3D Printing parts for the 10KW charger build

After spending a brief lunch break over at the mechanics last week I roughed out a box in cardboard to give me an accurate idea of how much space I have in the micro boot on the Honda Beat to fit the charger into, I will be using the right hand half of the mini boot space for the charger, this will give me simple access to the charger (for charging) accessed via the boot which should be ideal for charging, I also hope to put a “Standard” (there are several standards by the look of it) socket for connecting the power to charge into the ex-fuel filler cap.
The left hand half of the mini boot space will hold the Soliton, by coincidence there is an access plate from the mini boot into the main “Engine” area of the car this access plate is exactly the right size to hold the Soliton, Brent was considering mounting the Soliton directly on this plate which is cool as it would make removal of the Soliton easy if necessary.

I am also thinking this is a good plan, so once I got the box home and considered how I might make (fold) a box out of 3mm Ali, I moved onto roughing out the part placement for the charger.

It looks like it will be fairly straight forward, I am intending to mount the very large single capacitor onto the rightmost wall of the charger box using 3D printed brackets which I constructed in 3D using OpenSCAD, after making a simple hoop strap with mounting bar and holes (photo coming soon) and printing it I then decided to modify the second strap into a cap for the “Dangerous” connection end of the very large capacitor, this will protect the bare connections from accidental shorting if anything comes lose in the charger box whilst driving, I also intend to mount this large capacitor connection end down also for safety sake (although this is not absolutely necessary if I am going to “cap” the Capacitors connection end, so this could change)

Very large capacitor with 3D printed bracket & bracket-cap

I have also been thinking how I will mount the toroid transformer (also very large) it needs to be close but not touching the heat sink and the air flow needs to be unrestricted by any mounting solution, the instructions with the charger build suggest using a sheet of thick HDPE and cutting “C” brackets from this, this is a no brainer for 3D printing as I could print HDPE if I needed to although ABS should be fine as there is little difference in heat tolerance of these 2 thermoplastics.

I will fabricate a CAD toroid mount bracket which has fins that slide between the veins of the heat sink with a ring the same size as the toroid fixed to these fins I can then mount 2 (or 3) “C” brackets that are joined to the ring and hold the toroid from moving anywhere, this should give me a firm mount with plenty of heat dissipation capability.

Toroidal 3D printed bracket on printer with support 

 

Toroidal 3D printed bracket support removed

This does meant that my charger component placement will be a little unusual but this is a consequence of the size of the box I have to fit this into and the need for serious cooling when the car is charging.

Brent tells me he can drill out the old battery plate that sits in the bottom of the mini boot where the old 12V car battery used to be located, this will give me a few extra mm of height which is going to be required to get it all in if I want a lid for the charger, which I will as the charger controls will be mounted on the lid.

But all in all it looks like it will all fit quite nicely.

Lots more photos coming as soon as I figure out why my canon camera has suddenly refused to be recognized by my PC!