I’m back at home after working on Brian’s EV project. We put in four solid 10 hour days, pulling the battery pack and power pack out of a Nissan Leaf and then pulling the front clip and 196 four-cylinder engine out of Slowflake, his Scout 800. Getting the major assemblies out of the Leaf was much easier than we both were expecting, apart from not having enough 18 mm wrenches. Working on an EV with only 36,000 miles means all of the bolts came out easily and there was no grease covering every surface. The Scout, on the other hand, was a different story. Slowflake is 100 times cleaner than Peer Pressure, being a relatively recent restomod, but the transfer case was leaking and the transmission was slick with a coating of dirt and oil.
This marks the first time I’ve taken an engine out without the help of veterans, so we were learning as we went. Originally thinking we would split the transmission from the engine and just pull that out, we quickly realized those bolts were inaccessible, and we would have to pull everything out as one unit. That meant we had to get very creative with the cherry picker to lift up and angle the engine under the transmission hump and over the front bumper to remove it.
This process took the better part of a day, and it seemed like every time we thought we’d disconnected all the wires we found one more that had to be removed. But on the evening of the second day, we had the engine out and sitting on some blocks of wood, waiting for the transmission to be split.
The third day started with separating the two and putting the truck back up on a lift to get the transmission reinstalled. That took some doing; we had to get it up off the ground and onto the transmission hoist, which was taller than the cherry picker’s reach. We looked around and Brian said, “why don’t we just use the lift?” Genius. We chained it to the lift and got it onto the hoist, then muscled it into place under the truck. With the crossmember reinstalled it still wanted to fall out, so we steadied it with a block of wood and hooked the rear driveshaft back up.
On the fourth day, we started with something easy and installed a rear disc brake kit Brian had purchased at Nats five years ago. This took two middle-aged men a couple of hours and a lot of head-scratching while we tried to follow lousy directions, but common sense and mechanical aptitude prevailed and we got everything hooked up—and we didn’t have to flare a single brake line, which was some kind of minor miracle. (Looking at this kit gives me an itch to buy and install the front kit on Darth).
Then we got the EV power pack back on the cherry picker and hoisted it into the Scout engine bay to look at the fitment. There’s plenty of room in there—enough that we could probably fit a stack of batteries in front of the motor, if we run out of space in other places.
We were running out of things we could tackle without input from the guy who built the replacement wire harness, which is the first part of the puzzle that needs to be solved. The next thing that we need to do is hook the battery pack up to the power unit to test them both outside the car and verify everything works. Then we separate the brain at the top of the power pack from the inverter/engine combo and have an aluminum plate laser-cut to offset the two so that it fits in the engine bay.
We also need to talk to the guy who manufactures the adapter for the EV engine to the original transmission to see how close they need to be.
After that, we have to crack open the battery pack to see what sizes the individual battery elements are and how many are in there, then figure out where we can tuck them into the nooks and crannies in the Scout. Then we fabricate some aluminum cradle/boxes (thus practicing our TIG welding) for each group, and figure out how to wire them up together.
I set up cameras everywhere and wound up having a ton of footage (338GB) to wade through for YouTube. I’m going to split each day up into its own individual video because Monday’s video timed out at 40 minutes.
I’ve been looking forward to this project for months now, ever since Brian dreamed it up, and it was exactly what I needed to clear my head during this sabbatical. Four solid days of hanging out with my friend, getting our hands dirty, solving problems, and coming up with solutions felt great. I was happy that the skills I’ve learned in the last three years working on Darth Haul have come in so clutch. It feels good to learn and grow and tackle new things that would have been inconceivable five years ago.