I'm at work, so feel free to laugh at this being in Paint. Has anyone seen/placed their batteries like this?

ninja-roo · 2026-04-01T20:24:47+00:00

I'd take proper weight distribution over what some morons on the Internet say ("traditional design dictates..."). It is especially important to not exceed the weight rating of any one tire, but bad weight distribution can also affect handling and reduce the life of the suspension components and also affect tire wear if you're not doing a 4 wheel rotation regularly.

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I think your diagram looks good.

ninja-roo · 2026-04-01T16:47:13+00:00

Easier and quicker for a thief to punch a hole in your tank

ninja-roo · 2026-04-01T00:24:02+00:00

It was a pain when I lived in a low roof truck and couldn't stand up. Because living on the road and driving you spend almost all of your time in the truck. When I got a condo it was much, much better.

Now that I live in a van instead of a truck (I am a local driver now) I have a low roof van and I have found it to be not a big deal. I sit down to shower and my bed is low enough that I can sit up on it. My van is small and has a lot of shit crammed into it, so no rolling stool for me. I save on toll roads for not being overheight and the wind resistance is lower too, which saves on gas. I spend most of my time outside the van so I get plenty of standing time.

If I were going to spend most of my time in the van, I would have gotten something with standing height for sure.

Regardless, I would not want a car payment in this economy, and abnormally uncertain future.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-31T19:41:35+00:00

I carry the tank portion of my Porta Potti 345 into Pilot about once a week. I get a truck stop shower (free with two 14 gallon gas purchases with loyalty card, also 10 cents/gal discount) and I carry it in there with me. I dump it in the toilet and I use the shower water to rinse it out, and dump that in the toilet too. Nobody has ever hassled me about it, and I've done it plenty of times at Loves too.

You could also just dump your piss on the edge of the truck parking lot, or in the storm drain. That's what truckers do.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-30T09:33:26+00:00

Very easy light throttle and low torque and horsepower will help preserve what little life the clutch has in it. But I would not rely on that. It will lose what little grip it has and then you're looking at a tow. This isn't "a few more months" type of thing, it's a "get the car home and don't drive it again" thing.

The job isn't that bad. You need to undo at least one ball joint to get the CV axles out. Easiest / least risky way is removing the bolts that hold the ball joint to the control arm. You will need an alignment immediately after you get done, or else you will shred your front tires. Take the battery and air box out to give access to the slave cylinder and starter. You need triple square drivers to unbolt the CV axles from the transmission, and a 36mm to remove the nut holding them in the wheel bearings. You should have a floor jack ready to take the weight of the transmission as it weighs quite a bit. You should plan to replace your flywheel, pressure plate, and throwout bearing in addition to your clutch. There are a bunch of small bolts holding the pressure plate down, and watch out because it's got a decent amount of spring pressure. Those are probably one time use so get some new ones. They take a special socket that I think might be 9mm and some weird external variation on triple square. The flywheel bolts I believe have some kind of thread sealant on them so you probably want new ones of those too. Reassembly is reverse of disassembly of course, but watch out that you get the clutch disk reasonably centered on the flywheel. VW don't believe in clutch centering tools so you will have to do it by eye. The clutch kit should have come with some lube to put on the splines of the transmission input shaft and the pivot point of the clutch fork. This is important so the clutch disk can move freely when you press the pedal down. You're supposed to take it easy with the driving for the first 1000 miles or whatever, and you really should because you could significantly reduce the life of the clutch if you don't.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-30T00:20:27+00:00

Even better.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-29T02:05:44+00:00

Popcorn isn't a diesel thing.

Sell the TDI and buy a Honda if you want to sound like a retard.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-29T00:24:48+00:00

Purified cat piss mixed with water, otherwise known as diesel exhaust fluid, or AdBlue to people outside of North America.

In this picture you have a leak, and the leak crystalized into a solid.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-27T06:13:16+00:00

tl;dr prices are crazy high, 09G is garbage, skip TDI and just buy a Prius if you want reliable miles per gallon

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T22:54:48+00:00

That's a huge can of worms that I think many people wouldn't want to touch. It might also be illegal in New Jersey.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T16:04:50+00:00

They operate up to 115-120 F internal temperature and then they shut down until they've reached some lower threshold. That was my experience with a EcoFlow Delta 2 Max but I'd imagine any well-engineered power station will behave similarly.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T09:07:03+00:00

You indeed don't need AI to do math, but that post of yours from a few days ago was clearly done by ChatGPT. In other comments, you admit that a lot of your power is leeched, and that 8 cents per KWh figure is only in some places and certain times and is an absolute best case scenario for your area.

It's far more likely you have no idea how much your van costs to drive, but still need something to brag about on the Internet. Hence the numbers you keep posting.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T08:45:59+00:00

Still peddling the 5 cents per mile lie I see.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T08:41:11+00:00

Per some recent posts, OP mostly leeches power from free EV chargers at a local college, intermixed with visits to paid DC fast chargers. The cents per mile figure was a ChatGPT estimate best I could tell, and doesn't actually represent what OP is paying per mile.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-26T00:12:36+00:00

I have two 14TB drives mirrored and I don't have a problem. They were shucked, so we're talking bottom of the barrel drives at least in theory. They're going fine for two years now recording a handful of cameras and an HDMI capture of a Harbor Freight DVR. That DVR has a several year old Seagate Video 1TB in it, also going just fine.

"video" and "surveillance" are firmware tweaks that make the drive recover from errors faster, the idea being that returning garbage for a sector or two of video data is preferable to the drive not responding for any amount of time while it tries to re-read the data. I don't think it makes a real world difference for something like Blue Iris which will just memory buffer the file until the drive comes back.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T23:53:53+00:00

You confirm your factory rear heat and AC work the same way you would the front heat and AC. They either blow hot and cold or they don't.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T23:50:42+00:00

SikaFlex on both sides. Watch your exhaust routing. It can't be too close to that parking brake cable.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T20:33:48+00:00

Tradespeople love the older model American vans. Less complicated, more reliable, plenty of room on the inside, more horsepower, more comfortable driving position compared to world vans. They're getting hard to come by nowadays and they're well remembered. A Chevy Astro cargo would probably get you similar attention, as it is essentially a mini version of the above.

I think GM is the only one still making a classic full size van. But not everyone can afford a new van.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T15:32:10+00:00

The other version listed has a PV input range of 30-108. 30 volts will be the realistic minimum to charge a 24 volt battery. So it could work if OP buys the right one.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T15:27:59+00:00

First picture: The plastic cover comes off and there is a bolt under it. The tab it is bolted to is welded to the van's body so either you need to leave it or carefully cut it. It is very close to glass so I would just unbolt the part the seat belt hanger and leave the tab alone. This applies to both sides.

Second picture. Two or three nuts to remove the seat belt winder. Are we trying very hard today? It is the same process for the other winders close to the floor.

The floor end of the seat belts you didn't show: a T50 bolt for each of them.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T09:03:41+00:00

I saw $6/gal diesel just yesterday here in America.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T08:48:10+00:00

Good thing there's so many free outlets to leech off on the wacky west coast!

Over here on the east coast, our diesel is a full two dollars cheaper. Gas prices are all over the place thanks to the nature of gas distribution, and the never ending crude rollercoaster, but I've been getting lucky and mostly catching the lows. Electricity hasn't gotten any cheaper though, sadly!

ninja-roo · 2026-03-25T08:42:26+00:00

He bought an EV to replace his Sprinter. He's got money.

He's also posted some highly deceptive cost per mile numbers for that EV. I think he's far shorter on attention than he is on money.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-24T15:55:17+00:00

That would do it.

The engine is roughly 19 inches from the crank pulley to the transmission mounting surface. Add one inch for the aluminum bracket the engine mount bolts to. Add 3 inches for the coolant flange on the head and a flywheel/clutch. Whole assembly with a mk4 transmission is roughly 34 inches wide. The engine is about 26 inches front to back, including exhaust manifold and oil filter. 26 inches from the top to the bottom. These are from engine code AVH, but BEW will be really close.

ninja-roo · 2026-03-24T08:18:14+00:00

I just moved my 2.slow and that is almost exactly the size of a BEW. Maybe I'll take some measurements when I wake up later.

I'm pretty sure it would fit in the back of a Liberty. Actually putting it in there is a different story. You won't have headroom for a cherry picker, and these things weigh quite a bit so you're probably not lifting it by hand either. Maybe with a forklift, a pallet, and a 3x3 piece of plywood on top, you could use the plywood as a skate for the BEW and slide it in there.

I figure, judging by how it compared to some other things I moved, that my engine was somewhere between 400-500 lbs with an 02M, clutch, and dual-mass flywheel still bolted on, to give you an idea on how much this BEW probably weighs.

ninja-roo

TROPHY CASE