OK, finally back home from my EV Marathon weekend.
It started about noon on Friday, getting ready o go meet another EV builder and drive about three hours or so to south of West Chicago.
Long drive to get down there, but it was lots of fun and I got to see three electric pickup trucks, a grease car, a homemade Ford Escort conversion, and a Solectria Force (Metro EV!)
The Solectria was great. It had two mis-matched pairs of hub caps, but they matched on each side. The passenger side had standard hubs and the driver side had full moon caps. Since you could only see one side at a time, it actually looked pretty nice. I think I was one of the few people who noticed the hub caps.
I got back to Milwaukee about 1:30 AM. (My house is 40 mins to and hour west of there!) and ended up sleeping on somebody's couch.
The next morning, it was off to the Milwaukee Hybrid Group meeting. The main part of that meeting was a guy showing off and talking about his plug-in conversion Prius. That was the Prius that was converted to a plug-in at the recent Hybridfest in Madison, Wisconsin.
Also at the MiHG meeting I saw the guy who is building an electric motorcycle who I loaned my "Secrets of EL-Ninja" book to. He said he marked that copy all up and has already bought a NEW copy of the book to return to me.
After the meeting, I headed home, and then hopped on the electric motorcycle to scoot over to my aunt and uncle's house for my cousin's graduation party.
Right after getting there, I got a phone message back from Daox (Tim) saying that he could still come out and help me weld the Metro.
We ended up working until one in the morning on the car. It is now armor-plated and WAY stronger than when it was new. Now I just have to clean it up and paint it.
Slept for a few hours and then headed back into Milwaukee to meet up with a couple other EV builders who sort of have secret meetings to get together and work on electric cars.
We took a look at my motor again and hooked it up to transmission. There still was the bad noise, which you can hear in my YouTube video when I spin up the tranny.
The bad news is that the noise is from the transmission. We took the end cap off it to have a look.
After poking around in there we could tell there was a problem with a bearing. We were able to take some of the end parts off to get a better look.
In this photo, you can see at the base of the main shaft on the right, that the bearing is all slapped out.
I don't know enough about transmission to know where to go next. I think I need to talk to a transmission guy to find out if he can just replace this bearing. Otherwise does the whole thing need to be rebuilt? Do I just need to hunt down a tranny in a junkyard? I don't know. I need to find out.
After I was done at the EV built meet, I headed over to see Swee and help him with his electric trike project. (Look up "Swee's Bio-Hybrid Trike" in the Fossil Fuel Free Forum)
His controller isn't working right. We hooked up mine in place, but it didn't work either. I think there is something a little off in his wiring.
I will have to go back some other time to help him out some more.
Then I had to meet my wife over at a friend's house for dinner, drop the Sawzall back off at my Dad's house and head home, where I am now.
Shwew! Long EV Marathon weekend!