I’ve been here a work week so far (Monday thru Thursday) and have accomplished a little. For instance, the battery operated golf carts we use extensively during the season just sit for 6 months of the year in cold, wet conditions. My first project was to get the ‘Gem’ cart up and running. This is the newest cart here and was donated by the manufacturer. It’s cool and goes like hell when it’s working.
Here’s what it looks like:
It has six 12V batteries and all of them were dead except for one. The on-board charger wouldn’t charge the rest up because they were too low so it just constantly beeped plaintively. It would require too much current to charge the dead batteries so I had to use my own 12V charger and charge 5 of the batteries up enough that the on-board charger could take over. It took nearly 2 gallons of distilled water to top off the batteries. After charging for several hours, everything is back to normal and the Gem is working fine. I’m a little worried that the batteries won’t last very long but I’ll write up a ‘storage’ procedure before I leave. Maybe that will help them survive through next year.
Next I had to work on this little cart. It had charged up OK and worked fine for most of a day and then just stopped. Dead. The workers pushed it to the shop and when I opened it up I found a broken battery cable terminal, caused by extensive corrosion. After replacing the terminal and cleaning things up, it’s nearly as good as new…
Next, I worked on this one:
It had the same problem as the last cart…it was working fine but then just died. Note that in all these carts, the batteries and electromechanical devices are mainly under the seat. This cart was a little different in that it’s one of the oldest, which means that the parts are difficult to replace if bad. I rooted around in the guts of the thing and found 3 terminals that were so corroded that they had broken off after surviving the winter. After replacing all those, it seemed to work fine for a few minutes. Then it just dies. I pushed it back to the shop and started debugging. Several hours later, and after drawing my own schematic, I decided that a major part, the ‘Forward-Neutral-Reverse’ switch is bad. It’s huge as it switches all the motor current if you are trying to change direction. It’s also old, cracked, and probably impossible to find a new one. So this weekend I’ll be on-line trying to find a replacement switch or something I can use to replace it…maybe relays or something. I’ll keep you posted.
Update: I was able to take the big F-N-R switch apart, re-thread a stud, replace some older hardware, clean and brighten the contacts enough that it’s working fine now.
Meanwhile, I took these shots of the Baldwin Museum and the classic car I’ll be working on next week…
The masters house:
The antique…needs new tires all around…I’ll work on that next week or so:
