I finally started putting together just some of the vast array of parts required to build an electric car. To avoid the insanity of trying to design and build the battery boxes and gather all the special order parts, I've purchased a kit from ElectroAuto in California. They provide just about everything I will need to do the conversion. Just to give you a sample, here are just the bolts supplied with the kit:
Each baggie contains a different size of shape of bolts:
I started with the motor Controller and Shunt. The controller in an electrical car is comparable to the carburetor or fuel injector in an internal combustion engine (ICE). It regulates the amount of electricity that is directed from the batteries to the motor. You can also view it an a really, really large dimmer switch. The shunt is used to measure the current that flows through the engine. It's just a large low-impedance resistor that provides enough voltage drop to push a small needle on the dashboard. Much like a tachometer, the ammeter tells me when to back-off of the throttle. In the photo below, the controller is the big black box and the shunt is the angled piece of metal on the top. To give you perspective, that is a full-sized set of pliers on the right:
The thick cable connecting the two components is called 2/0 wire and has the electrical conductivity over 30 times that of conventional home wiring (14 gauge). This is important as the controller can deliver up to 550 amps of electricity -- enough to power over a thousand 60-watt light bulbs. I use a crimping device to permanently secure the 'lugs' to the ends of the wire. Here's a close-up of a lug that needed a 90-degree bend in it to guide it towards the shunt. If you look closely, you can see a circle with a cross in it where the crimper struck the lug to pinch the wire:
While I had the parts out, I snapped a picture of the breaker and main contactor. Much like your home electrical panel, the car will have a breaker to protect the circuitry from overload. It will be mounted in the passenger compartment to also allow for emergency shut-off. You can compare the size of the breaker (center) to a conventional household breaker (right). On the left is the main contactor that also acts like a huge on-off switch that is activated by a turn of the ignition key:
