Current location for King Malu

Saturday 10 July 2010

Motor working... sort of...

What a day. In the morning Daniel and I went down to King Malu and got the frame bedded onto the engine bearers. Then got the motor mounted onto the frame and finally lined up the motor with the prop shaft. Then back home for lunch.

After lunch Tim and I went down to the boat and wired it all up. Temporarily wired that is since we don't have the battery cage upon which the drive controller will be mounted. But the aim is to get the motor working so we can move the boat to the lift out dock and take out the old Ford engine tomorrow.

Having wired it all up we tested it and... the motor revolved at unbelievably slow speed. Everything we did seemed to make no difference. So we phoned Jacopo to try and get more information. The problem was compounded by the fact that the documentation didn't match the firmware embedded in the controller. No joy. So home for dinner...

Tim, Lauren and I then went back after dinner and went through every setting in the controller and at last the motor came to life. Not entirely sure what we did, but at least it should work for tomorrow. It was exciting to see King Malu surge forward on her moorings, rearing to go.

One irritation is that the motor controller doesn't like some connections at switch on. So we will have to put a time delay on them. Doesn't fully make sense in an electric car, but is nonsense in a boat. I wish we could disable that 'feature'.

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