Charging parts back and more miles

I received the fixed charger parts back from Belktronix on Friday and installed them with no problems. After going through a full charge cycle, I did find another Batmon board that was activating the shunt resistor at 13.5 volts instead of the expected 14.6 volts. I'll look into that early this week or send it back for repairs.

After fixing up the charging system, I took a quick test drive with my friend Jonathan for about 7 miles and the car behaved well. The suspension is still a bit off (rear is 2" high while the front is 1" low), so I'll look into fixing that.

Stuff still to do:

• Fix the zener diode on the failing Batmon board
• Fix the suspension ride heights
• Figure out how to encase the BatMon boards while allowing FET cooling
  
• Paint remaining hold-downs (not powdercoated) with POR-15
• Install Link-10 system after Christmas
• Install tachometer with shift light going back to controller for over-RPM protection

Last evening, I drove the Civic to a party at FreeGeek, a local computer recycler and showed off the car. There's a significant hill between FreeGeek and my house; the Civic did quite well starting on the hill. This is a far cry from the white-knuckle hill-starts I've been living with in the 914. What a relief.

We just got about three inches of snow on the ground today, so I don't think I'll be joyriding or testing the full acceleration of the Civic for fear of sliding off the road. I just updated the EVAlbum entry with some mileage so I'm officially out of the "under construction" stage.