10000km passed

The new brush set and air filter have worked nicely and Corolla has been in more use than ever! First electric driven 10000 km is now behind and the car is working great.

From Cycle Analyst statistics, I have learned that my average regeneration precentage is around 2,5%. This means that I have gained 250 km worth of energy with regenerative braking while saving the mechanical brakes at the same time.

On our winter holidays we washed our "Red car", as we use to call it, togheter with my kids. The paintwork looks ok when it's wet;)

I have not been able to drive totally without brakedowns. One day when plugging in the car to be charged as usual, the residual-current device opened from my garage's electric cabin. I was suprised as charging had just before worked ok at work, but then again, at work we do not have RCD's on all sockets..

After some testing I found out that the Defa Classic inlet cable was causing the earth fault. It had been in use in this car since late 80's and now water had penetrated through the armoured cable causing the brakedown. The broken inlet cable was replaced with a Defa Mini inlet cable, which is a delight to use compared to the old one:)

Air filter mounted on the ME1003

To prevent brush set breakdown due to dirt I purchased an air filter to be mounted on the ME1003 brush set cover. After finding nothing suitable from local auto parts stores I found a solution from eBay.

 I ordered a HKS super power flow air filter which is a dry type mushroom shaped free air filter. Its diameter is 200mm so it fits the ME1003 brush set cover very well. I removed some unnecessary parts from the HKS filter and mounted its frame on the brush set cover with four M4 bolts and nuts. I think that this air filter is a great match for ME1003, highly recommended!

Having the air filter and brush set ready it was time for running in the new brushes. Mounting the brush set with all of its 16 brushes has not been easy so this time I tied them with cable ties as shown in the above photo. After pushing the brush set into the motor I cut and pulled off the cable ties. This method was easy and fast but it costs 8 cable ties:)

 For running in the new brushes I used a single cell 10A lifepo4 charger as I did not have any other suitable power supply available. The charger supplied only about 3V so the motor ran at around 120rpm. The picture above shows the result after 36h of running in with 120rpm. The brush on the left had only about 60% contact and the other brush was around 75% contact so I decided to keep running in for 24 more hours.

After a total of 60h of running in with 120rpm I decided that the contact surfaces are good enough. I guess having used a 12V power source for about 12h would have given the same result.

 Installing the brush set cover was as easy as before as the HKS filter frame does not block the mounting screws at all. The filter itself is mounted on the filter frame by a single hand tightened screw and the Corolla is ready to hit the streets again!

While writing this I have done one successful round trip to work without problems. I hope not to face any more brush problems for a good time:)

New vesion ME1013 brush set received!

 I ordered a new brush set, this time from evdrives ebay shop. It was a very nice suprise that the received brush set was the newer version! There were no indication about the version of ME1013 on the item description, but I am glad to finally have this new version after having received one older version from www.electricmotorsports.com.

I wish Motenergy would have made a clear version number for these two different versions of ME1013. While being fully compatible back and forth, the newer version uses welded bus bar connections where the older uses bolt and nut connections which failed on Corolla's first motor breakdown. The newer brush set has also bigger cross section bus bars lowering conduction losses.

 On the photos above the new version of ME1013 is on the left. It can most easily be identified from its bottom side where it has a plastic cover on top of the bus bars shown on the right side photo.

This photo shows the new version of ME1013 with its plastic cover removed. Removing the cover exposes the nice welded bigger size bus bars. No more bolts getting loose and getting burned!