Yesterday was another EV build day at Tom's garage.
Swee brought his trike, with the intent to work on some sort of a chain tensioner. He has had issues with chain slap on his trike.
The general consensus was that his motor was just plain mounted a little too high. It sits in a steel cradle under the seat, and is welded to the frame. We thought the best thing to do was to cut the cradle, chop about 2 inches off the bottom, and weld it back on.
After removing the motor, and looking at the cradle, it would be a lot of work to remove the welds with an angle grinder. The plan is now to wait til next time on that one, so Rich would be back in town, and could bring over the plasma cutter.
Instead, Swee focused on getting the front differential out.
The front end of the trike is from an all-wheel-drive ATV. Therefore, it has a small differential going to driveshafts to both front wheels.
The differential is really caged-in the front of the trike. To get it our required basically removing both wheels entirely from the swing-arms.
The only trouble with that is the end of the drive-shaft going to each front wheel is an important part of what holds the wheel on!
We would need to remove both drive-shafts and the differential, cut off the end of each drive-shaft, and then re-install just the end of the shaft in the wheel hub!
Here, we chop the end off the shaft.
The end of the shaft was then put in the lathe to make nice and round and balanced, and then reinstalled in the wheel hub. (Sorry I didn't get photos of that)
Now, the extra differential is removed and will provide space for an accessory battery. A few more bolts still have to get tightened up to get the whole front-end back together.
We will work more on that next time, along with lowering the motor mount.