OK. Let's start with the box. After finishing the box I caulked all the joints and painted it with an epoxy paint to protect the box from acidic fumes.
During the charging process hydrogen gas is produced by the batteries. This gas needs to be vented out of the box. Most conversions use a small fan to vent the gas.
Here is a picture of the fan. The fan is connected to a relay that is activated when the old fuel door (the future charger plug in port) is open.
At one end of the box I have connected tubing that draws fresh air from outside the car. The inlet is the white tubing in the picture below. The end of the tubing you can't see runs to the battery box.
Here's a picture of the outlet tubing. The outlet is directly behind the fan. The top picture is where it vents from the box and the bottom picture where it vents out of the vehicle.
This is an overall picture of the box. Along the left you can see the white inlet vent tubing. The bottom right corner is where the fan is located. The wires in the box connect to the auxiliary 12volt car battery. The holes in the box are for wires and air to pass between the compartments of the box.
Next step was to make cables to connect all of the batteries together. Here is the layout for the batteries in the rear.
The final layout of the batteries had several goals to meet. The most obvious is that the batteries had to fit in the box. Goal number two was to minimize the lengths of the cables connecting the batteries.
A third an not so obvious goal is to minimize the voltage potential between neighboring batteries. For instance you don't want battery one next to battery seventeen. This would represent a 102V (6 x 17) potential. If you accidentally dropped a wrench across the neighboring terminals that would be one huge short. Although one and seventeen appear next to each other there is a divider between the last three batteries and the remainder of the batteries.
With the layout in hand I laid out the batteries on the garage floor. Then I started to make cables to connect the batteries.
First step in making the connecting cables was taking 2/0 welding cable and laying it in a path from the negative terminal of one battery to the positive terminal of the next battery. Because of vent caps and carrying brackets on the top of each battery this path was usually not a straight line.
After cutting the cable to length each end was stripped of insulation. A protective cover was slipped over the cable. Nolox was coated over the bare wire. A connector was then slipped over the wire. Since positive and negative terminals are different sizes it was important to make sure that I was not putting two positive or negative connectors on the same wire. The connector was then oriented to face the correct direction and secured to the cable with two crimps.
Here is the final result. Don't worry...they are all labeled for which batteries the connect.
Last but not least I put a few batteries in the box.
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