@Joe
The braided wire contains flux. You can buy braided wire without flux significantly cheaper.
The reason for modding the OEM controller is primarily for the FEED mode, but it did offer the identical OEM protection too. The OEM controller also contains a shutdown pin. An alternative is to have another power supply set for the lower voltage. It's harder to design a high current DC-DC variable voltage converter. The bad part about using the OEM controller is the size of 6 boards. I think individual motor controllers make more sense than one that can handle two motors. The starting current can be significantly larger too and single controllers are better able to protect a single motor. Industry always uses one controller per motor.
Wide open is what MAY have killed the pump. Because the Melexis IC is patented and only good for 18 V, this leaves me to highly suspect the operating voltage >18 V to be a problem. I've been considering calling Melexis. 22.5 V is the OEM voltage, so I would no go past that.
I wouldn't use a car battery charger. The pump controller will work fine by unsoldering two resistors. If there is a need to go variable, we can do that too.
Sometimes your email system can hiccup. Generally if you put the notification address for ETO as one of your contacts, the SPAM filter will always deliver the mail. You can accidentally unsubscribe too. Under "Thread tools", you can add the subscription. Occasionally a thread might be interesting to me, but I won't post, but I will subscribe to the thread.
The long black header thing unplugs into 3 separate pieces. One piece, a jumper, doesn't quite belong. You can use two pins or three pins of the male header and the jumper to "configure options". e.g. Say a center pin can be 0 or 1 for something to be enabled and a low and high voltage are at the ends. You can then place the jumper to enable a feature. Sometimes extra pins are used as storage of the jumper too.
Here is a application of the headers:
http://shieldlist.org/ Note the stacked structure of the PC cards. Those are long enough to allow fairly high components to be used on bottom boards.
The wire-wrap pin was just thrown in for no real apparent reason. Wire-wrapping uses square posts and the Wire Wrap wire that was enclosed. Stripping the wire will be difficult without the specialized stripper. A hand or motorized tool is used to WRAP the wire around the square post, so soldering is not necessary. I've seen entire commercial systems use that technique.
I really wanted to send you a push in terminal. Those, I do think you should use for breadboarding because it keeps the components separate from the traces. They pretty much require a $20 insertion tool and are available for 0.042 and 0.062 holes.
Your welcome for the package.
Hey, this isn't real work because there are no imposed deadlines.