I suspected the last time I went to the charger, it stopped supplying power because I may have turned off the power strip. It was time to give it another go.

I moved the battery chargers into the back of the CitiCar. I zip tied wires going to the outlets, and made sure I could see them all face up. Everything is setup for a quick change between J1772 charging, and charging from a standard house outlet.

Teddy and I hopped into the CitiCar and took off for the charging station. Driving around with the new turn signal switch, things felt much simpler. Who would have imagined how much luxury a fully operational turn signal switch would add to a car?

The thing that got to me was that after all of the care I went through to align the steering wheel correctly yesterday, it still wasn’t aligned. I couldn’t wrap my hands at the 10 and 2 positions, and my mind kept wanting to level it off. The car pulls to the side when hitting the breaks, making the problem worse.

Just like the last time, we saw the red Tesla and parked next to it. I connected to the charging station and confirmed everything had power before we headed over to Checkers for some lunch.

After picking up our food, Teddy and I sat on the grass in the shade of a tree. It was a great day. Nice weather, light breeze, with sounds of people and nature in the background.

The CitiCar was still charging afterwards, which confirmed my guess as to why the charger stopped supplying power the last time. It wasn’t due to a low power draw – but rather, I bumped the power strip to the off position.

I proceeded to take Teddy for a little walk. When we headed back to the car, the Kill A Watt meter showed that we got 0.2 kWh in 47 minutes. That is almost a mile added to the car. I now have a baseline to improve charging speed.

We drove over to Lowe’s and picked up some stud fasteners as a possible solution to bolt our switches and the motor controller into the car.

When I got home, I made sure the car was driving in a strait direction. I took a look at the steering wheel. I found an easier way to remove the cap without any tools. Once I took off the wheel, I rotated a plastic ring on the switch to line up with the steering wheels bolt, and placed the wheel back onto the steering column in the correct position.

Speedometer

The speedometer that I installed in the CitiCar came with a button to switch between the trip and lifetime odometer. I hadn’t installed the button yet. Instead, I’ve been resetting the trip odometer by grounding the end of the external button wire with the edge of the cigarette lighter. It looks like I’m trying to hot-wire the car when I bend down to grab the wire and line it up.

I decided it was time to make life simpler on myself and install the button that came with it.

Now that the charger is no longer bolted inside the car, I can stick my head in the area and look back up at the dashboard from behind. I was able to confirm that there weren’t any wires on the bottom right of the speedometer. I drilled out a 15/32″ hole, fairly slowly. The aluminum dashboard panel in the CitiCar is fairly thick.

The tricky part now was to connect the button up. The metal tabs are small. The spade connectors that I have are too large. My goal was to solder some wires onto the switch and put spade terminals on those wires.

Not every goal is met. I’ve been out of my thin soldering wire for some time. The terminal melted off when I began to heat it up with the tip of my soldering iron. I looked at a few videos online and found that I should have threaded the wire through the hole first, then twist it tight, and proceed to heat up the wire instead.

I found the same exact 12mm waterproof momentary push button switch and ordered aa pack of 15 with five colors. I’ll be able to make 14 more mistakes before I order more.

For now, I plugged up the hole with the defunct button. I’ll continue to use the cigarette lighter to reset the trip odometer.