# BMW 328i conversion



## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

I'm finally starting my build thread about a year after starting my conversion! This is good because I have a lot to report on. 

I picked up my donor car from a damaged vehicle auction for $650. The car had be vandalized and all the glass bar the rear windscreen was broken. Also the passenger side door was dented and needed to be replaced. I also needed to clean off some rotting egg yolk over the rear wheel arch. FYI, egg yolk oxidizes paint. Oh, and there is a small dent behind the rear wheel arch.... that's all. The car still drove great with the original ICE.

Fortunately, here in New Zealand we have a place called Pick-a-Part. It's essentially a huge car yard where you can go and find the part you want and remove it yourself for a fraction of the cost of a conventional salvage yard. I picked up the door glass for $30 each door. The windscreen for $50. The door for $45. I also repair the sagging headlining (a common 90's BMW problem) with some nice suede upholstery fabric.

Here's the car with new glass installed and new upholstery. Haven't got around to fixing the dent yet. 

more soon....


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

I'm trying to report this in order of what I actually did! This strains my memory a bit but I believe I this was around the time of the Azure dynamics liquidation auction. Anyway, I acquired a Siemens motor (1PV5135-WS14) and a DMOC 645 inverter and a small sealed lead acid battery bank (for testing purposes) and got to work setting up an arduino due to run the GEVCU open source project. This was all relatively pain free and I got the motor running within a few weeks of receiving the controller.







I'm no longer using any precharge hardware as the precharge initiation can be done entirely in software.


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

I must be too dumb to get youtube videos to embed properly! There is actually an attached video above. I clicked on it and it took me off to youtube! so it kind of works.

I next removed the ICE. I discovered the BMW E36 chassis is really great to work on. Drilling out 4 spot welds at the front enables you to remove the front supports and bumper. I sold the ICE for $650, ironically the same price as I paid for the car in the first place. I also sold the auto transmission for $250. Things were progressing nicely!


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

Next I was onto the motor/transmission adapter plate. I chose to do this a little differently.  BMW flywheels and clutch assemblies are really thick which presents a problem when making the adapter plate. Most often people seem to go for a milled slab of aluminum. I did a solid works drawing for what I would need and found the adapter plate would have needed to be over 2 inches thick! I ended up designing my adapter out two steel plates separated by a steel pipe. This was by far the cheaper option. Most of the cost was in getting the steel laser cut. All the pieces cost about $700. I incorporated the original clutch disc into the design. There are two videos below. In the first video, I try to explain what I've done. The second video is a time lapse of the assembly which makes what I'm trying to explain a whole lot clearer, although the video quality is not great....







 See the next post for the second video


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## Tesseract (Sep 27, 2008)

Here's how to embed youtube videos:






Notice it is the alphanumeric string after the v= part of the link between the youtube codes.


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

Thanks for that! I had been trying to put the youtube tags around whole link.

Chris


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

I decided I would move the controller from its original proposed location above the motor. With the controller here I could only fit about 20 CA40 CALB batteries. What's more, they would have been right at the front of the vehicle just behind the radiator and very vulnerable in an accident scenario. 

I worked out if I moved the controller right to the front of the engine bay and put the battery box above the motor I would be able to fit about 60 cells instead of 20.

I plan on eventually using 80 Ah at 320V (CA40 CALBs in parallel). So that's 25 KWhr which should give a range of about 150km or around 90 miles.


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

I have a question from someone who knows their stuff on inverters. I understand that it's a good idea to keep the phase cables (inverter to motor) as short as possible, is this just to reduce radiated emissions or are there other performance based reasons? I am using phase cables with a length shown in this picture. Is this too long?


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

Okay so I decided not to go ahead with the CALB cells. When you compare them to the cost of Nissan cells, well... there is no comparison. I got my nissan cells from japan for $NZD 5500 (for comparison that's $US 3500) to my door in New Zealand. Calb cells are $US 0.31 per watt hour, so the same size pack as my nissan cells would have cost me 0.31*24000 = $US 7440. 

Here is my leaf pack sitting in the garage


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

Here I have modified the original A/T cross member to incorporate vertical mounting posts for the front battery box. The cross member also supports the ford vacuum pump for the brake booster.


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

Completed front battery box, mounted to the front chassis rails and custom cross member. The front box can accommodate 24-26 Leaf cells.


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## ACEVS4US (Jul 21, 2011)

In order to mount the batteries in the trunk of the car I needed to create a flat mounting surface. The original metal behind the rear seats had stamped 0.5 mm sheet metal. I cut this out and replaced it with 1.5 mm flat sheet metal so that the sheet had similar rigidity (but more strength) to the original 0.5 mm sheet. I then welded the original Nissan leaf battery mounts to the sheet and fitted the batteries in the trunk space. The trunk will take 22 Leaf batteries.


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