but that's the goal taking this out moving the battery further up and then i have to start the process of putting down the subfloor securing that and putting the first traction battery on top but before i do that i have to tear off this side panel because remember we didn't talk about charging yet the charging infrastructure for the car so i want to be cute and sexy like all the other ev people do what they do is they take the gas cap off and they remove the filler neck and they put the charging cable right here so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to raise the car up take off this wheel put in the electronics for the charger i'm going to secure that in place and then on the other side i'm going to start the process of drilling the hole pulling the wire through yeah going to town so we'll see what happens it'll just cut cut along this line yeah just go straight up right up you got the safety goggles safety go what do you think this is richard i don't want to lose my eyes all right i only got two i care about yeah exactly you have two so if you lose one you still have the other one i mean your depth perception will be way off i don't want to be a pirate but you know i know pirates are pretty cool not like this we'll just slice that bad girl open yeah on both sides and we still have this this is the same blade we've been using for since the cyber quad yeah seriously actually since the rap this has been since this is a rat rod yeah since the early 1940s we're gonna see how big the space we've got so we're about 36 inches and once we pull these plastic pieces whoa just like that yeah look at that that's amazing isn't it oh my god how strong are you stephen movie magic way already oh my god it's amazing so these what we'll do is we're going to doctor that so we can accommodate more space a lot of people were asking why battery packs weren't put under the hood and honestly it's better to have them honestly all in one place it's a lot easier to manage two batteries that are stacked up in the back as opposed to one back here and one in the front which it wouldn't even fit we've got three feet by 15 inches of a void in the back behind this so when we close this we still want to be able to have four passengers exactly there's actually a considerable amount of space very considerable two feet all right richard it's battery battery day baby let's do this so these are the various battery options that people have uh when you're doing a conversion these are only a small percentage of the batteries that you can use for a conversion but these are the only ones that i could afford in my presence so these are the ones i'm going to talk to you about uh so right here this is an interesting battery this was the battery that was from the original cyberquad build this is from a zero motorcycle and this is one of the weird parts getting salvaged battery packs because this is the one that fell off the truck remember that yeah and this is the banged up one that fell off literally off the pallet and uh unfortunately this one wasn't usable at the time because it just gave me issues with the contactors on the inside but one of the reasons why i like this battery because of this form factor i think these batteries are better for uh power sports more like side-by-sides and atvs and things like that because this case is already pretty water resistant it's nice and sealed because this was meant to go in a motorcycle originally which does see some uh some water when you're riding in the rain so this is a better battery pack to use if you're using again power sports kind of thing it's really well sealed and it's very compact not only that but this is quite expensive and it's not easy to replace like for example if i wanted to buy one of these battery bricks um zero wouldn't sell it to me so i'm not going to use this as a potential yeah i'm not going to use this at all wheel this one out of the way uh these here uh these are cal batteries these are interesting too because they're these are only about like three and a half volts or so and they're very heavy and i would need a lot of these friggin batteries to to make up the the voltage deficit that i would have to make that motor spin for example the warp 9 that's used in the in the mini cooper right now uh that's going to run at about i think the maximum voltage is about maybe 160 170 or so just imagine i would need a metric you know s load as they say of these uh to to get it to have any power and they're heavy uh really not the ideal batteries to use next what i want to talk about are the lead acid batteries no one cares about lead acid batteries and these are the batteries that you used to use maybe like 20 years ago or so but these things are so outdated it's not even funny these are the most popular batteries that are used for the 12 volt systems in most cars today most cars have lead acid batteries um you know when they're ready to start for a high cold cranking amps and a high charge and discharge rate so they still use these for cars for their low voltage system um but anything that's high voltage uh they're gonna use lithium ion batteries for that but no one wants these clunky things these are 12 volts each so you get like 12 volts out of 50 pounds so what that means is i would need you know 13 14 of these things just to actually turn the uh the warp knife uh and then these these are the nissan leaf cells so these are really good cells because they're very easy to stack i actually like these these are about seven volts each they're really easy to stack and what people do normally is um uh to mount these they'll get a rod and they'll thread the rod right down these holes right here and you could stack like a whole bunch of them at their side so these are i admit these are pretty good to use uh a bit on the heavy side and then we have to take some measurements in the back of the mini cooper so this really could be a decent option the prices of these have dropped significantly so configuring these into mini uh setting up the bus bars and all of them that's going to add to the time so you know if we want like a decent thing if you guys want to actually see me finish this project this year uh i'm probably going to stay away from these for now and this is the infamous tesla battery module let's take the um let's take the cover off if you can see what it looks like on the inside i'm gonna use this uh where's your butter knife richard i don't have that anymore oh i've moved on since then and 18 000 people unsubscribed yes there you go here we go the beloved 18650s this is the big daddy big daddy diesel one this is this is the diesel truck of batteries right here uh super reliable great energy density the only thing is that these are monstrously expensive that's the problem so this battery you're looking at anywhere from like i would say a thousand to like maybe 13 sometimes even 1400 dollars for these batteries these things for some reason they still sell for tons of money all these years later for those that are keeping count this battery pack alone costs what that entire car is seriously yeah no really yeah so i can either have one tesla module or or the car and the reason why these are so good something that none of the other batteries have is cooling so it's integrated cooling in here so you have a coolant pump and you can run coolant uh through the batteries to keep the battery cool and this you're looking at this is about 24 volts the least expensive where you're gonna get to get enough voltage to spin that motor you're gonna need quite a few of these as well and that makes things way over budget so you figure you know they're what they're 24 volts each um you know you're looking at you know four thousand dollars just to get a hundred volts you know what i mean if you want two more 150 yeah you're looking at yeah six in some cases seven thousand dollars just in batteries you know and that's minimum you know if you want to run things in uh in parallel to get more amperage it's going to get even crazier so what i would do i'm probably not going to go with this one either again to keep the cost low um but i will show you what battery i did choose two of those and we're over budget yeah [Music] oh there we go there we go you put that in first then you do it and right here this is the battery i chose to go with the good old chevy volt now the reason why i like this battery is because of the form factor uh this actually forms the t the cross t and a chevy volt battery pack uh this makes it a lot easier to mount into the mini because look at the small drill itself measuring this right here it actually fits perfectly in the back of the mini cooper i actually purchased two of these and what we're going to do is we're going to stack them on top of each other i got a really good deal on them i went to a website i think it was a batteryhookup.com battery hookup had two of these left for super cheap i think i paid i think 500 bucks a piece for these which is an absolute steal and uh i think we're gonna go with these the good thing too is that the reason why i wanted these over the the nissan leaf ones is because uh they actually already included the uh the pigtails for the bms so the bms is the battery management system all the connector is already right here i just pull the connectors in and i wire the ends to the bms and uh this makes things 10 times easier to configure the only thing we haven't factored in yet is a charging infrastructure if we want to get this down to a decent price point we have to make room for the charger the onboard charger could get expensive and also the cabling uh that goes from the charger uh to the batteries and things like that so there's still quite a bit more to factor in here but i think right now we're about i want to say a little under four grand maybe 35 3600 which is yes we have some breathing room and uh let's check out the back of the car there's one it's a shame man i almost want to put one put one barry in it and call it a day you know but you know if you want this thing to go anywhere i should say 14 kilowatts is a 25 mile range yeah that's like it's like yeah this is this would be nothing should be literally like a commuter that you drive from you know one place to the other but it can't be used in the winter right definitely not definitely not and then uh yeah that's the first stage so so this is the shell of the uh yeah that's the vault pack yeah right here's our secondary one what it'll look like lined up that's the height of the two batteries that have just fit nicely yeah that's back there yeah but yeah for sure wow wow it's a lot wow i mean you can at least see it's not too much dip on your chip right that's the important thing right okay so that's out now to reroute the wiring and run it elsewhere so it's not stuck under the traction battery pack what i have to do now is i have to remove this filler neck before i do that i have to take off this wheel remove the inner fender trim to put the charge port there [Music] all right so i have the fender off and uh that is the uh filler neck right there so i want to take that out i'm gonna remove that bolt that's in there and remove the rest of that tube and after that i'm going to drill a hole approximately right here that will go into the rear trunk and that's gonna take care of the charging cable [Music] ta-da this is the pan that the battery was originally on top of and i painted it that same color that uh stephen picked out for the motor so it looks kind of good unfortunately no one will ever see this part because there'll be a large battery on top of it but this is all part of recycling because i'm using the same metal pan that was inside of the chevy volt so all i did was cut around it a little bit the battery pack's gonna sit on top of that and why this is important because it already has the grooves in it for the battery to sit down into and it can be bolted into the front so this is the easiest way to get this into the back of the mini cooper what i'm going to do i'm going to put this pan in the back secure this pan to the floor and then put the battery on top of this battery floor pan is in doesn't look pretty but it's definitely in there like swimwear now i what i had to do is i had to drill two additional holes outside of the car to make sure that the high voltage wires could come through i got a little aggressive on this and i actually cut through uh the 12-volt battery cable that's all right i'll be removing that uh that's part of the cable that was back here that'll be running to the front anyways along with the cable that runs along the side so remember this is very jagged and because of all the movement with the car i want to make sure that i put a good piece of conduit in there so i might get some of the same conduit that i used uh when i went to home depot put it in that tube to make sure the wires don't chafe so that's really it once these two wires come up through here um i'll be connecting it to the battery and also before that i want to make sure i screw down uh this plate make sure this plate doesn't move because this is a integral part of having the battery here because if anything happens you don't want the battery flopping around too much so i'm going to drill some holes and make sure this plate is secured to the bottom of the car okay so the back is coming together very nicely what i have to do is i have to put some more bolts on this side i'm probably going to put maybe two more up there two more up here one at the bottom and then one in the middle to make sure this pan is secured down because this is the pan that's gonna secure the battery pack that's the battery pack right there i'll be putting this on top and it's gonna fit into these grooves almost like a standard car battery in a lot of ways a lot of the batteries that you see on the market there's a groove that they fit in and then what i could do is i could actually bolt the battery down so it's nice and secure back here the other thing i want to look at is i want to look at the charge port that i finished that's looking pretty nice that's nice and secure and the wire is running right under there and going into the the passenger cabin so then what i want to talk about now is another part that i need is the dc to dc converter and the dc to dc converter is the equivalent of an alternator in a car you know in an alternator it uses the motion of the engine and the engine pulleys to charge uh the uh the battery in the vehicle and that's how the 12 volt battery in an internal combustion engine car stays charged the dc to dc converter is a little bit different because it actually takes the power from the high voltage battery kind of dumbs it down to the 12 volts or 14 volts to keep the 12 volt battery charged this is what this does this has a direct connection again to the high voltage battery and it converts that into a lower voltage to keep the 12-volt battery charged and i'm probably going to end up putting this somewhere at the side uh i'm probably not going to use this one i'm not really sure if it works or not i have to test it but that's going to go in here so before i install the the high voltage battery right here and i lose a whole bunch of space i'll be putting the dc to dc converter in that corner and then running the wiring to the front let's go to the front of the car and talk about a couple things up there okay now this is the front of the car i don't really want to talk about now in the first part of this episode i was talking about the wiring uh for the zillow controller and unfortunately that wiring i had did not work so i changed the setup a bit i have a new pot box and a new contactor in here and this pop box is a little bit different because this is a very simple two-wire setup as opposed to the six wire setups i've been using before these are two uh tesla aka ford motor company uh accelerator pedals uh these are the five wire setups i went to a very basic two wire setup and again i have a contactor here too that's different from the first one now the reason why i like the two wire uh setup is because a it's a lot easier and b this pot box is a pretty much a very simple lever that you attach to your existing accelerator pedal so you have your accelerator pedal when you push your pedal down you attach almost like a string uh to this well not a string but a coil to this and it actually pulls in unison so when you step down it pulls this down as well and that's what controls the acceleration of the vehicle now the wiring here i have set up again very simple the chassis ground 14 volt in uh key input start main contactor coil that goes to the contactor that tells it when to uh pre-charge and turn on and i also have the potentiometer uh plus and minus which is the pot box uh plus and minus here now for some reason with the old setup it wasn't working whenever i turned it on energize the system i would get a red arrow light wasn't sure what it was i hooked up to the diagnostics which thankfully zilla does have diagnostics i could read from my laptop but for still it wasn't working and one of the things you have to know that when you get uh used equipment from someone they may have a setting in there that prevents you from doing the things that you want to do for example that this battery pack uh unbeknownst to you they might have a setting uh in the zilla controller they modify themselves to make it so that uh you will not get any acceleration if the voltage in the battery pack drops below a certain amount you know for you could have a person using a low voltage system not really low voltage but a lower voltage system like something around like 50 or 60 volts or so and their minimum threshold could be 40. uh in a lot of cases if you drop below that threshold if using a 30 volt system a lot of the cases again the settings won't work so what you have to get use equipment you have to go into the settings and if you can reset all the settings so you don't have run to issues later on so that's one thing that i definitely learned about that but for some reason this setup is not working either but again i'm just going to show you a real quick tutorial on how i go in and kind of troubleshoot and diagnose minor things all right so now i have it all hooked up now and i'm in putty and i want to just kind of look for something but it says state is one three one one if i remember correctly one three one one means waiting for key and according to the error codes so what i'm gonna do i'm actually gonna energize this system i'm gonna connect uh those two terminals the key uh and the start uh to the positive lead on the 12 volt battery i'm gonna see if it gets a different error message but honestly what we're gonna hear right now is we're gonna hear the uh the contactor click and you're gonna see it pre-charged and then it's gonna go from the amber light to the main contactor on light so let me see if that actually does anything that is without dying again don't do this at home hear that one more time so it's off on recharge and the contactor clicks so right now energy is actually flowing through the system at the moment so let me just see if it gives a different error message on the screen all right so the state is one two one four one two one four is uh open pot wire huh so that's potentiometer wire that's apparently open not really sure why that is but uh let's figure that out all right so i just tightened down all the connections and everything seems pretty tight for the pot wires uh once i did that i'm still getting the same error message the one two one four so i don't really know why it's saying that it's probably my own ignorance but then again it could be again one of the disadvantages to getting used equipment you just don't know what you're gonna get but again not blaming anyone it's likely my fault as you can see this isn't a very professional operation but rest assured everything's pretty tight here you know i'm granted i'm not my boys over at stealth ev they're they're on a pretty clean shop so um check that check them out really awesome guys good friend of mine check them out stealthyv located in california and and they could take care a lot of your uh really cool custom non-janky ev stuff like i'm doing here but again check out their website that's in description box below but uh but yeah i'll be still here uh figuring this out uh it's saying it's an open pot wire don't know what that means but again this is one of the things where uh this is what goes into the back end of troubleshooting ev stuff you just don't know really what you're gonna get and anything's up in the air anything's up for grabs uh but i'll be here plugging away at this i'll let you know guys know when i figure it out but uh the behavior is as follows you plug it in contactor closes it pre-charges uh and i get the error message stating that um there's an open pot wire when i move that uh nothing seems to be working so whatever i'm sure i'll figure it out not a big deal and i will see you guys uh next week don't forget to like share and subscribe and check me on instagram at ritchiebkid and i'll see you guys in a bit wait wait a second wait wait wait wait no credits yet don't end the credits yet i just looked at something really quick and i screwed up right here look at this look at this those aren't fully pushed in let's push those in fully what a dumb ass i am look at that look at that huh all right one more time one more time baby nice there she is that's it no error messages main contactors on we're cooking with gas baby all right feeling good about this finally some good news either way uh jesus christ this is like down to the last minute um yeah i think we're good here we're cooking with gas so i'm excited to show you the next update for this thing no errors this thing is ready to fly and i'll see you guys next week

Channel: Rich Rebuilds

Views: 668,995

Keywords: tesla, cars, teardown, mechanical, salvage, rebuild, how, to, fix, whats, inside, ev, repair, electric, vehicle, how to fix a tesla, salvage repair, cooper, min, mini-cooper, mini cooper, electric mini, electric mini cooper, bmw, bmw mini, bmw electric mini, ev conversion, electric car conversion

Id: KBekVxvIe4s

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020