Chevrolet S10 Visit 1/21/14

     The S10, personally, would not be my choice of vehicle to convert for this project. I just do not like the way it looks. But, appearence and the like aside, it seemed to be a really good truck. It was in a very good condition, seemed to be very driveable and comfortable, but I was not one of the ones in the group to test drive the truck, that was Mr. Grisbee and Shiraz. The S10 itself is very small for trucks and light, which is good for electric conversions because if the car already weighs around 3000+lbs, it's going to weigh a lot more after we put the batteries and motor in. The truck would need a new paint job, a trend I noticed with all the cars we looked at today.

Searching Craigslist 1-21-14

This morning we tackled the problem of finding a donor car. After some scattered searching Mr. Moudry directed us by walking into the room with six possible choices from craigslist printed out. He told us to narrow down our criteria and focus on certain areas to search for. We were quickly able to get twenty four potential donor cars for conversion.

Toyota MR2

    Today was another day in our search for a donor vehicle and looked at 3 cars in total today: Toyota MR2, Chevy S10, and Toyota Supra. At our first stop which was near Beltway 8 and 290, we looked at the Toyota MR2. We were waiting outside the house when the car owner opened the garage door and revealed the red coupe. The team then went on to evaluate the car and the car all of a sudden didn't seem that great when we started evaluating the interior, the body damages but one thing that caught our eye was the T-top. After Mr. Grisbee approved the transmission the team went on to look at other cars and gathered options. (Alex's blog: Chevy S10, Max's blog: Toyota Supra)

Search for a Donor Vehicle

     We started the day off as usual, meeting in the 'green room' at 8:30 AM. The first thing that we did was discuss and peer edit the tasks that we completed the night before. To take another step forward we completed tasks such as budget, timeline, description and goals for our project. All of this work will be a part of a presentation that will be made for potential donors.

     Next we started reaching out to people that were selling potential donor cars and after a few calls we were able to get a time to go look at one and evaluate. Before we headed out we worked on a rubric with criteria and constraints to effectively evaluate our potential donor vehicle. It took us a little time to find the place but finally we saw the beautiful blue Chevy S10 drive in to the parking lot. We all got out of the the van really excited to look at car but unfortunately the owner put the wrong information on the ad and the car turned out be automatic which didn't meet our requirements. We also looked at a potential garage for us to work on (check out Alex's post). For now we continue to search for and contact people to find our donor vehicle!

The Neighbor's Space

     Today we went next-door to look at the neighbor's place to look for the best space to keep the car while we work on it. They have a couple options, the shed and the car port. We spent a good hour evaluating our options, looking at how structurally sound the shed was and how easily visible the car would be. We found quickly that the shed was the best option because the car port was helping to block any visibility of the car while in the shed. When looking at the structural stability of the shed, I got a little bit conceded about the roof because it started slanting down on the side towards the school. When I voiced this concern, Mr. Moudry answered very confidently that this shed will not collapse even after our children die. I thought this was a very bold statement, but I accepted it because Mr. Moudry has proven himself to be a wise man.

     We decided that the shed still needed a lot of work, but it was our best option. We were going to need to put some flooring in the shed because the ground would not be a sufficient surface for us. We also realized that the shed would need some more electrical outlets, in fact, there only seemed to be one available. This would surely be not enough for what we needed, and there wasn't a 240 volt socket for the car either. As a whole we decided that this was the best option as it was right next to the school, but it would still need some work.
What the shed looks like:

narrowing down donor cars and EV kits

On Thursday, we continued to work on the budget. we decided, after calling some of the EV pros, that an EV conversion kit would be much easier to order and manage. because EV kits already have most or all of the parts we would need, it would be much easier to order all the parts in one place.

Budgeting and Creation of Gantt Chart

  This Wednesday Alex and I worked on setting up a budget and creating a timeline for our group. Mr. Moudry gave us a presentation over a Gantt chart that he developed for the high school. The chart was an outline of tasks sorted chronologically and then translated into bars by their duration. The whole chart had around 200 different tasks some of which depended on others. We spent a good portion of the day working on setting up our Gantt chart. It took us about three different drafts until we were able to

Traveling Day 1.14.14 - Austin, TX

Tuesday, January 14th was spent traveling to Austin and talking to Chris at Revolt, a company that is hired to convert cars to EVs (electric vehicles). The drive there took a typical three hours, we left around eight in the morning, everyone made sure to arrive earlier to school than usual. The drive there was uneventful, which was a good thing. I tried to catch some sleep, but that was unsuccessful. We spent a lot of the drive when we were nearing Austin wondering where we were going to eat lunch, and to our surprise, Shiraz discovered that

Road Trip

     Today all of us met at the campus at 7:30 am in order to depart at 8:00 am and get to Austin in time. We all sat in the van pondering up questions to ask Chris, who is going to give us a tour of what they do at 'Revolt' and how. We thought up questions about the batteries, how are they connected, and also about the battery management system. We were a few minutes away from Revolt when we decided to have lunch somewhere nearby (can't build a car on an empty stomach). Looking for places to eat we

Visit to Adam's Garage

     This monday we took a trip to the garage Adam and John Metric. These two have been converting EV's for several years now mostly in the form of extremely high performance drag racers. His typical electric cars compete in the 1/4 mile race, where his fastest car (Mazda Miata) reaches 60 miles an hour in 1.5 seconds. This beats out the fastest production car (Bugatti Veyron Super Sport) by a full second. The Bugatti typically sells for 2.5 million dollars.    

day one

Day one, we started to outline what we needed to do during the j-term and laid out goals onto the board. we disused how we would go about the j-term and topics such as:
Research- what is an EV and how do they work
Assigning Roles - who does what
Budgeting- how much this would cost
Designing- what will the car look like and work
Evaluating- how will we be graded
3D Modeling- can computer molding help
Determine Needs/Materials- what do we need
Obtain Materials- how will we get it
Building- what needs to be done once we have the parts
 once we covered some of these topics we started to plan how long this would take us. after a long day of planning we started to do some research on youtube and some other internet sites.