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Battery Racks - Designing
Several considerations were made as to where the batteries would go. At first, I planned on splitting them between the front and rear of the vehicle (under the hood and where the gas tank currently is). I had heard about the dumb-bell effect which can occur when you put a large amount of weight on both extreme ends of the vehicle. This can cause poor handling around corners. I wasn't terribly concerned about this, since my total pack will be 12 Exide Orbitals at 41 lbs. each = 492 lbs. Other factors played into the decision though.
I had also heard of problems when splitting the pack by some distance. Someone told of an incident where one battery was placed away from the rest of the pack. It consistently went dead first, and was completely shot well before the other batteries. Again, I wasn't overly concerned, since I would be splitting the pack in two fairly equal portions.
The clincher on how I would place my batteries ended up being the convenience of having all the batteries grouped together. The location that was chosen was the rear-seat area. I don't use the rear seat very often. It would allow the batteries to be placed about as low as possible in any location. Keeping the batteries low is another performance issue. (Note: Since the writing of this, the number of batteries was increased from 10 to 12. Two of the batteries will be located under the hood).
I recieved some good advice about choosing a location. Buy some sand bags, or something heavy, and place it in the position in question. Then go out for a test drive to see how it handles. I bought several bags of rock-salt, and threw them in the back seat area (with the seat cushion removed). The next day, I headed up a canyon road not far from school. I took it about as fast as I dared around the corners, and was surprised at the difference in the way it handled. It seemed to track really well, and sort of slingshot around the corners rather than bloat around them. With this piece of information in hand, the batteries being set low, the pack all together for convenience to avoid any of the "stray battery" effect, and no worries about a dumb-bell effect, my mind was set. The batteries would go in the rear-seat area. Oh, and with my experiment complete, I took the liberty of returning the rock salt to the store :)
Now that's not the whole story on how I came to the conclusion, but it hits all the important points. One that I should mention is whether the batteries would fit in the rear-seat area or not. I did quite a bit of measuring, and it *seemed* like they would fit. To be sure, I had to build some cardboard battery mock-ups. My son Camden helped me with this.
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