Redoing battery boxes^4h

March 28, 2026

Well, a bit of a setback -- I decided to completely redo the battery boxes.

I never liked how my battery boxes turned out to be. Lot of holes I had to countersink with an angle attachment, and it didn't work very well. Also, the material these boxes were made from was kind of soft and gummy. All in all, it caused a lot of poorly made countersinks. I still accepted them because there were enough rivets to keep everything in place.

I also didn't like how "locking" battery in place turned out. Even though EarthX confirmed that these boxes can be installed in any orientation, it just didn't feel right.

The final straw was my attempt to drill the holes in the top panels to mount the fuse block / power relay modules. When I did that, I hit the flanges of the boxes behind (below) these panels -- these boxes weren't really designed to be placed in that orientation, these flanges were supposed to go against the firewall.

And then dimpling these holes (so I can put screws from below) was another problem.

So, I removed them from the structure, and started designing my own boxes. The idea was to use angles to contain batteries -- nothing too special.

Something like this.

The specific arrangement I came with was this corner idea, with the horizontal angle going across both of the batteries. The rear of the batteries (their tops) will rest on this angle plus this angle will "lock" them as well.

I decided to keep this angle as a single long piece because even though it will be supported midspan, that support is not as good as both side supports. The central rib has flanges on both sides (one real flange and one riveted angle), so I couldn't put a proper vertical strap.

I suppose, it might cause maintenance issues in the future because installing two batteries at the same time might require too many hands, but we will see.

This is how angles connect together. Later I replaced these angles with slightly bigger ones so I could fit an extra -3 rivet to prevent rotations.