Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[white exec]

" The zinc plated viton-coated 14 millimeter dowty seals "

Even Flanders & Swann would have been proud of that one!

[Mandrake]

I spent some time today stripping things down to get access to the Gearbox ECU (which lives under the battery tray) and look at any prospective wiring paths to run redundant signal wires between the two ECU's and grudgingly had to admit that it's almost impossible.

It is possible to open up the Gearbox ECU connector and very carefully solder extra wires to the pins, and then thread them into the cable bundle:

However it all goes downhill from there, as it's impossible to follow the original wire bundle which goes under the fusebox, around the front wing, in front of the radiator (which would require the entire front including bumper off, then via the front right wing.

The alternative path across the top of the engine is a no go as well. You can get as far as the the front of the air cleaner box but there is no direct route to the ECU cable from there - so you'd need to add some awkwardly routed trunking to go that way. Another thing that stopped me attempting that is that the wires would be going directly under the three spark plug lead wires for the rear bank only 10mm below them. This is very likely to introduce interference on the signal wires or perhaps even damage one of the ECU's.

I looked for some other path but without doing a complete bodge job there isn't one! So I gave up and decided to do a continuity check of the four signal wires between the two connectors (all OK) and then use a good dose of contact cleaner on the connectors on both ECU's - the gearbox ECU being positioned under the battery tray did have a little bit of white corrosion on the connector but nothing too bad.

I also disconected and used contact cleaner on the two sockets mounted in the front right firewall - the four signal wires pass through one of these, the big one of the two I think, so I figured it was a potential location for an intermittent connection and relatively easy to get to:

I put everything back together and went for a short drive to make sure the car still drives and it seems to be OK, however I couldn't tell if there was any improvement or not as the problem is somewhat intermittent and doesn't seem to occur until the engine / engine bay / gearbox is warmed up. Couldn't go for a longer test drive as the car is nearly out of petrol and none will be forthcoming until the end of the month...

A bit of an anti-climax to be honest as I was hoping to find an electrical fault but short of major, major strip down work or a horrible bodge, running new wires is infeasible. So I think I'm back to doing a second oil change with additive to see if that gives any further improvement! Or just put up with it and cross my fingers it doesn't get any worse.

[Mandrake]

Took the Xantia for a longer drive today and unfortunately no improvement - still seeing intermittent flare ups on up-shifts into 3rd or 4th. Paying more attention to the symptoms today and I think it might actually be the torque converter lockup releasing too early.

During an upshift you will sometimes have the torque converter locked up just before the shift (due to high RPM) and then after the shift it will unlock due to the engine now being at a lower RPM. Ideally it should do it in time with the gear change, however it looks like it is starting to release a fraction of a second before the gear change occurs hence the rise in RPM.

The intermittent nature of the problem may just be related to whether the torque converter changes state between gear changes - depending on the rpm and throttle position sometimes a gear change will have the torque converter unlocked both before and after the change - hence no flare up. Or it might be locked both before and after, also no flare up. The flare up occurs if it is locked before the gear change and unlocked afterwards.

Oh well, it is what it is. I'll try another oil change in a couple of months but other than that I'm just going to drive it and not fret too much about it. If it is what I think above then it's probably in no immediate danger of going kaput, and I do have AA nationwide recovery...

[Mandrake]

Now that the Xantia is dealt with as best I can, on to the Ion.

I have mentioned before that I believe the battery is degrading much faster than usual, and it's reaching a point where I decided I need to do something about it. For all the facts and figures for nerds please see the following post over on myimev rather than me copying and pasting:

http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php? ... =50#p39013

In short there are 3 cells which seem to be degrading at about 3x - 4x the rate of the rest of the cells in the pack, and this has only started happening since the car passed about 40k miles, so only in my time of ownership. The Ah capacity of a new battery is 45.8Ah, it was at 39.9Ah when I bought the car 2 years ago and is now at 33.1Ah and dropping rapidly - so it has lost more capacity in the last two years than the 6 years prior to that, although to be fair it has done more mileage in the last two years than the first 6 as well...

Because all the cells are in series the usable capacity of the battery as a whole is limited by the weakest cell in the chain. So even a single bad cell out of 88 cells can have a devastating effect on the capacity and range - and I seem to have 3 bad cells. The car still works and drives normally but the range is around 5-8 miles less than I think it should be at its current age and mileage based on other cars, but of more concern is the rate at which it is dropping in the last year.

So a few days ago I bought four second hand cells (none are available new) from these guys:

https://www.secondlife-evbatteries.com/

Given the ludicrous price of a replacement pack from PSA (Hah!) and the non-availability of new individual cells, I think £50 each is pretty reasonable, assuming they have a good remaining capacity that is equal or better than the good cells in my pack. They're sourced from scrapped cars, usually relatively young cars which have had minor prangs which are enough to write the car off but not enough to damage the battery pack, which is fairly well protected in the middle under the floor. There are quite a few being wrecked for parts in the EU lately.

To verify their usable capacity is sufficiently good before going to the hassle of fitting them I'm currently doing my own capacity measurement of them one by one:

To test them they first need to be fully charged to 4.1 volts, then a discharge test is run to discharge them to 3.0 volts measuring the Ah capacity in the process, then I will do a storage charge to bring them back up to 3.8 volts for storage until I'm ready to do the swap. (It's bad for the cells to be left sitting fully charged or discharged for a long time like weeks or more)

Unfortunately my tester is designed for radio controlled car batteries about 1/10th of the size of these cells, so it takes quite a while to charge and discharge a 50Ah cell with a 6 amp charge and 2 amp discharge rate. So it's going to take about a day and a half to test each cell. But I only have to do it once to verify they're OK so not a big deal.

The next issue is how to do the swap. The battery weighs 164Kg and has to be lowered out of the bottom of the car with the car up off the ground. Originally I thought only a two post hoist would do the job and thus be out of the reach of a driveway mechanic such as myself however a couple of people have trail-blazed a really simple method to do it that only requires a small, low, wheeled trolley, four threaded bars, a jack and some high axle stands or other supports.

A guy Rupert over on SpeakEV had a fault with one of the CMU (cell monitoring) boards in his battery pack which with a bit of diagnosis help from me and a couple of other people he managed to fix, and in the process also devised a way to get the pack out of the car in his own garage with limited equipment. It's a very interesting thread with a few wrong turns and mistakes that ended up alright at the end, quite the electronics detective thread!

https://www.speakev.com/threads/c-zero- ... ir.137750/

Initially his approach was to jack up and support both ends of the car with ramps and a jack and then use a small hand operated hydraulic pallet mover to drop down and remove the pack - a nice approach if you can hire one but still a bit expensive. You can see this method in the images above from the first post in the thread. However when he had to drop the pack out a second time, presumably after returning the pallet mover he devised another method seen in this post:

https://www.speakev.com/threads/c-zero- ... st-2613992

This time he propped the car up good and high on some concrete blocks and then replaced four of the battery pack mounting bolts with 30cm long threaded bars with a spacer tube and nuts to guide and lower the pack down. Genius.

He did cheat a little bit though and rammed M12 x 2.5mm threaded bar into an M12 x1.25mm hole. Another person in another thread also dropped their pack out but used a slight variation of this technique - they used actual M12 x 1.25mm threaded bar and nuts, and because those would be too slow to wind down by hand they supported the weight of the pack with a jack, ran the nuts quickly down a few inches by hand, lowered the jack, and repeated until it came right down. I know of a 3rd person who has just done this method as well, using the bars and nuts mostly for guidance and support, but doing the lowering and raising quickly with a jack with the nuts then followed up.

So that's my plan. I'll need four threaded M12 x 1.25 bars about 40cm long, (apparently M12 x 1.25 bar isn't easy to find) 4 spacer tubes to slip over the threaded bars, 4 washers and a handful of nuts - one to run up and down each bar and a pair at the bottom as locknuts to keep the bar from being unwound out of the hole in the car. I also need to build a little trolley to lower the pack onto - I was thinking 25mm plywood with 4 large caster wheels on the corners. I don't know the exact dimensions yet but probably around 1 metre x 1 metre. I need to get under the car and measure the spacing between the bolts that will have the threaded bars inserted so that the trolley is slightly narrower to allow the bars to clear the trolley while inserted in the chassis.

As my driveway isn't flat I think I may also need to add four eye hooks to the corners of the trolley and attach ropes so it can be pulled and guided out from under the car into the garage to work on and back under the car again.

The actual work of swapping the cells shouldn't be too difficult, it's mainly the hassle of getting the 164Kg pack out of the car and back in again! Might be a two person job just due to the physical effort required to get the thing in and out and guide it around safely - not sure yet. One major advantage of the threaded bar approach is that they also work to guide the pack as you lift it back up so that it ends up exactly in alignment with the mounting points on the body.

So fingers crossed these cells test out OK and I can actually get a dry weekend in the next couple of months to look at this!

[RichardW]

I've got a creeper like this although mine is a 6 wheeler - should be OK for a trolley! M12 Fine bar available on e-bay, not particularly cheap though... I'll be up for a bit of battery shoving when the time comes.

[RichardW]

Bar cheaper here but the delivery is a bit steep, not sure which would work out cheaper!

[myglaren]

I used to drop the engines out of the Imps onto my neighbour's daughter's skate board

[Michel]

I used to drop the engines out of the Imps onto my neighbour's daughter's skate board

We used to do Beetle motors using a nicked shopping trolley with the top part cut off so it was just the bottom basket and the wheels. They fit in well.

[Mandrake]

I've got a creeper like this although mine is a 6 wheeler - should be OK for a trolley! M12 Fine bar available on e-bay, not particularly cheap though... I'll be up for a bit of battery shoving when the time comes.

Bar cheaper here but the delivery is a bit steep, not sure which would work out cheaper!

Thanks for the offer of assistance, that would certainly make the job a bit easier!

I don't think a creeper like that would be suitable though - although it could probably take the weight (about twice a persons weight) it's far too narrow - the battery pack frame goes right from one side of the car to the other (and most of the length between front and rear wheels) and it's difficult to judge where the centre of gravity of the pack would be to place such a narrow trolley under it.

Also I don't know how well you remember my driveway but not only are the slabs quite uneven, (and therefore a challenge for tiny wheels like that to climb the bumps with a heavy load ) there is a fairly large (and broken up) concave concrete drain gully between the driveway and the garage that would have to be traversed to get it into the garage to work on it out of the weather, and I'm pretty sure the edges of the battery pack frame would get beached on the ground in that gully with such a small trolley precariously supporting it from the middle.

My plan was to build a trolley that was significantly higher off the ground and of a length and width that matches the battery pack, while still letting the threaded bars clear the sides of the trolley - in fact I aim to have it high enough that I can just squeeze my jack under the edge of the trolley to help lift the pack if there is any difficulty getting it back up onto the threaded bars during refitting. My jack goes down to 130mm so I thought these caster wheels would be ideal, and pretty sturdy:

At £7 each they're not too bad. The plywood is a bit more of a problem - I only need a piece of 25mm(ish) thick about 1m x 1.5m probably (I need to measure under the car to get exact dimensions) however in B&Q they only have full size 8' x 4' sheets in that thickness, so I'm not keen on buying a £34 sheet just to cut a small piece off it... I would have thought someone would have some half size sheets available.

Other things to consider are what to support the car on - Rupert used 4 stacks of two concrete breeze blocks with some wood load spreaders at the top - that looks pretty practical and has the advantage that they can be reused around the garden somewhere afterwards. The car needs to be approximately twice as high off the ground as regular ramps to get sufficient clearance to get the battery pack out, especially if its lowering onto a trolley that itself is 150mm off the ground. So the car needs to be raised approximately 500mm at both ends. Or two breeze blocks worth, whatever that is. That's going to be a challenge with my jack even using a ratcheting process...what's the biggest throw jack you have ?

Quite a bit of planning, measuring and sourcing of materials to do yet for this project - it won't be cheap however when you consider the alternative would be hiring a days worth of access on a two post host, doing the work in someone else's way in their workshop and crossing your fingers that there are no delays or snags that cause it to take longer than one day I'd much rather do the job at home at my leisure!

Next step is to get some measurements under the car to work out the exact dimensions the bed of the trolley should be and try to source some plywood as cheaply as possible.

The threaded rods you found their look perfect for the job - I'll check if they have the matching nuts as well.

[myglaren]

If there is a sawmill near you they will have offcuts suitable, maybe not exactly to your requirements but close enough, much cheaper than B&Q type places.
Even some small DIY places are worth trying.

[RichardW]

Skulking around at my place...

Framed out in 2x2, approx 1.4m x 0.6m. I've also got a piece of 12mm OSB 1.2m x 0.8m we could put on the top to replace the lattice. Never throw anything away, me. Which is probably why I can hardly get in the garage....

If you look around to see if there are any building works going on near you might be able to find a piece of OSB in a skip - builders chuck it away like it's going out of fashion.

My jack is similar to yours, about 300mm lift, it's only 2 or 3 lifts to get it on to a decent height stand. I've got loads of timber offcuts to make blocks with.

[Skull]

Simon Lidl do something similar this week

TROLLEY £17.99 MAX 250Kg

LIDL

[Michel]

Simon Lidl do something similar this week

TROLLEY £17.99 MAX 250Kg

lidl trolly.jpg

After ending up in a collar strapped to a spinal board 3 weeks ago after trying to prove I'm not an old fart on a BMX, I went in Aldi a few days later and mistook this for a skateboard and nearly did myself a serious injury in the aisle.

Seem very sturdy devices, that's for sure.

[Skull]

ALWAYS wear protection

[Michel]

ALWAYS wear protection

I was when I did my neck in, I didn't even fall off. Just jarred myself pretty badly.