u/Carlos_Spicy_Weiner6

The progress on the 2007's traction battery wasn't going as fast as I wanted. So I threw more money at another charger/discharger to double team the batter!

After a couple of months of weird issues with my second gen, I finally got the red triangle. So for the past hour and a half I've been digging the hybrid battery out and getting ready to start charging and discharging the cells and figuring out what needs to be replaced.

When I opened it up there's blue painters tape and what looks to be voltages written down on all but four cells telling me that somebody has worked on this before which is not surprising.

I am seeing corrosion on some of the bus bars so we will hand polish those and maybe hit them with some of that of anti-corrosive spray like people put on battery terminals when it goes back together.

Dr. Prius told me cells 123 and 4 are where I should start but since I've gotten this far we're going to test them all.

I also bought a box of sound deadening material so we're going to put that all over the trunk space hoping to lower some of the road noise.

After a year of sitting with a spin rod bearing the #PandaRD1 lives once more and moves under her own power!

The stock b20z spun a rod bearing after 319k. It took about 6 months to find a replacement engine that wasn't sketchy AF and took an 8 hour round trip to get!

The next 6 months were spent slowly disassembling the car. We took our time and put everything in super big ziploc bags and labeled everything before putting it into one of those black Costco plastic tubs.

Things we didnt expect we were going to need were lower ball joints (and the kit to do them), a new flywheel and clutch (I forget the flywheel name but it's American made and an exedy stock replacement clutch kit), and the torque mounts on the body.

I ended up finding some aluminum toque mounts with black poly inserts for $20 on the zon to get me up and going and while they work, they absolutely suck! Every vibration from the engine is sent into the body and I swear amplified! I will be hunting down some stock ones to swap these out with!

I have already had two people ask me if I would be willing to sell it once it's running. 🤔🤣 There are a bunch of 1st gens here in Oregon but the 5sp AWD model is some what of an oddity.

One thing that was rather annoying, when attempting to bleed the clutch. I could not get the damn thing to move fluid at all even with my vacuum bleeder. I ended up pulling out the master cylinder completely disassembling it and cleaning everything look good so I put it back together. I then unhooked all of the lines and blew them out with air seeing if there was any obstructions or if I somehow pinched one and everything was good. When I got to the slave cylinder and took it apart it was full of what looked like mud and super black brake fluid. I disassembled it and when cleaning I found that there was a bunch of chunks of crap in it. It wasn't seal material so I'm not quite sure what exactly it was but it was so caked in there that it actually blocked the bleeder hole!

Engine is in!

New lower ball joints next, fluids after that, and then we see how well the battery has held up while she sat 🤔

We just got rid of the smoke people, we don't want more.

And no I didn't take the picture, hands were on the wheel and shifter. My passenger got yelled at for putting their phone in front of my face

Another productive day with the kid and wifey getting the engine/tranny into the car! During disassembly we used extra large zip lock bags to put all the parts and associated nuts/bolts into them with labels to help during the reassembly process. It took a tad extra time then but I feel it's saving us a load of time now!

Slowly progressing on getting the new to me b20b in my 2000 5sp AWD.

The stock b20z started sounding like two robots fucking so out it came and I found a a b20b out of an automatic to replace it with.

Today I made the boy help me remove the flex plate, install the flywheel/clutch, transmission, and a hand full of brackets so it's ready to drop in!

I got a good 7 years out of the stock battery but it's definitely done at that point 🤔😜

How did I get so long of a life out of it you might ask? I kept it on a battery maintainer when not riding! I have a "Viking" brand maintainer on all my vehicles and the Grom is no exception. I pick them up at harbor freight and so far all have been good out of the box (some of the reviews people have gotten bad ones and then got pissed off when they returned them and got charges a restocking fee instead of asking for a replacement)

I guess it's time to head down to cycle gear and pick up a replacement for $25!

Instead of saying "fuck around and find out" try this one