September 30, 2020
Update #15 - EV conversion initial plan # At the end of August, I attended the 4 day EV car conversion course run by Damien Maguire and Kevin Sharpe. It was absolutely fantastic. I learnt a shedload. I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of doing an EV conversion.
One of the big takeaways from the course was the focus on opensource collaboration. There is a growing community of people out there, working together to share knowledge and develop open solutions to motor inverters, charging, battery management and so on.
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May 15, 2020
Update #14 - Removing roof paint # Beginning to remove the paint.
April 19, 2020
Update #13 - Rust investigation # There’s some rust just below the wind-screen. Today I’m removing the paint to see how extensive it is.
This is a notorious problem area on these cars. The vent here is for fresh cabin air. There’s an inner skin below the vent which stretches almost the full width of the car. There are circular openings in the inner skin at the outer edges of the foot wells on both sides.
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April 4, 2020
Update #12 - Steering column removal # Objective today is to remove the steering hardware.
The rod in the top left of the picture is the accelerator. This connects mechanically directly to the carburetor. The other end of this rod goes through the firewall and the accelerator pedal is at the end. I love the simplicity of this.
In the top right is the steering box. You can see how it links to the steering arms.
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February 16, 2020
Update #11 - Rear axle assessment # I’m trying to identify what type of rear axle this car has. I need to decide whether it’s good to restore and keep or whether it needs to be replaced. There are some minor alterations here and there, but, as best as I can tell, most of this car is original. So, my first guess is that this rear end is original to the car.
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February 15, 2020
Update #10 - Rear axle removal part 2 # Still working on removing the rear axle. Need to disconnect the hand-brake lines to free it up. To do that I needed to remove all of the brake parts. You can see the spring-loaded hand-brake cable poking out the bottom here.
Here is the axle fully disconnected. Also the shocks.
Close up of the serial number on the differential.
And here is the underside of the car without the axle.
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February 5, 2020
Update 9 - Rear axle removal # Started working on removing the rear axle.
January 11, 2020
Update 8 # 2020-01-11
Took out the some of the glass today. The wind-screen glass was already cracked, so, I did that first as it didn’t matter if I screwed it up.
The first thing to do was remove the chrome from around the wind-screen. There’s a special tool for doing this. It reaches in under the chrome and unhooks it from little metal clips attached to the body. I just used a skinny screwdriver and that worked fine for me.
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November 19, 2019
Update 7 # The objective today was to pull the engine out.
Before I could do that though, I needed to disconnect the drive-shaft from the engine. After a bit of head scratching and some searching around online, I discovered that the drive-shaft needs to be disconnected from the differential at the back first. It then slips off a spline on the transmission and can be removed completely. Easy when you know how.
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September 29, 2019
Update 6 # 2019-09-29
Taking out the exhaust. I don’t want to keep it and it’s really awkward to remove, so I just cut it up with the dremel.
Disconnecting the shifter handle.