 When I was working on this one, I wanted to smooth out some of this sheet metal here, and I nicked this battery. You know, it's just a matter of time when working on delicate things like this before I, you know, hit the wrong thing at some point. Anyway, it sparked, made a tiny hole in the cell, and there were like little tiny bubbles coming out of the cell for a few seconds. So it's definitely damaged. Maybe it would be alright, but if I leave it, I'm just gonna be wondering the whole time I'm driving this boat around. Oh, is that thing, that little hole in that cell, is that gonna catch fire, or is it gonna explode? So I'm just gonna replace it. So I have to get that sucker out, and I have one of the 12 volt blocks I made, and I'm just gonna dedicate this one to replacement cells, so I'll have to break it apart. So they're all like welded onto these plates. So maybe if I cut it, I don't know, I need to figure out how to cut this in a way, and cut this one out, I have to open up this whole thing, cut this one out in a way that I can attach that to here, maybe by, you know, leaving some of the metal on this plate that I could overlap on the other one, then fold over and crimp or something, something like that. These batteries are the one thing on the boat that I might want to replace, just because they're used batteries, and you know, it's a big question. They couldn't end up being amazing. Maybe I can find a place that will sponsor me with some batteries for this boat. I got the solar panels, which was amazing. So maybe I should try it for some batteries too. This side's a little trickier. 3.2 volts, so still good according to that. I'm still replacing it. There's the hole right there. All right, plenty of attachment material. So that's bolted together, and the other side is just kind of woven together, and maybe I'll take that part that's sticking up under, fold it over, and that should be good. This piece goes up under that, folds over, that should be good. All right, a pile of cables, some batteries. I'll go grab the other ones in a minute. In here, I attached two bolts, one here and one on the other side, and I'm gonna make one of these positive and the other one negative. So I'll make all the positive connections from the batteries go to here, all the negative over there, and then I can make the positive from the charge controller come off here and the positive to go to the motor controller, which I need to go grab. When the sun's hitting the side of the boat, it's gonna heat up and it'll heat up the batteries, and I don't want that. So I grabbed some of the bubble wrap that came in. That packaging I just got, I'm gonna insulate the walls. Beauty! This is plastic fencing that'll help hold it up there. This is packaging material the batteries came in, and I'm gonna use it to stuff around the batteries to lock them in. Just hold them in place. This piece is at an angle, so that when the motor is going, the blower blows air along the side of the motor. It'll hit this, blow up, and come out the back where there's a space. And then at the back of the motor where it's sucking, hopefully it'll suck air in this way. I got everything plugged together, and it looks like it's working. This is blinking like it should be. And then I looked at my, oh, I installed one of these too. I looked at the voltage thing here, expecting it to go up, and it didn't, it just stayed the same. And I'm looking at everything and like, you know, this says it's doing the right thing, and I'm testing everything. And I'm like, all right, what's the problem here? Long story short, I remembered I asked the guy for the lowest voltage solar panels because they have a higher amperage. All right, without getting into like a 45 minute monologue about electricity, in a nutshell, it's more efficient to run the motor directly off the solar panels rather than have it go through a charge controller into the batteries, then to the motor. Basically, because when you're charging batteries, you need to have a higher voltage to force the electricity into the batteries. And then like the top end of that is kind of wasted, not really wasted, but you need it to force the electricity into the batteries. So you sort of artificially need a higher voltage on your solar panels than you would if you just ran it directly to the motor. And since you're increasing the voltage, you have to swap something out, so you end up losing current. So you end up having some wasted energy, some wasted power. But if you set the solar panels to be the voltage that the motor is, like pretty much exactly, and just max out the current, then you can, you're not, you're wasting less electricity. So I'm going to wire the boat kind of like I did this boat, which is some of the solar panels will go directly to the motor, three of them will go directly to the motor, and one will go through the charge controller and the batteries and charge the batteries. I probably should have gotten one solar panel that was a higher voltage, because it won't actually charge all the way, whatever, it's fine. I can always, you know, top it up when I'm parked, because the thing is, when I really need the most efficiency is when I'm driving, because generally when I'm parked, I'm parked for plenty of time for the batteries to get charged. I don't need to, you know, max out the charging when I'm parked. I need to max out the efficiency when I'm driving, because if I'm going on like a four hour round trip, I want to be using the batteries as little as possible and basically almost just running off the solar panels, or preferably completely running off the solar panels and just not touching the batteries. So, I need to make a switch or two. I'll probably have one switch connect two solar panels and another switch connect the third one to the motor, and then the other one will just run through the, oh, then I need a third switch for connecting the batteries with the speed controller. Technically, I don't even need the speed controller. It's funny, I don't need the speed controller or the charge controller to run this both the way it is. The charge controller will be like, you know, just extra safety precaution and the speed controller will only be necessary when it's dark, because I won't have the gradual ramp up of electricity if I'm in the dark, because I'll have to go straight to batteries. Alright, so instead of all my wires going into the charge controller, which is right up there, these two are maybe going to come down here, go through a switch, so that I can reach when I'm... Alright, voltage is up to 26.9, that's good, I don't know if you can see it from there, take my word for it, and I've got two solar panels running through a little switch right in there. Too late in the day to test it, the sun's almost down, and I'm going to get a third solar panel with the wire running down to that switch. So it's making a sound and a vibration, and I think the bolt that's going through the shaft and the motor shaft that holds it all together in here is hitting the brass part. I'm hoping that's what it is, because if it's hitting further down the tube, that's going to be a harder problem to fix. But there is a bunch of dust up here, yeah, so there's a good chance it's just the nut from that bolt hitting this, which is an easy fix, well that's super easy, but I just have to file out some of this, or I can just run it for a while and it'll wear out its own groove, which maybe is not a terrible idea. Let me run it for a few minutes, see if it smooths out. A lot of the sound disappears if I splash water up into the bearing, because right now it's just running dry, so that solves a lot of it. I'm still not totally sure about up here though. I did put that copper sleeve inside the tube, so this tube runs up here and the copper sleeve is somewhere about in there, so that'll have to wear through before it wears the tube. So I've got some time, it's not going to like self destruct right away or anything. So maybe I'll just run it for a little bit like it is, see if it smooths itself out, and if not then it'll start investigating. So I've got three of the solar panels wired in to run through this switch to the motor. I'm also going to have to put some emergency disconnect for everything, so if some idiot doesn't come over and turn on my switch. I still have to put in the speed controller that goes from the batteries to the motor. I think I'm going to do that after the propeller though, I kind of want to make the propeller right now. I think this propeller is going to be the first use for this thing. It's probably not a recommended tool for this, but that's okay. Look at that precision, oh love precision. I'm going to make a three propeller blade with this pipe, which is something I would not try measuring by hand. Well I might, but so nice to have the exact measurement. I think I can use this setup to cut stainless gears. I didn't want to cut stainless gears with my fancy things because it just gets super dull and wrecked. But this thing can handle it, it won't be the right shape, so I'll have to do some trickiness to cut it in at the right. Anyway, that's something to worry about later. For future reference Jamie, when you do this again, which you probably will, stuff this in the back first, get it all the way in the back and then get it forward. And when you can't get the front all the way in, just grab it with the vice grips and cram it in there. Use a hammer if necessary. Oh good propeller. You know the first time I made one of these, I made it this way because I didn't have an easy welding setup and I wanted to make it out of steel. But I actually prefer this over welding because there's nothing, it's so clean. I don't even have to run any beads across here and try to smooth them out, there's just nothing there. Oh such, I shouldn't get too excited. Let me see how it works first. Get all those tabs bent down all the way. Maybe I'll just leave that piece in there. It's a piece of a PVC pipe I didn't use for anything. I have a bunch of these. This is the thickness of the prop shaft, tiny bit loose. So this guy's ready to go on. I just checked outside though and it's high tide. So the propeller shaft on the boat is currently underwater so I can't drill the hole to put the bolt through. I'll just wait a few hours. I think it's snack time now anyway. I'm feeling mighty hungry.