Coupe de Volt: Battery layout and rack designs Pt 2

The rear battery boxes will be made with 1.5"x1.5"x.125"thk steel angle, welded into 2 boxes which will be bolted together and bolted to the car, either through the floor pan or directly to the frame.

To make sure they will actually fit in the car, we built the boxes in stages. First, the base of the "lower" rear rack (the one that will hold 6 batteries side-by-side) was tacked together and placed in the car.

Hooray. It fits. As you can see by the second image, the left-to-right level is a bit off, but that's because we haven't yet set up the brackets that will anchor the rack in place. As you can see below, we should be able to utilize the seat belt anchor to secure the rear corners of this box. (Hard to see in this image, but it's the rust-colored spot inside the red circle)

So, since things are looking ok at this point we proceeded to complete the frames. Here's the lower rack tacked together. The gap in one of the upper edges is where the opening to the upper box will be.

Here's the upper rack partially tacked together. It's a more complicated design because it will contain 2 rows of batteries (1 row with 3 batteries end-to-end, 1 with 2 batteries end-to-end).

Here's the upper rack basically finished.

The next step is to put the racks in the car and fit brackets to them to secure them to the car and keep them level. Our initial plan was bolt the two racks together in place, then bolt the racks to the car in 7 places: the front of the lower rack will be secured to the floor pan on either side of the "center hump" (the floor pan will be sandwiched between two 1/8" thick plates), the back corners of the lower rack will be secured to the seat belt anchors, the rear of the upper rack will be secured through the trunk floor, and the upper rack will be secured through the trunk floor near the rear wheel wells. Here's a picture showing the lower rack. You can see where the pedestal supports will sit on the floor.