Building a battery from Leaf Modules – The Plan

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Jay

I am in the process of replacing the twenty (20) six volt lead acid golf cart batteries that power my electric pickup truck with 48 Nissan Leaf battery modules. Because the battery bays in the truck are specificity designed to hold 20 golf cart batteries (and the Leaf modules have a different form factor), it’s not a straight-forward drop in replacement.

My initial design (not showing the compression plates that hold the six modules together in compression):

In the image above, the black bar is negative, Continue reading →

UPC Barcelona Sodexo Unity cafeteria menus

Posted on August 2, 2015 by Jay

The Sodexo “Unity” cafeteria at UPC in Barcelona offers a “complete menu” for 6.60 Euros that includes a starter, main, drink, bread and desert. You could typically choose between three different starters and main courses, mixing and matching.

The common vegetables were potatoes and artichokes. Ham, bacon and fish were the relatively common meats.

Below are photos of the ten meals I ate.

Grilled fish, french fries, and kale.
Continue reading →

How to recycle in Barcelona

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Jay

Barcelona has many curbside recycling bins that are color coded.

The blue bins take paper, magazines & cardboard (folding boxes), but NOT the plasticized cardboard juice and milk boxes. (Which go into the yellow plastic bins instead. Also, no tinfoil, because it’s metal, not paper!)

The yellow bins take all types of plastic, including plasticized juice and milk boxes, but don’t throw in plastic toys or DVD/CD-ROM’s. They also take metal cans (I’m not sure if this is just aluminum cans, or all types of metal cans.)

The green bins take all types of glass, but no metal lids or lightbulbs, or ceramics.

The brown bins are for organic remains (think compost), and all of your regular trash goes into the light gray bins. Currently very few people in Barcelona actually recycle, and most just throw all of their trash together into the gray bins.

How to open a 2013 Nissan Leaf battery pack and remove the modules

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Jay

I have opened my 2013 Nissan Leaf battery pack and removed the modules. The tools needed are:

500 volt class 0 (or better) electrically insulated gloves
One or two full rolls of black electrical tape, for covering your tools and the terminals of the modules when you remove them.
Regular leather gloves
Side clippers and needle nose pliers for removing wire tiedowns
1-1/2″ putty knife or chisel and hammer. (or preferably an air chisel)
10 mm wrench (preferably a socket with ratchet)
13 mm deep socket
16 mm wrench and hammer (or impact driver w/ 16mm socket)
small flat bladed screwdriver for prying clips
# 1 Phillips screwdriver for removing screws on the sense terminal of the modules

You can watch the 13 minute youtube video here, or spend about the same amount of time wading through my wall of text below….

First: Remove the twelve 10mm bolts Continue reading →

The 2013 Nissan Leaf battery and module differences

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Jay

I have opened my 2013 Salvage Nissan Leaf battery, and removed some of the modules. I’ll post a complete guide with more pictures after I finish, but I wanted to post some photos of the differences between the 2011/2012 batteries and the 2013 battery.

From the outside of the battery the big difference is that there is a Continue reading →

How to drop a Nissan Leaf battery pack (without an auto lift)

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Jay

NOTE: The battery pack has 400 volts inside of it. Be sure you know what you are doing and have the proper protective equipment, as it can kill you! It also weights 600lbs, so it can crush you!

I needed to remove the battery pack from my Salvage Nissan Leaf. The 2013-Nissan-LEAF-DG.pdf (Disassembly Guide) I found on the Nissan website has good instructions, but they assume you have an auto-lift (and custom battery moving system).

I didn’t want to purchase an auto lift, so I did it with the following tools on my concrete driveway.

Class 0 – 500 volt electrically insulating gloves. Necessary when pulling the service disconnect, and the high voltage cables leading from the battery to the motor and interior cabin heater.

Continue reading →

It’s Alive!

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Jay

I was able to move the leaf under it’s own power (using two of it’s own wheels as well…) I titled the video “Drifting the rear end” because I want to see how many racing enthusiasts I can troll. This is probably the last time this Leaf will move under it’s own power, as the next step is to drop the high voltage battery pack.

Booting up a Nissan Leaf

Posted on March 28, 2015 by Jay

Hojas, the wrecked 2013 Nissan Leaf that I purchased at an auto auction site was delivered to my house, and appeared completely dead. The first thing I did was to check the 12 volt “accessory” battery, and found that it had drained down to 1.5 volts. I think this was because in the collision one of the rear doors was knocked ajar, and the interior lights were illuminated because of that, but it could have also been due to the 2-3 months it had been sitting in the auction yard, or perhaps somebody initiated the emergency shutdown procedure.

After charging the 12 volt battery back up, I was able to put it into “accessory” and “on” mode, Continue reading →

How to purchase a Leaf Battery Pack (and surrounding car)

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Jay

This is Hoja, a new (to me) 2013 Nissan Leaf. Hoja was rear-ended sometime around December or January, and was “totaled” by his insurance company, The Travelers Indemnity Company. They used Copart, an auto-auction company to sell the remains with a salvage title.
Continue reading →

Hexagonal wooden mirror frame

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Jay

This is my finished hex frame mirror, which is the last piece of the downstairs bathroom we renovated.

I built a hexagonal wood frame out of ceder planks for the new bathroom mirror. I had originally wanted to build an irregular three sided “triangular” mirror, but once I figured out that my compound miter saw wouldn’t make cuts sharper than 50 degrees I decided I needed more than 3 sides…and 8 pieces would have been a nightmare to assemble.

I used a table saw to rip a groove in each piece to hold the glass, and then I used the flattest surface I had available (the mirror glass) to assemble and glue the pieces together. The mirror glass was original to the house, and has a 1961 date printed on the back.

Once I had the frame built, I traced out a template so that I could mark the mirror glass exactly where it needed to be cut. (Due to a few holes I was avoiding in my scrap wood, the frame is not perfectly symmetrical….)

If I hadn’t already built the frame, I would have strongly considered making a “Superman” mirror at this point in the glass cutting phase.

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