Details, details

The slog continues.  Now that the truck is home, I can jump out and work on it easier.  This week I have been shoring up some of the essentials... like brakes and clutch.

During the drive home, I discovered that the brakes were not nearly strong enough.  They looked good while the truck was on jacks, only having to stop the wheel.  However, they did not do a good job stopping the truck!  Additionally, the clutch pedal broke off (!!) about the time we hit Stoughton.  Of course you don't 'need' a clutch pedal, but it sure does help.

I drove the truck to Ellsworth Welding in town and Jeff Ellsworth (who loved the truck) figured it had to be removed to weld.  So, I removed it the next day.  It was a bit of a puzzle, but came off easily after I figured that one out.

He did a great job of welding, and as a bonus, he reshaped the metal so that the pedals sit much better.  They had bent out of shape after all the years of use.

Notice the brake master cylinder under the floor

The pivot is squeezed between the cab hanger

The other major accomplishment was fixing a software 'bug'.  I was having trouble with the truck 'starting'.  Sometimes when I turned the key, everything was AOK, and sometimes it would only run the motor for a second before shutting down.

After several e-mails with Jack, I finally found the dopey mistake that I made.  You have to tell the controller box which outputs are hooked to where.  In my case I have outputs running to the two contactors, the main contactor and the pre-charge contactor.  I had them assigned to Outputs 3 & 4, but the wires were hooked to 4 & 5.  When it worked, it was just lucky that the output 3 came up in a state that happened to run the truck.  It shouldn't have worked at all.  So, when I fixed that, everything now comes up and runs very reliably.

Here are a couple of pictures of the controller software.  The guys at EVTV, Jack and Colin mostly I think (not sure), did a great job.