Last week went pretty well on the Saturn.
up to a point...

Under the hood:

We have gotten the motor mounting brackets powder coated and have balanced the motor/flywheel and done final assembly on the motor stack. So, finally, the motor stack is complete and installed in its final resting place. We then took measurements and have worked out what we think will be the final design of the front battery racks. Unfortunately there won't be enough space under the slope of the hood to do full battery enclosures the way we would have liked. However, things should work out just fine. The racks are welded and now it is just a matter of figuring out the exact angles for building the beams that will support them. That is where we left things last night. The compound angles on the beams in this car are a bear to deal with. Chris and I have tried several ways to measure them and haven't found one that really satisfies us as being reproducible. I think Chris is looking for a laser so that we can have at least one level point of reference to measure from.

In the passenger compartment:

I had finished up installing the electric heater core into the factory heater core a while ago. The core is now re-installed in the car. Brian and Dale came over and ran some additional wires through the other tube (through the fire wall) that is no longer being used so that we have plenty of options where it comes to installing switches for some of the components. (AC, Heater, power steering, etc) If he wants that extra bit of range, he should be able to switch off all unnecessary components. Brian and Dale took the dash with them to work out how they want to mount the e-meter in it and should bring it back next Saturday.

In the rear:

The large battery box has been put together and has been fitted in the car. We are waiting until we get the other box worked out before we get it powder coated and mounted fully. I built a mock-up for the box that will be mounted between the shock towers and have tested putting some batteries in there. I think we will have to give things a bit more clearance there. These batteries swell with use and will be a bear to get out if we design the enclosures too tightly.

So, there's the welding... We are reinstalling the floor under the rear seat because we just can't install batteries under there without making the rear seat mostly unusable. The box would stick too far down close to the ground and we have speed humps all over the place in Austin. They don't work out very well with things sticking down in the middle of vehicles.

Thus, the welding. Of course I had cleaned up the edges of the cut out section, so re-installing the original molded steel is quite a challenge. Luckily I hadn't thrown it away all together... It is taking a while and the welder has proven not to have a low enough current setting for welding 22 gauge sheet metal. We have been having to do a bunch of starting and stopping in order to avoid blowing holes in what we are welding. If you know how a mig welder works, you know that there is a motor that feeds wire from a spool in the base unit, up along the gas hose, up into the gun and out through the welding tip. It is pushing a lot of wire and probably requires a bit of work.. This motor seems to have died on us. This is the second motor to do so. First it was Chris's Ready Welder and now in this cheep Chinese Lincoln SP-135 knock-off. Of course there is no warranty... I will be replacing the welder shortly so that we can get this work out of the way. But, we suspect that there will be a way to fix the motor. No time to mess with it now though. Anyway, so then we will have two! One for each garage. [grin]