Slowly becoming a car again

(05/02/2026)

I’ve had some pockets of time in the last month to get a few things going. First and foremost I was able to sandblast the motor and all of the brackets and then I decided to paint everything flat black. Most of this stuff you won’t even see, but the motor especially looks so much better.

I also got the new black headlight buckets installed and Holley Retrobright LED headlights. I cleaned up the Bosch fog/driving lamps and started replacing the halogen lamp with LED and rewiring those. I should have installation pictures of that in the next update.

Now an issue. I started installing a high voltage wiring block I picked up from Inductive Autoworks (https://inductiveauto.com/product/nissan-leaf-em57-inverter-dc-wiring-kit/) and I noticed that the plastic that holds the two copper terminals was sitting proud of the inverter top.

Apparently when the salvage yard removed the PDU from the top of the inverter stack, they must have assumed the HV side was maybe a plug? It’s not. It’s bolted in, and they used so much force that the entire glass fiber block was shattered.

I was able to straighten out the bent buss bars and made a quick 3D CAD model to replace what was broken. My version is a simplified setup compared to factory.

I made a number of trials in PLA to get the fit just right:

And then finally I made the end result in ASA, applied a tiny amount of blue Loctite to the bolts and called it a day. Next update I will have the motor stack put back together and the high voltage cables installed.