bruces ranger ev
100AH Ranger EV bruces
  This is a ranger ev that bruce sent to me to have upgraded so he went the whole way , he went with 100ah cells from Hi-power .. a BMS from thunderstruck motors to protect these great but expensive cells ................... he had a faulty BCM and a failed contactor box assy ...
and during the install the DTR sensor (the one on the transaxle that tells the BCM what gear it is in) failed ..................  turned out great ...  I will leave out some of the steps since I have showed it in other installs and just fill in the important changes ........................  On to the upgrade ......
OK,  pulled the original pack out and yanked the top off ..............
here is the 8 volt pack .. I will yank these all out and recycle them and install the 100ah hi-power cells with the new flow through fan and the new large recirculation NIMH fan setup and add the NIMH wiring and IOM assy ......  Using new copper connector bars to connect the cells together wherever possible ............
I put all the batteries in and installed the new thunderstruck motors BCM on all the cells ...  flash updated the BCM and found out it was faulty so I had to get another one and replace it and one of the original problems with the pack was the contactor box assy it had failed strangely  , it will fire up if you immediately go to start but if you wait for the self test it will not start .....  very strange ...
changed it out with a good used one ....
I hooked the spare board for the cells , I put 100 of them on the cells and 1 in this really nice case and put it in the pack so if one ever fails they will have one to replace it (hopefully that will never happen) ....................
here is a quick pic of the front of the pack ready to go into the truck ....
Here is the original board and original relay that came with the system but it was designed for switching high voltage and it was not working correct so a quick call to the manufacturer and he went to work and found me a new relay that works great !!!  I am leaving the old one in place in case they ever want to use it to control a different charger in the future ... you never know so I might as well have it there in case this does happen .....
OK here is the new relay and a connector I came up with to make installing it easier ...
OK here it is with the new relay and I left the old one in place ..............
I added a marker light to make this easy to know when the system shuts down the charger and not some other error not known,  you can just look under the driver side and it will be lit ............
Here it is a full charge and the light pops on , as long as the light stays on it means at least one of the cells has reached the maximum of 3.8V and when the cells come back down in voltage it will restart the charger and let it try to bring the other cells up to match the high ones ...........
Tap into the wall box blue wire for the connection ...  it is wire #6 ...  you can trace it from the charger plug or use the wiring schematic to find the correct wire .......................
here we are ready to close up the pack and put it back together ...................
Bruce wanted a way to plug in the ranger ev while at work without having to have a wall charger installed by his work place ... so to add a second way is not as hard as maybe thought to be ..
install a really nice DS-50 under the hood and wire it into the system just like the original one add a switch to control it so only one can be used at a time for protection ....  add a cable and add a relay to make it so when you plug it in it turns on the plug light and makes it so you can not drive off with it plugged in .......  He can now plug it into any 220 volt plug in and use it with just an extension cord ..........................
add the relay in the box and wire it in !!
run the power cord , put a end prong on it for a bunch of adapter cables if needed and hide it behind the grille .....................
add a nice hidden switch and wire it in .... 
you must have the switch to the left (towards passenger side) to use the normal avcon plug in..
If you want to use the added power cable instead you go ahead and plug in the cable first (you must plug the power cable in first) then turn the switch to the drivers side and it will start the charger ... you will hear it clunk ...  when you are ready to go home ... turn the switch back to the passenger side (this makes it so the power is not on in the cable) then just unplug it and slip it back into the grille ...  put the adapter behind the seats so it is always available .....
Ok to charge, reach in pull out the cord ..........................
reach behind the seat grab the adapter and plug it into the cable ....
 
plug it into a heavy duty extension cord with of course 220 volts of electrons flowing through it ...
of course you can always use the regular plug in (just make sure the switch is towards the passenger side to use this one ) ......................
when the cells are full these really cool lights come on when it shuts down the charger ..
added this pic , too bad the case is closed up and you cant see these as they are really cool ...
OK put the pack back in everything is working .............................
I was all finished and driving it around and just suddenly I got a wrench on the dash after I had put it back in park,  it took a little playing around with the NGS tester connected and I found out the actual switch on the transaxle had failed ..  I am just guessing from setting it went bad ... I have never seen it before but I had a spare transaxle assy with the switch still on it so I pulled it off of the spare unit and just plugged it in and it showed the switch worked so I knew it was faulty ....
here I plugged in the used one and it worked,  it was a pain getting the one off with the transaxle in place ... I had to remove the bolts holding the plate on the transaxle and then jack up the transaxle just a little (about an inch) to clear the bracket and get the switch off and put the new one on .........................
finally finished up and tested and ready to go back to its owner ...  impressive truck now ...
I went for a 62 mile run and no problems at all and still had 1/4 of a tank left ... not bad for new cells ..........    my dad broke in the cells though as his driving is perfect for doing that as he makes a whole lot of short runs in his truck so I had him run 500 miles on the pack before I put it together for the truck ...................................................
 
  I am sure bruce will let us know how well it goes for him ...
 
  on to the next truck ............