Gears replaced, leak found!

Well, I was going to update this the other night, but sometimes there's only enough time to work on the car.  So a few things have happened since my last post: for one thing, I got the old gears off. 

 

Stop using Dropbox to send a file

Dropbox.  It's becoming the household name for the way to transfer files, and I don't understand why.

Torn up gears, and a dead end for now

Well today I got the transmission cover off.  There were two gears in here (5th gear and the selector gear) that were totally rounded (all teeth were sheared off).

Leaky Transmission

Well after a horrible stay at La Guardia airport for almost 12 hours, I am home and thinking about my car problems.  Tried to get into it after work today, which usually goes something like this:

Bye Bye, 5th Gear

It had to have been within 10 minutes of my staring at the odometer, marveling at the nearly 199,000 miles I had wracked up on my VW Golf and thinking how trouble-free the car had lately been, when my cruise control disengaged, and the car started to do the all-too-familiar "death coast".  Without thinking or trying anything else, I immediately turned on my four-way flashers and started moving into the breakdown lane -scoping the distance to the next rest area.

It's Wednesday.

...And it's snowing.

Have a great week, and a safe drive home.

Sunny but windy test ride

The more I thought about my minimum voltage yesterday, the more it was bothering me.  The battery holds a lot more energy than that.  It occurred to me that if the voltage is dropping, but the energy isn't being used, it's probably a loose or high resistance connection somewhere.

The weather was still pretty warm today (and actually sunny and somewhat dry), so I decided to do a decent test run and see if I could figure out what's going on.  First I fashioned a temporary front fender out of cardboard.  Looked kind of ghetto, but it did help a lot.  I rode down Shelburne Rd. and back on the bike path, about half of yesterday's trip.  Throughout the trip, I wasn't completely sure, but I did seem to see 2 different behaviors on the instantaneous volt meter.  At times it would only drop one bar under full throttle (normal), and other times it was down to half.  I also noticed my top speed dropped about 10MPH when this happened.

When I got back, I checked all the connections, and sure enough, I found the culprit.  The connection between the battery and the battery management system (BMS) was still a cheap, standard crimp connector.  It was not too hot to touch, but definitely pretty warm.  When I pulled it apart  I saw a little bit of charring around one of the contacts.  Going to replace this with a Power Pole connector.

Accidentally reset my power stats when I was changing the watt meter over, but enough said/noticed to satisfy me on this.  Round trip was about 8.5 miles.