[bennelson]

Yeah! Finally a little progress on the Electro-Metro.

I went over this afternoon to meet a machinist, Jim.

In his "garage" (about the same size as my house!) he has lots of fun drills, lathes, etc, a full-blown car lift, and a hot-rodded 57 Chevy that he did EVERYTHING on it from scratch!

I brought the Metro transmission along with all three forklift motors to show and the one Lovejoy coupler I had.

He said that the mounting plate should be no problem, I just need to do some measuring.

It's a good thing I have splined items I can attach lovejoy couplers to. Apparently cutting splines is a very tricky thing to do, and it requires lots of wacky measurements.

I have the original clutch disc, so we can use the spline out of that. On the big forklift motor, it was double-ended with a drum brake on the back end. We are going to pull out the little splined hub from the brake and use that to attach to the lovejoy on the main end of the driveshaft.

Jim told me to make a template for the plate with some tagboard and knock-down the brake to get just the little splined bit out of the center. Then he can weld up the bits and make a plate from the template.

Real nice guy. Heck of a hotrod he's got. He also said that he knows an Exide dealer and can get some really good deals on batteries every once in a while.

I am also working on cleaning out my garage. I got $60 for a punching bag and crappy non-street-legal trailer I wasn't using. I just got $250 for a 50cc scooter I didn't have the title for, and thus couldn't ride anyways (sold back to the original owner - long story, don't ask...)

Anyways, that gives me over $300 to put towards the electric car fund that should cover either a controller or machining services.