BMW 3.0 CSE

Almost all of the EV conversion work is now done.  A few of the things recently taken care of: On the test drive the brake pedal went to the floor.  This was because the pedal itself rotated on the pivot point.  I thought it was secured at the factory and all pivoting happened at the pivot tube but I was wrong so had to TIG weld the pedal to the pivot.

Hoses and brake lines are a challenge on this Frankenstein project.   Brake lines a combination of metric DIN bubble flares and ISO imperial double flares, with a super odd metric double flare on the Tesla master cylinder.  Plus, the original ATW front calipers have two redundant circuits so the original master had 5 ports.  The Tesla iBooster only has two.  And the original rear-mounted proportioning valve isn't practical with this new setup.

The Tesla drive unit only has Forward, Reverse and Neutral. There is no Parking pawl. On a real Tesla there are electric worm-drive parking brake calipers that clamp down on the rear discs when park is engaged and stay there even when power is cut. Paul adapted those to his car because he was already fabricating new caliper mounts for his Wilwood upgrade but I'm sticking with stock brakes so that wasn't an option for me. Initially I thought I'd just flash a "Pull Hand Brake" type message on the dash app when you engaged Park but I found a better solution with a product called eStopp.

Bolting in an electric motor and some batteries is the easy part. The devil is in all the little details and decisions that need to be made to retrofit and replace needed systems like braking, power steering, cooling, HVAC, etc. The biggest hurdle yet to overcome is braking. Paul changed to Wilwood all around and devised a very clever mechanical solution (Fred) to change the direction of brake pedal travel and translate it into the transmission tunnel area where he mounted a hydroboost and Wilwood master in a backwards orientation. All that scared me and I had already rebuilt the stock ATE brakes before deciding to go EV so I had hopes of retaining stock braking all around.

In order to accurately test battery fitment, I had to mount the front suspension cross member so that I could install the steering gearbox.  The batteries will need to clear that.   I had spent months rebuilding all the brakes and suspension for the car, prior to deciding to go electric.  Fortunately, all those parts should work fine with the EV conversion.