A couple of weeks ago I bought a two million dollar hybrid and I don't know how to fix it. Join the club! I Paid fifteen hundred dollars for a hybrid concept band that had high hopes of securing a 450 million dollar loan from the government. The Bright Idea van was built to get 100 miles per gallon and supposedly it succeeded, but the government lent the money to Tesla and a few other companies that went out of business. So Bright gave up and the van was left abandoned in a warehouse for 13 years.

I've been working hard to get this van running and driving again and after building a custom charge cable and fixing a broken electric motor bracket, the van drove for about one block before Dino trying to destroy itself. The main issue is the high voltage battery as it hasn't been charged in over a decade. The battery pack was custom built by Bright so there aren't any off-the-shelf parts available and retrofitting a new battery into a completely unknown electric powertrain system without any schematics or manuals could be extremely expensive and difficult considering what I find as I peel away more layers to this build I Definitely finally don't want to go down that road if I can restore this battery pack. I Can not only save a lot of money, but that might fix the issue with the rear motor trying to rip itself to Pieces As I believe this is being caused by low voltage, the madness continues on.

so sit back, relax, grab yourself a burrito and enjoy the show. so you guys may know my friend Freddy Tavarish Hi How are you? uh he recently bought something that cost two million dollars at at some point in its life. Yes, yes, um, mine cost two million dollars more recently than yours did. but I think yours is, uh, more complicated I mean I don't have any schematics although it's got to be hard to find information on a P1 as well.

But yeah I think you got me beat there, dude. So I'm very glad that the people that made this, uh, made it super easy to follow all these wires. I mean we can obviously tell where you know this guy. that's the that's the module for the it's the computer module.

Yep, yep, yeah, so lots of weird stuff going on here. What I want to see is I Want to see this on the road doing its thing getting 99 miles per gallon. you know, making people smile with its, uh, wooden headlights. You know this thing needs to be on the road.

so you're gonna get that on the road in this episode, right? Yeah, sure? yeah. I don't I don't think I don't think so Alex Downplays a lot of it. This is like the real deal. This is a concept car.

There's like this stuff is made of wood. It's all like hand. oh my. God This is so thick.

Yeah this is thick. It's like this thick fiberglass. but look at how nice the body is. Overall though, it really is.

you know, very very good. They made their mini clay and then they sculpted this beauty and then they made a car that looked like nothing like the clay model. Yeah, they made this and then made the clay models but then gave up halfway through making the clay. Oh okay, was that where the two million dollars went? most of it? Okay, all right.

Um so the battery here that doesn't look very good I think we might need a new battery. Something new that happened today was I Went in there and I've been charging this thing by the way for about a week and a half. I Told you guys in the last video that the engineer said that it's possible there is a battery cell imbalance and then I essentially need to plug it in for a week. So I did that and then today I think the normal 12 volt battery that came out of my 99 Cobra Mustang is bad and now we're getting a lot of.

let's just I'll show you so all we're getting is the red light in the cluster where before we would see Park and driving all that kind of stuff lit up I think the 12 volt battery might be bad. We're gonna just start start there. Hold on I think I think I got it. Yeah, those are fake.

Oh okay. okay yeah, you should return this car. All right. No I like it too much.

All right for now because I have a battery on order. Yeah, look at that. 10 volts. All right.

we're gonna give it 100 at 10 volts. Yeah, there you go. We're going to give it some some juice here and and see what happens. This isn't going to like smash into the door or something, right? Uh, it might it might.

oh all the foot out, put on brakes. It's an old door. Let's do it all right. let's see what happens.

Oh okay, that's it. Oh, that's it. You want you. just it's the mounts are broken.

you just gotta. You gotta get in there. Okay, okay okay okay oh this is nice. Everything's like kind of plush but also this feels like like bath mat.

You know, yeah, like there's there's a hard surface underneath it. Like everything on this van, it looks good, but there's a lot of oh do you wanna? it's carbon fiber back. It's like a P1 yeah, look at that. That's so cool.

Yeah, it's really essentially a P1 at the end of the day. it really is. You know, All right. Uh so yeah.

just like on and then yeah you'll you'll know to turn it off. Okay yeah okay, all right, that moved the entire car. include like okay, that was. that was nuts.

Now if you're wondering I Had to try this because I've had it charging for a week and a half and the battery's at like I can only get it up to like 322 or 23 volts something like that. Nominal is 325. Max is 350. I Have a feeling the battery is just is done at this point.

Do you have high voltage gloves? I have one pair. I'll wear one and you wear one. Yeah yeah the other. We will be one.

Yeah, it'll be like a layaway situation. You know you know you have it on Mondays through Wednesdays Yeah, 316. I I Think this high voltage battery is bad. It was at 321 yesterday night and uh, it won't get over that.

So I did learn that the battery the high voltage battery in this car van concept car. whatever you want to call this is not liquid cooled. It has cooling for the motor. Yeah, not the battery.

So it's kind of like a Nissan early Nissan Leaf Oh okay situation. So do you know if it's off the shelf? uh Parts anywhere. No. I know the battery is here and the guy said that it's kind of complicated to take apart because there's all sorts of like air duct.

but I mean I think I'm making me believe are you already it's trying to tell me something. Are you leaking already? I am Oh hey, look they left me this rag though. this came with the van. This may be where all the government loan money went.

Yeah, it's physical. cash and gold is in here. It's National Treasure Three. That's right.

There's a declaration of Independence in here here. This is. This is like the National Treasure Yeah movie here. Do we have anything that's Oh, look at that dude.

that's the battery. That's like that. This is battery battery Raw battery. Okay, we should not like be around this.

All right Here we go. Okay, okay, there you go, that doesn't Yeah, yeah, this is okay. We got this. These are numbered Dude Sweet Oh, these are like, you know what these are.

They're like thermal pads. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. Okay, so that is raw battery right here. Okay, hang on before we get too carried away.

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click on the link down below. Now let's get to some batteries in the back of my space fan. So uh, Rich rebuilds I know you're watching. Tell us in the comments what sort of batteries those are? Uh, what sort of cells these are because? uh I don't know.

This is very interesting. Uh, cool. I Gotta say I Didn't think I'd ever have my face up against carbon fiber staring at at this right now. This is weird.

So this is air cooled. Literally The holes through the floor that we just took out help with the cooling of this battery. It says positive and negative, right? right? Uh, why don't you put a once you put your multimeter across them? Yeah, and uh, see if they register a voltage. All right.

So we're gonna test this right now. If you're wondering if I'm nervous right now, the answer is yes. I'm still nervous right now. We're in live battery right here.

I I Don't know why I'm like, okay here we go guys. I'm just I'm done that. Not dead yet. 40 40 volts.

You got 40 volts. Okay on that one. let's keep going. Yeah, look at that.

I Have all the confidence in the world though. it'll be okay. 41 41 volts. What would be great is if we find one that's dead.

Well, how many? How many of these do we have? So we have eight eight times forty. Uh, what? What is that? My uh, my uh. Education? 220 320 320 Oh yeah, 320 320. he said nominal voltage on this battery pack is 325.

Okay, perfect. So we should be able to diagnose each individual cell, right? 41 All right, we got another 40. well we got another 40. Okay, yeah, that that one might be.

Uh yeah, let's go. APR culprit could be the problem child. 41 41. 31.

Oh nice. So so we could potentially have two two dead cells. 2010 Bright Automotive So they made these so you know what we got to do right now. Uh, get out of the van.

Well yeah, we got a video called Rich Okay, yeah, let's do it. He's too important for us. No, he's not what's up yo. We need you rich.

What do you guys need? We have made a discovery over here on the space fan and we might. Yeah, let me. let's bring you inside. Really? Yeah, yeah.

Look, we took the battery cover off and we have all this stuff going out. Most of these, uh, measure at 40 volts except these two. One of them is 31 and one is 38. Like is it? Is it just a matter of I mean I see how to take them out? There's like gigant.

There's t40 screws holding these things in. But I mean this is obviously all live right now. So I don't know what's gonna happen to me. sells only 40 volts.

It just adds up to the to the total pack voltage. Rich Have I ever told you how nice Chicago is? In the summertime? it's really nice. You should come out here. Yeah, Freddy's from Florida and he's here.

Wear your lineman gloves. pull it out. it's only 31 volts. Putting it back in.

the fun part, all right, but uh, it'll spark a little bit, but you'll be all right. All right, Rich I Fully trust all the advice you've given me. All right. All right, See ya, Bye bye.

All right. So we should absolutely not do anything that he just said Rich says always is just yes from far away, Do it. I Wouldn't want to charge any of the bad ones because if one's bad and then it starts overheating and it starts going into the other way. they have the thermal runaway thing and then you don't you don't want that.

I mean it's not going to be bad because it's 40 volts. but yeah, you don't want to. You don't want a Lithium fire, you know? I got these all right. So Rich gave us uh, some work to do.

Although Freddy is not just here for the space van, we have some other activities including a charity event that we have to get ready for. I'm gonna eventually take one of those out and I'll I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah I am going to work on my own. Two million dollar project.

uh, that also has a battery That right needs. We'll be in very different states, far far away from each other, essentially doing the same exact thing. Hopefully we don't just call each other like electrical fire like YouTube Yeah, all right. cool.

Well, uh, good luck. Well it's a few days later and Freddie was mostly in town for my fill the van with Cannes charity event. not this van but my 15 passenger Chevy Express van and we successfully packed that van with essential items to donate and also another van. So Freddie was there with me at the event and he is back in Florida working on his P1 now and I am back in the back of my van with my lineman gloves ready to do some work on this battery.

So right now it's been three days I want to check voltage and then we need to isolate which cells are bad and that'll give us a good idea of what we need to do next. We'll either be able to attempt to fix this or we're going to be dead in the water now. I did put the battery cover back on. We want to be super safe with this, not leave it exposed.

Pull it off right now and it's nice that we have these partitions that can lay over each module. So it's been three days and this was one of our good modules and let's see where we're at. Yeah, 41. That's perfect.

So what we have here are 12 cells and each cell should measure around 3.4 volts. They're connected in series, so as we test them, they should go up so we can leave a negative here and you can see they're labeled Bb1, BB2, BB3 Bb4, and so on. So this should be about 3.4 ish. Yep, 3.4 6.9 Okay, if you add those two together, this one is also reading about the same and we'll keep going.

Good good. These can vary a little bit and we'll test all the way up to our total 24 now and then. Our final cell, there's our 41. Perfect.

Okay, so this is a good module. This is functioning properly and pretty much all of them were like this except for this one. This was our problem child measuring in at 31 volts a few days ago. Ah, 25.

That's not good. Let's see if we can isolate these cells that are having issues. Okay, well that was quick. that is not reading much at all.

Move on to BB3 Wow, that one's really low as well. Go to Bb4. We're at one volt finally and we've tested three of these. 2.6 volt after four.

Well, these are. these are not good. These are very low. Let's start to normalize.

Okay, yeah, yeah, the last cells look to be working. Okay, Okay, so we're seeing decent increases across these cells here, but these first four I believe Very low. All right. here's the game plan people.

We have a battery pack with cells that were built by Bright like 13 years ago. This is nothing I could order off the internet. So I spoke with Sean the engineer that helped build the van and my good friend Nick from Nick's garage builds here on YouTube Check him out if you're into EV dirt bikes and stuff. Really, really good videos.

Uh, Anyway, in Consulting with both of them, we came to the conclusion that I can try and charge each individual cell. So I've ordered a separate power source that we're going to be able to connect to each week cell and charge it at a very low amperage and voltage to see if we can bring them back to life. Sometimes you can do this with a Lithium battery. so we're going to give it a shot and while we're waiting for that power source to arrive in the mail, there's a lot more to discover on the van.

I Want to try and get the screen working and that all starts in the mess of wiring. Let's let's dive in since we're being safe with the gloves. There are a few safety items I Kind of want to just look over here in the sea of wiring and one of them is this right here. This metal block here has two red wires going to it and I don't know if that's live.

Yeah! Okay, so first off, these two posts that are exposed 308 volts. no caps on them whatsoever. So let's see. we're going to put our positive here.

We can ground it here. Yeah, this is insane. This is live right now. I Do have the charger plugged in I Believe If the charger was unplugged, this wouldn't be live.

so driving around it wouldn't be. But yeah, this should all be covered up. 300 volts just sitting there. All right.

I've unplugged the charger. Okay, yeah, this has voltage all the time. So does this great okay safety loop coming out. Okay, so this is dead.

Now that's nice. Cool. All right with the fireman safety loop out, it cuts all the high voltage power to the rest of the vehicle. We're gonna use a little spray electrical tape.

it's done this positive one. now. let that dry kind of build it up. and this guy.

I'm going to wrap up with some electrical tape here. give it some kind of protection. Is that the prettiest thing in the world? But at least these two are insulated to a certain degree. Uh, yeah, those are open too.

and we'll just go ahead and protect them all right? I've gone around and taped up and protected as much as I could find. But just look at this. I'm pretty sure they just gooped up our TV on this positive connection. So this van itself costs over two million dollars to build in 2009 and I know that a lot of the money goes into research and development when you're trying to build a brand new vehicle.

but I don't know guys. Let me know in the comments section because I'm having a hard time finding exactly where over two million dollars you know would be in this van. It's just with with work like this again. I Know they were just trying to make it kind of function to show it off and sell the van.

but two million dollars. A lot of money. so it is from sitting overnight. Seven volts.

This battery's done. so we need a good 12 volt battery to get anything in the interior to work. This was out of the 99 Cobra Just bought it a few months ago. it's bad.

so I got new one much better 12.8 All right, we're back in business. All right. So with everything plugged back in with a good battery, uh, this guy goes through a self-test and I believe this in conjunction with this have to do with the screen in the dash. So let's see here.

self test. Okay, cool and what we have here are RCA's yellows for video and that goes into a USB connector here. Now something I've noticed is that this green LED does not turn on. It could be potentially why that screen doesn't work.

Yeah, we're getting nothing from the screen now. I did find this cable wound up it's USB there's a USB slot here. it's gonna plug that in and I'm gonna get anything all right. I Tried This is probably the hook up for diagnosis purposes to a laptop that bright was using, but I was never able to get this guy to do anything.

It has show car mode. cluster illumination Video mode isn't even fully plugged in. No, it's not I don't even feel where the other connector is. Oh wait a minute.

What's this? Oh oh, there is one I can't even pull it down. There's no room. Hang on. Oh yeah I Just plugged this in.

Oh what is that gonna do? Is this stuff gonna work Now? Please work. Please work. Please work. Please work work.

Let's press some stuff on here. All right. Here's cluster illumination. Oh, look at that cluster illumination button.

Hey, what in the world is show car mode? That is this one here. Oh, look at this. Green lights. That's show Car mode.

These lit up as well. What else is lighting up? We got headlights. We have headlights That's so cool. Oh, get out of here.

This is like a headlight switch. All right. There we go. It's drawing a lot of power.

Okay I'm gonna leave that on for a second. We gotta see if we got blue lights. Oh yeah, look at that. We found that there was a light bar right in there, but it wasn't working.

That is some show car mode right there that'll sell you two million bucks. Just take my money. All right. We still don't have a green light here.

I think I'm gonna order a new one of these I Looked around at Best Buy and Office Depot and it's ancient technology. No one has one and we might not need this converter box. We might just need a yellow RCA to USB Maybe we do have some that says video mode. It's a button.

This is the push to change and nothing is turning the screen on. and then there's two of them that say spare I don't know what that does. that's about it. So I'll turn all these off.

Nothing's making the screen work. When I spoke to the engineer, he said they programmed a ton of good information in here. like obviously the state of charge of the battery, but a few more in-depth type of things that would tell us potentially what each individual module is doing. That would be really good right now.

I Found a same-day delivery from Amazon. We'll see if this works. All we need is the yellow and the USB All right. USB is plugged in.

Are we going to reach barely? Okay, so I've eliminated all of this. Let's see if the Screen Works come on screen on screen on screen. Man, this really stinks. Oh, that's easy.

Okay, okay all right. I Don't know why they have this plugged in, but they had one plug going to the climate control switches and the cigarette lighter. That's cool. We got some wood holding this up.

It makes it works right. It's lightweight. it's renewable. I Want to see if this thing's even connected to anything? In some of the Articles they wrote about this, they show the screen working but it also could be a sticker.

Kind of like that. That's just a sticker. It doesn't have 182 000 miles. It doesn't have that much fuel.

None of that works. Oh well. it just pulled out all right. I'm pulling out loads and loads of wires.

Let's get this out of the way. I Don't see any reason why this would be unplugged, but then again, the show box was unplugged. so who knows. Okay, here is our shifter module.

Okay, this one. I just unplugged. so that's normal. It was like that.

What else do we have? Sea of wiring cables? Oh, let's see. we got. oh, is this a video? One Hey, we got a video one that's not plugged into anything. These are the three cables coming out of the screen.

they are all plugged in. I Don't see any other missing connections here, but at least we checked. Okay I Found something a little bit more similar to this, so we're gonna give it a shot. All right.

Got the USB plugged in? There we go. We're gonna turn the key on now see if this lights up, huh? Nothing. Oh whoa, whoa There we go. Okay I made a light.

There we go. Fans are on. Baby noises I Like baby noises? Yeah, nothing. Nothing on this screen.

Great. Next thing we gotta test for power. Okay, that's great. At the back of the screen, there are hardly any screws that hold stuff in.

it just all pops together. It's kind of nice. Maybe we'll find the two million dollars in here. Oh yeah, this of course just pulls right out, doesn't it? Yeah, this is so cool.

We get to see the work behind the dash as well I Feel like Indiana Jones That was easy. Oh look what we found. Okay, this is where the rodents got all of this white material from as it just jammed inside of here. Yep, Oh wow.

Look at this. this pink insulation like home insulation I think it is. What is this some? R 24 We got in here keeping it nice and cool and hot. This is wood.

Yep, that is definitely wood. Oh wait, no no it's not. It is actually a speaker right there I figured it was a fake speaker cover. I Can see a plug in here that's disconnected a little Sharpie line where they were kind of cutting all this out right here.

Okay I found a screw foreign custom one of one piece right here. Look at that and there's a screw right here. a little more right here. I think I might have to take these a pillars out.

Whoa. Oh, look at the roll bar in here and spray foam insulation. A metal plate right here. Okay, these things just pop right off.

Look at that. they're made of foam. These are made of foam and just wrapped in fabric. I Don't see any screws for this.

Dash Oh, you gotta be kidding me. This whole thing just pops right out. No way. I Mean this is awesome for me, but wow, this isn't how cars are normally made.

Yeah, this is straight up home insulation right here. Wow. Lots and lots of connectors. What does this say? A little note here: Passenger side wheel a little far away from where you're supposed to be little buddy I Would love to know what this harness is out of or what all this is for.

Yeah, none of this goes anywhere. I Got a ground wire right here and it does have a heater box, but nothing works. Nothing's connected. We have this bar right here.

so here's what it looks like underneath the dash of the Bright Idea van. All custom made all right. Now we can get to the remaining screws. Here's the wood.

Mount Kind of holding up the screen. Okay, so I found an inline fuse in the dash. Yeah, we have continuity. The fuse is good, all right.

So I'm looking for the main harness that is connected to the back of the screen. pretty sure it's here. So I Just want to see if there's a power source we can verify. Well, that's not plugged in anything.

What in the world is going on here I Think this just pulled out of it. Oh yeah, it did. Outside of the cables, there's only one big connector that goes to the back of that screen and it was plugged into this. that like literally leads nowhere.

Yeah yeah, this thing was plugged in just like this. Yep, that's it. and that went nowhere. I Found the power source for the screen right here.

It's an inline fuse and we do have battery voltage. Okay, so this screen should power up it. That could be bad. We now have a red blinking light at the back of the LCD screen.

We have not seen that yet before. Still nothing here though. I Have a suspicion that the screen itself is bad. So we're going to unplug this VGA cable and we're gonna feed it directly into a monitor.

see what happens? Okay, monitor is powered up. Yeah, there's that. no signal. Oh oh oh oh whoa.

What do we got? What do we got? I heard the little beep back there so it went through its self test. Oh man, no way. Oh I'm just gonna Mount this on the dash. Whoa.

Okay, so we're plugged right into the computer back there. Yeah, I'm gonna need a mouse and a keyboard. I'm gonna pull this computer out because I want to see if maybe the hard drive needs to be reinserted? Um, let's just see what we can see here and I wanted to see if there was any information on the back of this as well. Now we can see here.

16 gigabyte. I Want to take this drive out and just reinsert it. kind of start over and these normally pull out and I'm not getting that right now. It is stuck.

The drive isn't just sliding out. I'm going to take this face plate out see if that helps me. All right, let's see if this guy will pull out now. Oh, that might help us.

Yes, All right. Okay, we should be able to slide this entire thing out, see if anything is disconnected or obviously broken. There are a couple little replaceable batteries here. they're just 20.

32s should be able to pop this drive out. there we go. So all I really want to do here is just double check the connection here. It's pretty solid.

There we go. Yeah, pins look to be okay. Let's put this right back. Wow.

we're in there. Let's just take a look at these batteries see if they're any good. No, it's just one. This little guy's totally dead.

I Can definitely replace this. Not sure if it's going to fix all of our problems, but while we're in there I don't feel like running to the store so we're gonna steal this out of my CL65 key. this guy should be good. There we go.

This has three volts. the other one had nothing. I'll go ahead and pop this guy in there. We go with our new 2032 battery and I'm gonna put everything back together I believe that's to hold memory so it's possible that could affect the operation here.

we're going to find out in a moment. So I'm going to put it back and then we're plugging it back into our gigantic computer monitor screen that I stole from Max He normally has three screens to edit, but today he's only got two. Yeah! I took a picture on how everything goes so we should be good. Everything is reconnected.

We're gonna go ahead and turn the key on. Now there we go. Stuff's making noises. Got some fans.

we got our self test. All right Here we go here we go. Error. Oh now press F1 to continue.

We're gonna have the same thing. aren't we all right? Computer guys out there, What is going on here? I'll do this again. Probably not gonna work now. Is this disc not reading any longer? Maybe it's corrupted? I'm not sure.

Well, this is a total bummer. I Really wanted to get that screen working but this computer obviously has an issue. so computer guys out there let me know in the comments section what you think is going on. Um, but at this point I believe my only option here is to send this to a computer store.

uh, see if they can diagnose and fix it and see if we can recover anything on that hard drive and then at the same time I might look into a replacement screen or maybe send that out to be repaired because I don't believe that's working. It's getting power, nothing's lighting up so we have some serious issues. But the good thing is is this stuff doesn't have anything to do with this vehicle driving. it doesn't control anything, it's just a display.

and it does let us know a lot of important information about the battery and the hybrid system and everything like that. But it doesn't control anything. so we could still drive the van without all of this. So with that, let's get back to the battery, see if we can at least get these cells to recover.

At this point, I'm kind of striking out left and right. I could I could just use zoom. A bit of luck, a little luck. Bright Idea Come on, look at this.

my buddy John from watch Jericho just sent me this. They still make the screen in the car. there's that little circuit board we found underneath and we have the exact same connection. So if I deem that to be bad, I could just buy a new one and John wants a shot at fixing the computer or figuring out what's going on with the hard drive.

he'll probably feature that on his Tech throwback. Channel And it's definitely a big time. Tech Throwback. So I think I'm going to send it out to him and for now, we are going to mess around with this right here.

So this is my programmable DC power source that we're going to try and charge up the cells with. I already attached the leads. Look at that. they're not messing around.

They say you right up at 120 volts and we're going to charge this at three. Let's do 3.3 volts and we'll come down here to amps and let's just do two amps. All right. We should be all set there.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is it. Oh, I'm kind of nervous about this. We are going to be hooking up this power supply directly to these open cells since we're only going to be working on this module right now. I've covered all the other ones.

We have our power supply ready to go and I did have the van plugged in for a few hours. Let's see if we gained anything. Okay, we got a half a volt on the first cell and let me show you guys how to check individual cells. We're going to put our negative on BB2 and then our positive on BB3 and we should be able to isolate that cell.

So that's a half a volt there and we can go down the line here. Negative on BB3 positive on Bb4 Another half volt These are very weak. There we go, we got to sell at 1.2 That's nice. Sell at 0.8 and you keep on alternating and making sure the polarity is right.

And here's another 0.5 Wow. There we go. 3.4 So this is our first cell that's giving us a normal reading: 3.4 3.4 Yeah, these last cells are fine. All right.

So we're going to do to isolate the cells is we're going to go negative here and positive on BB2. Now, once I'm done charging this cell here. the BB2 cell just like we did with the meter, we're going to go negative here and positive on the BB3. So even though the module and all the cells are still connected, we haven't removed them from the battery pack and physically isolated them on a table.

We can still isolate the power flow that goes into each individual cell. Okay, so let's just set this back up for first one and we have our base reading half a volt. All right, let's make sure we're good here. Bring this up a little.

All right. So 3.4 volts, 2 amps and we hit output. You can hear this working. It's normal, but it's a little scary.

A little scary. Okay, 1.7 volts with the machine connected right now. feeding it a couple volts. Okay, I've had it charging for about a half hour now on this one cell.

Uh, the fan kicks on every once in a while on the power supply and there we go. Kicked right off. 3.46 volts and two amps. So let's do this.

Let's turn the output off and check it out. We're at 2.9 volts already on this one cell. so up from 0.5 almost all the way to three guys. That's a great sign that it took the voltage.

now. Unfortunately, at 2 amps, this would technically take about 20 hours to charge each cell. But what I'm going to do is wait about another two hours. Uh, get it up to hopefully about 3.4 volts and then I'm going to shut this off and go home for the night because it's already kind of late.

Uh, when I come back in, we're gonna see if that cell dropped down at all. If there isn't a drastic drop, then we're good to increase the amperage and kind of speed things up a bit and then move on to the next cell. Either way, this is going to take a really long time, but we're moving in the right direction. Sounds like that should be a song.

Moving in the right direction is that song might be a song. It should be a song. Captain's Log Supplemental I Just spoke with Sean the engineer and he said a better idea is to charge up each one of the low cells. So about 30 minutes to one hour each cell.

Uh, get them above three and then let them all sit overnight because the BMS can consume voltage from the higher cells and it might look like it's losing voltage overnight. So it's better to basically just balance the pack right here and then let the whole thing sit overnight. So basically I have to be here for many, many hours into the evening. So I went down the street, got a fully loaded steak burrito, added avocado I took it out and got the mild sauce and I'm gonna set it back here and have some dinner while I watch my Lithium batteries charge a little burrito.

Oh I know what you're thinking Alice don't get locked in I won't the doors open all the way I am not getting locked in this van ever again. Knock on floor that was made of recycled tires I Learned I could have gone spicier with this I thought the grain stuff was the spicy. Isn't it the opposite? The red is mild. grain is spicy.

Let's do something spicy. Anyone else watching this insane? Tavaris P1 build what in the world? They're taking everything apart. It's one big burrito and three hours later, check this out. Let's see if I can do this and hold the camera at the same time.

Look at that. 38.5 for this module. Earlier today, this was at 25. We have successfully brought up these first few cells up to three volts each.

So now I can let this sit overnight. But before we do that, hang on. let's slap a cover on this guy. Remember this cell right here has 38 volts.

It's supposed to have, you know, 40 41. So I checked each cell individually. This guy here is only at half a volt I put a little X there so you know how we do. We've got this guy connected up.

We're gonna charge up that half volt cell all the way to probably three or more and this pack will go from 38 to hopefully 41. And that means another half hour for me here in the space fan, it's been a half hour. This pack was reading 38 before 40.3 Nice, Yeah, we got this one up to 2.9 Pretty good. That'll do it for this evening's charging.

I Will see you here bright and early in the morning. Fingers crossed. Do a little dance, pray sing a song, and do something. Do something All right, Because if these modules are back to where we started yesterday I am in big trouble.

It's the next morning. I Got a red legit three car shirt on and we're gonna test and see if these batteries are good. Moment of Truth Big Moment of Truth I'm so nervous right now. If this works, we are good on this battery 37.3 Not bad.

That's really good. We only lost like one volt overnight. Okay, 2.8 2.7 2.7 2.7 2.628 And then we get to the good ones. Three four three four three four three four three four.

And let's just double check our low cell on this side. Two seven. Cool. That was at a half volt.

that's pretty good. Now, it's normal for the cells to have dropped a little bit because we haven't let them fully charge and saturate now. Each cell unfortunately will take about 13 hours to charge because my machine will only go up to three amps, but honestly, that's where I would have set it at. Anyway, we don't want to go too high, we really want to let it kind of trickle charge.

So now if you guys are curious on why we're able to charge each cell well individually and why the power doesn't get spread out when I connect the alligator clips, It's because each cell is wired in series. so as long as we take our leads with the proper polarity and clip them in between the cells, the power flow will only go in between those two. So let's go ahead and start baking this first cell. Yeah, 3.1 amps.

That's the most we can do. Okay, hey, look at that. 3.2 sweet. So because I'm trying to balance the module I keep moving the power source from cell to cell every hour or so just to keep things even.

And I'm just curious right now if it'll move at all without doing the crazy motor. Shake Let's see. Okay, so far so good. I Have this thing taken apart a little bit.

Let's see. Oh yeah, look at that. We're back in business. Okay, it's two days later and I've gone around and charged each one of these modules quite a few times.

We still need to charge them a lot more. roughly 13 to 15 hours each and there's seven of them. You do the math. we're not totally done yet, but look at this.

We now have almost 40 volts out of this entire pack. That is really good. Now I Know a lot of you guys are thinking there might be a faster way to do this, but I really want to give myself the best chance possible at restoring those cells so we have plenty of other things to do. so let's move this guy forward.

Oh why did it do that? So this battery pack has More Voltage than it's ever had. That makes no sense I Thought for sure it would just move up. You know, right when you think you've gotten somewhere with the space van, it does this to you. This thing is unbelievable.

Let's just go check the whole battery pack right now and see if maybe we lost some other cells. I Don't know, you know what I haven't charged? Is this one dead cell in here or the low cell? Okay, yeah. 1.5 volts on that one cell because I didn't let this one saturate. Okay, let's let this one charge up for a few hours and we'll see if maybe one really low cell is throwing this whole thing off and making it do the shaky thing.

I Feel like this is all I've been doing lately. But while I wait for that cell to charge up? Uh, we're gonna take care of some wiring right here. As you can see, the insulation has come apart I don't think anything is touching and all the strands seem to be okay. but we're gonna.

we're gonna fix this. No, there's no corrosion in here, which is nice and I think all the pins are pushed in properly so that's good. We're gonna do a temporary repair. I'm not gonna D pin everything on this connector for heat shrink.

Right now, this will be good enough for the space van, especially with all the hackery going on here in the space fan. This will lend right in. I've isolated all the wires. At least they won't touch each other anymore.

so let's plug this one back in there. we go. There's another connector down here. It's not corroded, just a little dirty.

so we'll clean it up. Electrical contact, cleaner, plug this guy back into there. We go. Okay, let's see where we're at.

Three Volts. Okay, let's try it here. We go here. We go.

Okay, we're back people. We're back. That motor going nuts has to have something to do with cells being very very low. Just need to go a few feet get me there space fan.

You can do it to infinity and beyond. Buzz Lightyear Buzz Lightyear You guys got kids Toy Story Actually, people that watch those originally are not kids anymore. It's an old movie we're driving. Feels good to drive the Space Man I Gotta say, let's not Pusher Luck Okay, you just have to charge the cells for like 72 hours and you can go like 10 feet.

It's it's totally a usable vehicle. I Gotta get this thing in a little bit of a better position. I'm scared every time I Turn this key. Okay, it's alive.

Okay, this is the first time I've been able to move this thing, turn it off, and then just start it up and move it again. We're on to something here. people. we are on to something.

Look at this. I even have reverse. No big deal. There's home insulation in there.

This is plastic. There's no wipers. No. AC No airbags, no radio, no windows.

A very, very fake mobile. All right. I'm really pushing my luck I Forget I'm getting a platform with a winch motor installed over there tomorrow so we can get things into my storage unit. So I actually need to get this thing over there so let's see.

Hopefully third time's a charm in this case and this thing still works. Space Fan Space Fan: It moves it, grooves. It's the Space fan. I'm going into reverse right now to go into drive.

A lot of you guys have said maybe that the polarity is reversed on the motor I Don't think that's the case. Honestly, all the big gigantic cables look to be going where they're supposed to go, but we will find out. Okay bag of Park Can we get through here? Hold on a little bit more? Okay now. I'm seriously I'm done moving this for now.

We have to get the brackets off for the motor I Took one of them out in the last video we got it Weld and it immediately sheared it off. but honestly, we're looking really good. I've never had this thing kind of start up and move on. EV Power So many times in a row without doing the whole crazy motor.

Shake I Know we still have to charge the cells all the way, but can I say I fixed the shaky motor thing I Don't know I think for the rest of my life I'm always going to feel weird turning the key like it's gonna go and try to kill me. but I think I fixed it guys. Check this out. I Just found something really, really cool.

So see how that cable right there has a number one going into the motor? It's hard to see, but there's a number two and a number three. There's three total high voltage cables going into the motor and then going into the motor controller or the inverter. They labeled it one, two three and you're probably thinking Alex Who cares? They're labeled one, two three so one probably goes to one and so on and so forth. But no, they have one in three switched.

And remember when I go into reverse, this thing moves forward and when I go into dry drive, it moves backwards. They reverse the polarity on this motor. Some of you guys had mentioned this in the comments section. You guys were right now.

Some other people mentioned that they thought the gas engine was fighting the electric motor, which that was not the case. We never had the gas engine and the electric motor working at the same time. We only had the gas engine working and kind of moving the van with the high voltage connector out of the battery so that never happened. They never fought each other, but reversed polarity? Yes, let's switch some stuff now.

I've pulled out the fireman safety loop so we shouldn't have any voltage going to the motor, but you can never be too sure. So these are the cables that go directly into the motor. We got nothing so we're safe. This stuff though is extremely dangerous.

So I'm still just gonna wear the gloves. Why not? From inside the van and from the top, you can see the three and two. So we just have to switch the top and the bottom. Hopefully these connectors just pop right out.

I Have to release these little tabs. There's two of them. A little difficult To do, but that's holding that. Oh, there we go.

That's coming off. Okay, come on now. I'm doing this right. We're gonna switch it from the bottom.

This is much more accessible and I believe we turn this okay just to check again. Yeah, we got nothing. All right. We're safe.

We're safe. Okay, so we'll have to take this one down just to get it out of the way. Two is in the right spot. Go back together with that one.

But we needed this guy out. Okay, so now we're gonna switch to this one and this one now. But uh, you know. what's crazy is though, they are labeled with colors and the colors go inside.

These might. these might not click into anything but themselves. Yeah, these are all different. Okay, so we have to flip it at the motor.

These do have to be plugged into the motor controller. as they were. They have little guide pins in there so they only fit into their specific slot. No biggie.

let's put them back All right. Click that in and then All Right pushes in. Okay, okay, that's back. Oh I Think this is it.

Oh cool. This whole thing slides off. Oh, maybe we can switch them inside of there. All right.

let's pull this out so we can work on it inside. That would be nice. There we go. All right man.

how did they mess this up? They would have literally had to have d-pin this improperly. This is weird. Well, I've never d-pinned one of these before, but that looks like something. This collar pops up so we'll have to do this on this side too.

All right. Oh okay. that one just came right out. cool and we gotta click these back too.

and it looks like there's a couple other tabs in here. Oh, that's a nice clip. Another, oh look at that. my first time.

those are some satisfying clicks I Gotta say, this is not live, but it's still scary. All right. So we'll pull this one out. Clickity click.

All right. And now this one is coming out too. and we're just gonna go right ahead. Plug this guy into here, click and this guy into here.

So I kind of don't understand why this is like this. Someone would have had to go and do this work at this connector and for what reason I don't know I don't know. it's a mystery. just like the rest of the band.

All right, it's hard to work with the high voltage gloves. I Just triple checked. We got nothing here. We're safe all right now.

We have to plug this in, which is a lot easier said than done. There we go, plugged in, see what kind of satisfying clicks we can get. Yeah, is this gonna work? I don't know? It should, right? It should. In theory we should have reverse and it should go backwards and forward should go forward.

and we might be there with this. This will be so cool. Okay, we're going back together with the fireman safety loop. Okay, another Moment of Truth Okay, first one.

Okay, it was a little one. huh? Okay, that might have been like some kind of normal test. It did a little little something there we're in Drive Not going anywhere. Let's try reverse foreign at all.

Why does this thing disappoint me? Come on dude. Okay, so I've let this thing charge for about a half hour. We're gonna see if that reset anything. Okay, no weird noise from the motor at all.

That's good. I'm gonna go into drive. Oh, that was a weird sound and it didn't move. Let's try reverse, huh? It's registering speed though.

When it does that, let's watch some half chefs here and see what's going on. Go ahead. you see that. Oh yeah, it moves.

It's shaking back and forth. Okay, what in the world? Yeah, it's just freaking out. Just not as bad as before. but now it doesn't move.

Also, Okay, well that did not go first thing. The cables would make words in reverse. Um, but that didn't happen. It's very possible that they simply mislabeled the cables on the bottom I Mean considering everything we found in this video, uh, yeah, they could have made that kind of mistake.

So kind of a bummer. But at the end of the day I think we restored these cells I still have a few more days to let them saturate and charge up a little bit more and then I can plug it into the wall and hope that the pack just balances out and fully charges I Mean it's going to be degraded a little bit I Believe this was designed to go about 35 40 miles on electric power alone and then the gas engine kicks in. but you know if we can get I don't know anything over 20 I'd be pretty happy at this point. And then we got to figure out how to get the gas engine to come on at the right time so that the front wheel drive Chrysler drivetrain will keep this van going down the road so lots of work still to be done I Still have to remove these motor brackets to get them reinforced but you guys have seen me do that in a previous video.

and I Want to look at the shifter and instrument cluster communication to see if something's reversed there? Maybe that's why it's showing reverse when it's really in drive. I Don't know I Don't know, but we're going to learn. We're going to figure this out. We're gonna get this space fan back on the road and I Hope you guys have really enjoyed this series up until this point.

If you have give this video a big thumbs up, it really helps the YouTube algorithm tell YouTube that you guys like the video. That's why it's a thumbs up. Share the video with your friends, subscribe if you haven't already, and most importantly have an awesome day! I'll see all of you in the next video. They had one plug going to the they had one plug so when speaking with Sean the engineer he had told me it's I Don't know what that was but they needed to move a lot faster.

Okay and we'll see if and we'll see if maybe one. Okay, I'm gonna seriously push my luck right now. We're getting a big when we only lost like one night. Yeah, we only lost like all right.

foreign.