mxp said:
Interesting project. Great stuff!
What was the total amount of time taken for you to start and finish the swap?
Was it close to what the "book time" requested by the dealers for this work?
The dealer never swaps module stacks out of a battery.
At the dealer, they only touch the battery case when wearing their high voltage isolating gloves
and they are certainly not going to open a battery voluntarily and voiding the warranty.
At the dealer, they drop the battery case after disconnecting the 12V battery and disconnecting the 2 or 3 plugs
(depending if you have battery warmers or not) by unbolting the 2 or 5 10mm bolts in the little straps
and then the 10 or 12 (old/new style battery) bolts that hold the battery to the frame.
Oh and of course, first remove the 3 battery covers, the plastic belly pan pieces. About 20 10mm bolts and 20 push pins or so.
Once the battery is dropped, the replacement goes in with reverse order of disassembly.
Then the Nissan computer gets involved - there is a paper that comes with the new battery that holds a key
that has to be entered into the Nissan tool to register the battery to the car, the car's computer gets updated to
recognise the new battery computer and they are done.
For me, since I have no access to the Nissan software tools, the only option is to keep the same battery computer with the car.
For my own 2011 Leaf I lucked out, it had a 2016 battery and I had bought a 2015 battery that was a warranty replacement on a 2011
so it already had the correct plug for a 2011 and I could swap the computer from the new installed 2016 battery into that 2015 pack,
re-seal that pack and remount it into my car. That was a (long) evening of work but it did not involve moving module stacks.
Then, the removed 2016 pack minus computer was completely dis-assembled down to module stacks without wiring and the 2011
BMS wiring was installed on them, in order to be able to swap them into a degraded 2011 pack.
The degraded pack that came out of that 2011 received the 2016 wiring and the 2015 BMS so it was again a complete set, to go into an EV truck. Nothing was wasted, but as I said - just swapping the BMS wiring on the 3 module stacks takes about 2 hours of hustling.
Cutting open the new style shell is about half an hour, depending how lucky I get with the knife cutting the glue apart.
The longest time it seems is taken when switching BS wiring and the mounting spots of the wiring changes so the brackets can not fit
on one of the existing bolts. I always find myself untying the HV wires, in order to get it to move over an inch and fit on the mounting
bolts on the halfpack.
Making sure the shell is again waterproof upon closing is another big thing.
And knowing how to jack it up again so it comes into the correct position for bolting it back on.