Lithium Swap 5 - Cleanup

Now I get to relate a part of the project that I wasn't really very much looking forward to.

It had been six years since the last time I drove the Rabbit, it had been sitting in the carport all that time, gathering dirt and dust, but protected from the worst of the weather. I had opened it a time or two to wipe down the seats, which tend to grow mildew all over them when not in use. I made some attempts to keep the most obvious mouse infestations under control, but at the core, the car was dirty and a playground for small rodents.

It was time to hook up to it with my Electrak tractor and pull it out into the open with a chain so I could get both doors open and begin cleaning both the exterior and interior.

The exterior responded fairly quickly to being squirted with the high pressure washer. Here, it's in half-and-half state, showing just how much crud builds up on a car in storage, even under cover.

When I parked this car, it was shiny, and didn't have a speck of rust anywhere. As is evident, living even eight and a half miles from the ocean has disadvantages if you are made of a reactive material.

After washing the rest of the exterior, it was time to remove the old, dead lead-acid batteries. This was sure to be a back breaker, so I pulled my pickup bed trailer up to the rear of the car and put a couple of 4' 2x6 pieces of lumber between the vehicles. This meant that I needed only to lift the batteries a foot or so onto the ramp, then slide them into the trailer. Not lifting and then turning to move them saved my back. Here's 16 of them ready to go to the recycle yard for disposal (and $$redemption$$).

So far things were going pretty well. I needed to unhook the trailer from my truck until I made the trip into town to get rid of them, so I pulled it around to the side of the carport and used a hydraulic jack to lift the coupler off the tow ball on my truck. It sat like that for a few days, then just before I was going to hook it back up, I opened the tailgate of the trailer, standing behind it.
BIG MISTAKE!

I had assumed that I had stacked the batteries in the trailer far enough ahead of the axle to put quite a lot of weight on the tongue, but opening the tailgate shifted the center of gravity to the rear of the axle, and the trailer immediately started to tip back very quickly. I recognized in a fraction of a second that I wasn't going to be able to stop this, and jumped out of the way just as 1,100 pounds of batteries rumbled out of the bed of the trailer like a runaway freight train.

Then I got to pick them up a second time, lifting them the two and a half feet from the ground and onto the trailer, making sure that there was a lot of weight forward this time.

With the batteries out, I could begin cleaning up the interior. Although there wasn't any obvious evidence that the mice had spent much time out in the open, there was an overpowering stench of urine in the car. I would need to find the source of this before I got much farther in the job.

One thing I had noticed over the years was that the resilient surrounds on both of the 8" subwoofers in the rear quarter panels had gone missing. Time to remove the interior carpeted panels covering these areas and see what was inside. What I found was the source of the stink.

When I built the stereo system, I had put fiberglass insulation inside these cavities to smooth out the bass response from the woofers and dampen the speakers. The mice found this an irresistible nesting opportunity, and had filled both sides with nests and toilet areas. Removing the soiled insulation removed 99% of the nasty smell. Very little of the remainer of the area was contaminated.

The speakers, on the other hand, were destroyed. What on earth the little vermin found attractive about the rubberized cone surrounds, I'll never know, but these thumpers were toast. Later, I picked up a replacement set of vintage Rockford-Fosgate subs at the recycle yard.

To further drive the mice out of the car, I placed soda can bottoms filled with moth balls around inside the car.

As cleaning progressed, I was able to fit a lithium module into the battery well and get an idea what it was going to take to install the new cells and mount them securely.

It was still looking like the new cells were going to fit with little room to spare, but they were going to fit. You can see the moth ball containers spread around inside the car.

I left the fiberglass rods that were installed as part of the battery hold-down when the car was converted, thinking that they may be useful in the new installation. This didn't last long, as they weren't really in the right locations, and I had strong reservations about the strength and durability of that system. Mostly, I always believed that the old batteries were held in by gravity and faith. It would have been mayhem in the event of a roll-over. Something more substantial and safer was in the works, so the sawzall took care of these obstructions.

Much more cleaning ensued for several weeks further, when I borrowed a carpet and uhpholstery spot cleaning machine and gave all the carpeted areas a through scrubbing. The seats, dashboard, door panels, etc were all wiped down with a weak bleach solution, and I even disassembled the heater and vent system to flush out any droppings the mice left behind. The car was becoming pretty clean, and now it stank mostly of naphthalene and/or paradichlorobenzene, the active ingredients in moth balls. This would prove to be another problem later...