Massive overhaul of 16655- including planned BEV conversion

[Ashyukun]

I've had 16655 for somewhere around 15 years now, and sadly the latter half of that time it's been parked because of the sway bar attachment to the front extension having rusted through. 4 years ago I finally got off my butt and got the car into my garage to start tearing things down to replace the front extension and repair all of the other rust damage to the frame. Since that required stripping everything off of the frame in order to take it to a local shop to have it sandblasted to get all of the remaining epoxy coating off the frame to have the bare metal to start the repairs, I decided that I was going to take the opportunity to also swap in a newer powertrain. My original plan was to use the Renesis engine from an RX-8, but as I looked into it I came to the conclusion that the rotary's high RPMs would likely not be appreciated by the car's stock transmission. At about the same time, I happened across a 2012 Nissan Leaf in a nearby junkyard and was able to pull the motor, gearbox, and electric AC compressor from it for a really low price (the yard didn't have any prices for the EV components and essentially said, "screw it" and charged me the price for a transfer case...).

It remains to be seen whether I'll end up actually using that motor & gearbox (it's relatively low-powered compared to newer ones) or get a newer wrecked donor car that I can also pull the battery pack from to reconfigure to use in the DMC, but it will have some form of electric drivetrain. I'm planing on making as many other improvements/fixes as I can while I have the car mostly disassembled. Current plans include:

• Adding power steering
• Completely rewire the car (I'll need lots of new wiring for the new drivetrain anyway)
• Fix (or replace) the roof box
• Potentially upgrading the brakes
• Custom digital dash (I had hoped to be able to use one of the projects others have started, but haven't seen much on those for a while)

It has been slow going though overall, but I'm hoping to try and focus more on it this summer. I have the frame back from the blasting company and just got in the new front frame extension from across the pond so need to stop dragging my feet and get the repairs made to the frame and working out mounting the electric motor/gearbox.

[Josh]

Jacob Graham fitted his DMC with a Nissan Leaf motor and gearbox. Perhaps he could be a good resource for you. The car goes by "AC/DMC" online.

I am interested to learn more about your restoration. Pictures?!

[Ashyukun]

Thanks! I?ve looked a good bit over what he?s posted as well as what I can find about the others that have been done. Probably the closest to what I?m looking at doing Bill Carson?s conversion using a Chevy Bolt, primarily because he just used the electronics (inverter, BMS, charger, etc.) from the donor car vs having to either buy or build them which would (hopefully) reduce the cost.

I need to go through the pictures I?ve taken (I?m not as good about it as I should be, I tend to get going working and not think about taking pictures) and post them- but here?s a very broad view of where things are after working on things yesterday:
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Yesterday I finally got the angle iron drilled to be able to put the front end of the frame on my very jury-rigged ?rotisserie? (turns out a new, non-ancient drill press and a fancy 1/2? drill bit makes drilling the necessary holes much easier) only to discover that 1. the angle iron on one side sticks out too much to allow rotating it in one direction, 2. the engine stands I?m using somehow don?t have holes for the locking pins at 90 degrees so I can?t lock the frame completely on its side, and 3. I really need to connect the two engine stands so they can?t yaw when I try and spin the frame due to not being able to mount the frame such that the CG of the frame lines up with the rotation points of the stands. Fixing that (likely using a lot of wood I have lying around) will be my next order of business- annoyingly the two stands aren?t identical so it may take some work (or my going to HF and buying another stand, which may make sense anyway so I have a stand for the motor down the line).

Next up will be deciding exactly what places on the frame need to be cut out and patches fabricated and welded in. Along with that I?ll need to work out how to best shore up/brace the frame while doing that so everything stays properly aligned- it would suck to do all that work and then have nothing straight and lined up. Just out m-of-frame in that picture is the box from Delorean Go that arrived just a week ago with the new front frame extension (the main reason all of this is happening in the first place?), the new front brake flex lines (mine were so rusted I couldn?t get the nut loose to remove them from the frame), the one brake hard line that broke when stripping the frame, and the roof box repair kit (which will hopefully be enough? I?d prefer to not have to replace it completely if possible).

I have a few options for what I may use for a donor for the electric drive and may have one of them purchased in the next week if it works out- then I?ll need to figure out whether it?s better to repair the stock engine cradle or follow in the approach of at least one other electric conversion and cut out the cradle and design and fabricate a custom one for the new drivetrain.

[Ashyukun]

So, I hadn't quite expected to be picking up a donor vehicle for the conversion just yet- but something that seemed to fit the bill really well came up so I jumped at buying it: A 2024 Volkswagen iD.4 S with under 12,000 miles on it that had been in an accident and apparently rolled, doing enough damage to the upper body that it was deemed unrepairable (and I don't argue with that assessment with regards to the body & frame) but looking to have left the drivetrain and battery mostly if not completely undamaged. After all of the fees & taxes from the auction and having it delivered to a buddy's place near the auction house it cost a bit over $5k. Unfortunately it's going to sit at my buddy's place until early June since I won't have space for it here at my place until then.

The base RWD iD.4 has a 201HP/229lb⋅ft electric drive and a 62kWh battery which gave it (at about 1,000 lbs heavier than a stock DMC) a range of 209 miles and a 0-60 of 7.8 seconds (according to the Wiki page on our DMCs, R&T tested the DMC when it came out and rated its 0-60 at 10.5 seconds; DMC's literature said it was 8.8... I'm more inclined to believe R&T...). The motor is a bit less powerful than some of the other options- the Bolt's is about 70HP more- but it's still a good bit more power than the PRV put out (and even more torque)- and the Electrogenic conversion kit that was recently announced uses a motor with almost the exact same specs and the reviews of that were pretty complimentary with regards to its power. One other thing appealed to me in the iD.4 as well: our cars rear hubs use VW-splined axles, so there's at least a possibility that making the axles work will be a bit easier with VW's power module than some of the others (which required either making custom axles or getting custom cups made for the gearbox to drive the original axles). It's also a RWD vehicle, unlike most of the other promising options (excluding the Teslas).

The battery pack is made up of a number of smaller modules similar to the Bolt, so it should be easier to reconfigure to fit into what spaces will be available in the DMC to place the batteries. Since I'm planning on using the iD.4's original BMS, inverter, and electronics I likely won't be able to add or remove modules to lower weight or expand the range, but I think that the base 62kWh battery size should be a good size for the car.

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[Timeless]

FYI I heard the VW ID battery modules are known to have reliability issues.

[Ashyukun]

FYI I heard the VW ID battery modules are known to have reliability issues.

Hopefully being a fairly new vehicle they'll have worked out some of those issues, and since I'll have to reconfigure the battery it will also hopefully make it easier to replace individual modules if they start to have problems.

[Ashyukun]

I promised earlier to dig up the pictures from things so far, an finally got around to trying to do that- so here goes. (NOTE: I have no idea why some are upside down... they aren't when on my computer or phone...)

This is 16655 about a decade ago, before the frame got to the point that I had to take it off the road:
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Unfortunately not too long after that picture was taken when I was out driving it I noticed a heavy clunk coming from the front right when I turned, and when I got back home and could get under it to investigate found that the lower front section of the front frame extension had rusted through. The bottom of the front shock tower box had always been rusty, but this was the first really structural problem I'd found, and I knew that if the frame extension was stressed too badly the upper portion would fail- which would be, of course, bad. So I took the car off the road with the plan to do a full body-off repair of the frame (since of course there were other rusted areas where the epoxy had cracked/come off).

But... I pretty much always have too many projects on my plate- and not just automotive ones- and at the time my garage was occupied with a G-body El Camino I had been slowly working on getting on the road. It would be several years before I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn't enjoying working on the Elky any more and eventually was able to sell it- and then several more years working on projects on my other cars in the garage before I finally got to the point that the garage was empty and I could go through and clean it up enough to be ready to start in on the DMC.

Finally- a year into the pandemic- I had everything set, and finally pulled the car into the garage.
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With the engine cover removed, you can see the carburetor and custom manifold.

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T-panel removed- you can see how crusty the roof box is.
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Doors removed- in order to try and fix the roof box there wasn't much option, and having them off would make working on things inside the car a lot easier.
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Next up was getting all of the body/frame connections removed. Some of these were easy- several were not (and absolute pains in the ass) and resulted in several of the bolts needing to be cut. But eventually the body was free of the frame...
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I got started pulling things from the frame- since I have just a 2-car garage without a lift, I was going to need to pull at least the front suspension off to be able to slide the frame out from under the body and off to the side for easier access. But first... here's what started this whole thing:
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Yeah, that's not good. But, I got the front suspension off so it was possible to move the frame out from under the body.
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On rainy days where she couldn't lay out in the sun, I'd occasionally have an observer.
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Starting to pull things from the engine- starting with the carb & intake manifold.
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Finally, the engine was out of the frame.
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And shortly thereafter, the transmission as well.
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Eventually, everything was off of the frame.
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And it was possible to see just how bad the rust was in some places...
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I then hauled the frame to a local sand blasting shop so they could remove what remained of the original epoxy coating. Had the rust damage been much more contained I would likely have just tried removing just enough of it to be able to make the repairs necessary, but it seemed smarter both for being able to make repairs and for the longer term to not have the old epoxy and whatever I use to seal it up after I'm done (likely going to be POR15) there. It took them a while to get to it- and a lot of work (more than they bargained for)- but eventually it was done and I could pick it up to haul back home.
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After the blasting, you can see a lot more of the rust damage that is going to have to be fixed...
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Removing the front frame extension:
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Which largely brings us up to where things are at the moment. I need to figure out exactly what sections are going to need to be replaced, and work out making or having made replacement sections to weld in. As much as I had been planning on just fabricating my own replacement sections, it's clear that there are some of the sections that are just going to be too complex- and that's even assuming I can either find/get use of a sheet metal brake that is wide enough and can bend the steel for the new sections. Some of them are just going to have to be drawn up in CAD and send off to SendCutSend or one of their competitors to have them fabricated.

One of the bigger things of interest will be whether I will be able to mount the iD.4's motor/gearbox/inverter assembly within the stock engine cradle, or whether I will need to cut the cradle out and have a new one fabricated (as at least one other EV conversion has done) to make it work. Honestly, with the amount of rust in the cradle around the lower swing arm mounts, it may just be better to be making a completely new one anyway- but that's something that will have to wait until I have the iD.4 here and have pulled the drive assembly to see how it fits.

[Ashyukun]

So I didn't have a lot of time yesterday to work out in the garage, but a friend of mine has been looking at getting an aftermarket cruise control system for his NA Miata after having to make several long trips in it without it- and I for a while have had something similar on the DMC (though it had never quite worked right, probably because it was hard to come up with the right way to wire it into the PRV's system). Since I won't need it (the iD.4's electronics should handle cruise control- and again, it never really worked right in the car) I offered it to him. I had already pulled the servo unit (vacuum-driven) from where I'd tucked it away in the pontoon and pulled the wiring through into the cabin, but the wiring for the control switches and the brake pedal ran under the center console- so I needed to pull it out.

One of these days I'll remember that there a six nuts that hold that thing down and not just 4... I always seem to forget the two aft of the shifter hole. Once I got those removed, the console came out pretty easily.
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I also had to try and find the install manual for the cruise system, so went rifling through my box full of manuals and documents from... well, everything in the house and garage to find it. While doing so, I also found all of the printouts and instructions for a number of the things I'd put into the car when I was initially getting it back on the road- like the updated light relay/system, remote battery cut, door poppers and trunk release, alarm system and keyless entry, and the new door lock actuators.
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That pile of paper definitely brings back some memories...

A modest amount of those mods will be staying- all of the door mods will still be quite useful for certain- but there are a number (like the lighting mods, keyless entry/alarm, and battery cut) that aren't likely to be necessary and/or work with the iD.4's electronics, so I'll have to carefully remove them and see if anyone can use them.

[Ashyukun]

The iD.4 donor vehicle was delivered yesterday! Though unfortunately, not to my place... it is going to have to hang out at a buddy's place near the auction site for about a month until I have the space here after Memorial Day to haul it the rest of the way back.

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It's definitely been through it (and over it, sideways...), but nothing that I've seen so far indicates that there's anything terribly wrong with the battery and drive system- though there's obviously going to be a lot of little things that will need to be fixed/bypassed before the drive system is going to want to behave halfway normally.

[Ashyukun]

So since I can't do much with regards to the conversion part of the project until the iD.4 gets here in a month or so, I'm working on moving forward with at least the frame repairs that aren't going to (probably) change depending on how the iD.4's drive module fits. Part of that (no pun intended) is figuring out whether it makes more sense to try and fabricate the parts completely myself, model them in CAD and have someplace like SendCutSend fabricate them, or some combination of the two. I've had a difficult time finding a sheet metal brake that will be able to bend the 16-gauge CRS that the frame is made from for less than a grand, so my confidence in it begin more cost-effective to fabricate everything myself was pretty low.

I did some pricing comparisons between what having a bend/drilled part made by SCS would be and what buying just the plain sheet metal from Metal Supermarkets- and surprisingly having SCS make the parts didn't cost that much more than just the bare metal did (likely owing to the volume pricing SCS has to get on sheet metal). So most likely except for things that are nothing more than flat parts that need holes drilled (like the lower plate on the front shock tower box) I'll just be having SCS make the parts for me.