So…I’ve been holding off on moving forward with the battery mount, mostly out of an abundance of caution. I’d gone ahead and ordered some spacers from McMaster-Carr, and I wanted to do a real fit-up with those spacers and thus evaluate the battery placement in that position, before actually drilling the bolt holes. Those spacers came in today, so I got that final fit-up done.
The basic deal here is that I’m placing the battery box as high as it can possibly go. The placement I chose will put the top right bolt under the starter contactor – meaning that solenoid will have to be removed before that bolt can be loosened – but such is life. I could possibly have gone higher, but I’d have had to added washers between the starter contactor and the mount, and that sounded like way more of a pain to deal with down the road.
So I got that location plotted out, then went ahead and drilled the box mount holes. Next up was once again tracing around the various mount holes and laying out how to trim the mount down. I took a lesson from the last mount and didn’t go nuts with all the inside curves in an effort to shave off as much material as possible. This will make it a lot easier to finish the edges, and I think I can make up most of the weight by way of adding more lightening holes.
Before calling it a night, I rough-cut the outline on the bandsaw:
Next, I’ll get to finish the edges and round the corners, then it’ll be time to lay out the lightening holes.
In other news, the stainless flange fittings I ordered from Amazon were far too large to be useful, so no joy on making some cheap passthroughs (though at least I can return these). I looked around some more for something to press into service, but eventually decided to just cough up some $$$ for some passthrough kits that Spruce has. Even those will require some modification due to how close the passthrough holes are to the firewall edge, but I think it’ll be doable. Worst case, I can still fall back to just the snap bushings and a big blob of sealant…