We have started the process of cleaning the Ghia out. As you may have seen (or not...), the Ghia's motor got borrowed so that Mark's MR-2 could get a heart transplant at the MakerFaire in Austin. Cara worked on beating the seats out of their rusted rails and somehow managed to pull them out. In the meantime, I have been removing all of the old batteries that will be replaced by an as yet unnamed new battery pack. I have pretty much everything cleared out now. We have some rust repair to do and a bit of repainting. As we do that, Chris and I will be digitizing the interior spaces and may spend the time to do all of the system design in software as a test for our future Revolt project process. Pics coming soon. Really I promise... I'll link some of them here when I get a chance.

I haven't said much about the Ghia lately. This is just a quick note to update that I have purchased the Ghia from Mark B. and the title transfer has gone through. I am going to be taking the entire thing apart, fixing some issues with the body of the car and then rebuilding the electric side of things. I am working to get a pack of Lithium batteries so that I can experiment with a > 35 mile range car without killing the suspension. Wish me luck!

Though, of course, most of this is on hold until Christopher and I finish the 2002 Saturn SL that we are doing for Brian L. It will be the first REVOLT Custom Electric Vehicles car when it rolls out of my garage.

The weather finally took a bit of a break on Sunday. So, I got a chance to get out of the house and do some work on the Ghia. The agenda for Sunday was battery maintenance. With flooded lead-acid cells you can hook them all up in series and treat them as one huge battery pack. Through typical use, the individual batteries in the pack will perform with slight variations so you slowly end up with some batteries that come to "full" charge at lower voltages than your strongest cells. To prevent these batteries from getting worse and worse, you have to "equalize" the pack which just puts the pack on a low amperage charge at the end of the charging cycle. While the batteries that are still low will continue to charge, the ones that really are full will start to bubble, releasing the excess energy as gas. Since I have had it, I have been bubbling the pack a bunch trying to give it some long equalization charges so as to improve the pack's performance. So, I wanted to take the time to go through and check the water levels in the batteries and make sure I wasn't damaging them.

I just got back from showing Mark Barr's Ghia at the Sustainable Shopper's Ball here in Austin. This event is held 3-4 times per year and AustinEV was invited to show some cars there. I am really proud because I had managed to get the batteries in the Ghia rehabilitated enough to drive down to the Burger center and back without much of a problem.