Today one of my coworker said to me "You won't believe what I have in the back of my truck!", we headed out to the parking lot and I found myself staring slack yawed at a whole pile of prime EV parts.

Apparently a friend of his dumped it on him, his friend was moving shop and wanted him to get rid of it.

This is just a quick progress report on the car.
Whitewash

I've sanded, bondoed and primered the front third of the car, I'm currently sanding the primer and touching up a few spots I missed at first. After I'm done with that I'll be painting the engine bay yellow and then reinstalling the steering, brakes and front cross member.

What's this?

Yesterday, I recieved a charger from a friend and former coworker. The charger is an isolated 3kW unit that AV produced sometimes in the nineties. They never sold very many of these, the target market was probably larger OEMs but when they stopped producing electric cars the market disappeared and the product was discontinued.

My evil twin

For many reasons, spending several thousand dollars on a professional paint job is not an option for me, mainly because I don't have the money to spare.

While browsing the internet looking for cheaper options I came across this thread
on moparts.com. A guy there described how he had gone about painting his car with $50 worth of paint and material and the end result was indeed quite impressive. The thread is really long; there's a couple of weeks worth of reading material in there so take your time.

I scored a new dash board on ebay. My old dash was badly warped and had a large crack in it rendering it impossible to restore.

The new dash arrived today:
New Dash

It arrived in good condition; it has a few dings and scratches as can be expected from something thats around 30 years old, the same can be said for myself. It is certainly in much better condition than my old dash.

For the past couple of weeks I've been working on expelling the rust from the inside of the car.

Rustoleum

The floor of the car is covered in some sort of tar like substance. I suspect it is for sound dampening and rust protection. On the driver side it was pretty solid, water and subsequently rust had only gotten through it in a couple of places.

My brother in law David Barlia, a professional web designer, surprised me with a custom made theme for my site.

I gave it a try but it had some technical issues that need to be resolved. In the meantime here's a picture of what the site look liked for a while.

New Look

An EV battery pack usually consists of a number of large battery cells connected in series in order to get high enough voltage.

When a pack of batteries age the individual cells tend to do so at different rates. Some batteries in the pack will have less capacity then others and as you repeatedly charge and discharge them the cell voltages will start to drift apart, some cells may even start reversing on deep discharge. Reversing a cell will kill it quickly.

The fire breathing dragon that has been living under the hood of the fiat for 30 years has been vanquished!

Vanquishing in progress

I placed an ad in a fiat spider forum on yahoo, mentioning that I have an engine to donate to anyone who can use it. Two guys responded, one offered to help me remove the engine. Guess who I gave the engine to.

The dissection of the car progresses slowly.
Naked Engine
The engine bay is starting to look a little empty, well there's still the engine in there but I have now removed enough parts that I can get to the engine mounts easily. I placed a note in a fiat spider forum offering to donate the engine to anyone who may need it. I got a couple of positive responses so the engine is coming out soon.