Front 6-Battery Box Construction

There are two schools of thought on how to secure batteries in home-brew electric cars. In the first school are those who strap the batteries in using tie-downs to a base-plate. In the second school are those who build a box that contains (N-1) batteries and gravity holds them steady in the X-Y plane during braking and steering. I opted for the second school and chose to try my hand at a somewhat universally useful skill; riveting tin to aluminum corner stock. I purchased a Campbell-Hausfeld rivet gun that operates at 90-psi and connected it to my rather large DeWalt air compressor, then cranked it up to 100-psi, which seems to sheer off the pop-rivet mandrel in one handle compression. About 30% of the time two or more trigger squeezes are needed to snap off the mandrel. Sufficent to say, pop riveting a frame piece to a sheet of tin sure beats welding and gives an engineering warm fuzzy that is up there with the application of tie-wraps and heat-shrink. Step 1) was to prep the front engine compartment. I hired the little one to paint the interior of the front engine compartment completely white. Over the course of the week I aquired some sticks of aluminum corner stock and roofing tin (non-galvanized) and cut out four sticks of aluminum for the base, then drilled corner holes in the tin and riveted them. Once the four corners were rivited, I went every 3-4" and popped in a rivet for strength. With a 22" x 25" base (6-Large Optimas), it was fairly easy to bend up the edges, overlap the seams, then rivet the remainder of the battery box. The result was very strong and light and impervious to vibration and/or corrosion. Once more hardware is installed, I will fix the battery box solidly to the chassis.