EV parts collecting has officially begun
 

We'll call this thread the interim thread before the actual build on a vehicle I may not even own yet - sort of a continuation of my http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...o-19830-2.html thread.

The reason for a new thread is I'm going to convert something to electric, just not necessarily my old Volvo. But I have officially started my EV parts collection. I am up to 7 free batteries, highlighted at the end of the thread linked above.

Today I changed my mind from converting a car to converting a motorcycle. Obviously my mind isn't made up (and it will more than likely change back and forth a million times before I actually go through with it), so I will continue scrounging for free battery cores at work that withstand my deadly carbon pile load tests.

THE [CURRENT] NEW PLAN [THAT WILL NO DOUBT CHANGE]:

-Find a sport bike with a blown engine for almost nothing
-60V/72V pack of free floodies
-Alltrax 7234/Mars ME0709 combination
-Parallel charge the pack with 12V off-board charger

That last one is interesting. I will use my 40/10/2A regular old charger at home, and the one at work when I am there. Today I came up with a cool way to do it without spending lots of money on a ton of contactors and relays/switches. I'll get to that later...if I actually go the motorcycle route, that is.

Question #1: how much current can a 4/0 anderson connecter handle continuous and peak?

Question #2: A cheap motor solution for car conversions is the forklift motor route. Do the same rules apply with motorcycles but with smaller motors, or do people rarely use cheap forklift motors in motorcycles? I guess at $485 for a new ME0709, it may be hardly worth the trouble scrounging for a motor.

Motor Brand: Mars is the EValbums search for Mars Motor so you can see what others have done, to me that motor seems like it's about as small as I would dare go with.
Forklifts tend to have a hand full of motors on them, some of the smaller pump motors might be a better fit for a motorcycle, my motorcycle is using a golf cart motor because they are $100 used from golf cart shops, but they have their own issues, like not having a drive shaft that extends out of the motor or a support bearing on the drive end of the motor, some of the fork lift motors have odd issues like that as well so make sure you buy something that you have seen in person, some of them have their way of connecting to the fork lift so the motor can be pulled and serviced more easily.
It's great that you are collecting parts already but things like batteries age over time and degrade if not taken care of, so make sure that you keep them charged up, full of water and I've had a number of people tell me that lead acid batteries do not like sitting on cold floors, so at least setting them up on a sheet of wood or foam is a good idea, I wire my stored batteries all together so they are one big 12v battery (6v in my case) that way I can use a single small trickle charger to keep them all topped off without boiling them.

The SB350 is rated for 350A continuous with the right conductor size.

-Adam

I agree. I think for my 45 mph requirement, it should suffice. Some guys get 60 mph with 72V.

Excellent. Then here is my potential charging schematic:
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...2VCharging.jpg

More batteries and connectors
 

Today I revived two more AGM batteries at work, so I have three in total. Not sure if I will be able to keep them or not, but here's hoping. All three had been discharged to the trucks's 10.5V cutoff and left that way.

All I have at work is a dumb charger. It has three settings: low, medium and high. All three seem to be constant amperage. I charged and load tested each battery individually to get an idea of their health. I have never charged AGMs before and I found it interesting how they acted. At first they wouldn't eat current. They sat at 14.0V and took about 8A, which I thought meant murdered batteries. After about 10 minutes, the voltage suddenly fell to 12.5V and the current went up to 15A, as if they suddenly woke up. I jacked the charger up to the high setting which meant 13.8V and 50A for about 2 hours. I monitored the temp with an IR gun and they only got to about 80F, well below the danger zone. As the voltage finally climbed to 14.5V, I lowered the charging speed until finally on low they were at 14.5V, drawing 5A. Again, I did this to each battery individually.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...30121449PM.jpg
I tortured them all on the carbon pile with 350A for 15 seconds and none sagged below 10V.

I also found a good solution for my "10-pin Charging Connector" in the drawing above, if I end up going that way. It actually has 12 pins in case I need more. Note the fancy Caterpillar yellow paint. It's bits from a Cat 15L engine harness.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/c0208783.jpg
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/54e56760.jpg
It even has mounting holes!

New donor car and more free EV bits
 

Good news! Yesterday I was offered a Mazda MX-3 (Precidia) 4-cyl manual for $400. Amazing what gets thrown at your way when you have enough people looking out for parts for you! "What are you using as a donor car? A Volvo? That's no good. I have just the car for you!" I immediately put the Volvo on Craigslist, and someone is coming to look at it tomorrow morning with about 3 more emailers in queue.

The MX-3 will probably need an emissions test but even if it fails I can insure it for 4 months with repair - just long enough to gather enough parts to convert it to electric. It's about 640 lbs lighter than the Volvo and about 1000 times as aerodynamic.

On another front, today I visited a local forklift dealership and talked to the service manager there. I told him where I work (we do some business with this forklift company) and what I am after - a motor about 8-11" in diameter and 100 lbs. He figures a 24 volt motor will be the ticket. Works for me. He didn't have any now, but the next time they scrap a forklift with one of these motors he will give me a call. All I have to do is remove the motor from it's current home and it's mine for free! WOO HOO!

Wow, you're finding some great deals! Good luck and I look forward to more updates.

My newest favorite thing in the world
 

I love when Craigslisters don't show up. "Yeah I'll be there at 10:30 tomorrow morning." Right. Then you try to phone them a few times and email them.

Why not just let me know that you're not interested anymore? Would that be so hard?

Oh well. I have another dude scheduled to look at the Volvo tomorrow morning. He is coming from far away, so the chances of a sale are high. If he shows up, that is.

That is why when you are buying stuff from craigslist you have bargaining power, after all you are there with cash! when selling stuff never take the ad down until it's sold, I always tell people that it's not the first person who calls who has dibs but the first person who shows up with cash in hand.

So true! Unless of course you have something in high demand. In my case, a running car with a valid AirCare. Speaking of which, dude #2 actually showed up this morning and bought it for my asking price, $550. So I made $150 on the car. This week I get the "new" car. It needs to be AirCared, so hopefully it passes.

Thoughts on higher voltage
 

The general consensus is that a regular old forklift motor can take 72V without [quickly] exploding. Is this because of the neutral brush timing? I wonder if you can feed it more V/speed if you advance the brush timing....

I don't think 12 batteries (series/parallel) will fit into an MX-3 without serious imagination. Six batteries probably won't give me my required range. The alternative is just going with as many as I can fit - whether 7, 8, 9, 10....whatever. But that means voltage will have to be higher than 72. I guess with a higher voltage system I can always limit V to the motor. :confused:

Controller Max Voltage Question
 

Question: Alltrax lists the max voltage of the 7245 controller as 90V. Assuming that open circuit fully charged voltage will be 12.8V per battery, this makes an "84V" string 89.6V, just under max. Is it possible to actually run 84V with this controller? Sure, with some surface charge it will be over 90V, but couldn't you just turn the electric heater (or any load) on for a minute to get rid of the surface charge?

Just asking.

A fully charged 12v battery is going to be closer to 13 or even 13.4 if it just came off the charger.
I would also opt for a higher amp controller then 450 amps if you are only running 72v then you end up with 32,000 watts that you can pull, I only say this because people complain about their EV being a bit sluggish or slow when their controller is to small, my EV is 1,400 pounds and has the Altrax 4865 in it, so even tho it's a 48v controller I can put 650 amps or 31,000 watts to the motor when needed and I've seen it happen, not for very long but for long enough that I was glad that I had a controller that could handle that many total watts.
As for running the motor at a higher voltage, pretty much everyone says it's fine to do, that over speeding the motor and over heating it are the main things you need to worry about and both of those are easy to prevent/control, for the over speeding of the motor just figure out how fast it's spinning in each gear, and for over heating, a small squirrel cage fan and a short piece of heater duct from the auto part store should force cool it, add an air filter in there and your motor will be really happy, if you want to keep your motor under a set voltage then figure out what voltage it takes to go the speed you want and don't go faster then that! you could have a 300v battery pack but if you only ever drive 45mph and it only takes 60v to drive that speed then the speed controller is limiting the voltage to the motor to only allow it to spin fast enough to go that speed, the advantage of that higher voltage battery pack at that point is that your line loss in all of your wiring and battery interconnects is less, so popular opinion is that the highest voltage battery pack that you can get away with tends to be the best option as long as the batteries are not getting so small that they can't handle the load.

Thanks, Ryland. I believe that's the second time you have advised to go bigger than the Alltrax. Advice taken. I guess its a "being cheap" thing. But the controller is something that I shouldn't be cheap with if I want to be happy with the final result.

I am interested in Paul & Sabrina's controller, but I have no electronics experience and my soldering usually looks like bird poo. Maybe it's my giant soldering gun. Maybe with some practice and a better iron I could do it. I do know how to follow instructions and figure stuff out (being a diesel engine tech by trade kind of makes that a necessity!) Like I said above, having even a 72-120V controller vastly opens my options for battery arrangement. Found another battery? Add it to the string and go faster!

As far as motor heat goes, I will probably find a place or make a holder to mount the ICE coolant temp sender somewhere in the motor at the commutator end. If I see the gauge move at all, I back off.

If Ben can fit 12 batteries in his Geo Metro I'm sure you can get 12 batteries in an MX3. It might take some cutting and welding, but you should be securing them down solid anyways which will more than likely require welding at the least.

For placing the batteries remember that the area where the gas tank is will be open for you to cut in to the floor of the car and drop a battery box down and out of the way, you also will get rid of the radiator, gas engine and a bunch of other stuff under the hood freeing up space up front, of course you need space for the motor and transmission but an electric motor takes up a lot less space then a gasoline engine does.
You might also look at Curtis controllers, they have been around for around 50 years and build some pretty solid speed controllers, because they have been around as long as they have and make speed controllers for all kinds of stuff it can make your head spin a little trying to pick one out and find the best price on it, but if you don't want to build your own then that is another option, otherwise there are some really high end, expensive speed controllers out there by NetGain and Zilla and a few other companies that are not coming to mind right now, just stay away from Kelly controllers unless you like stuff starting on fire.
If you do want to build your own speed controller a good quality electric soldering iron is key, I've used a soldering gun a bunch and never really cared for them, but a soldering iron with a good clean tip and some fine gauge silver bearing solder and you should pick it up quickly.

Thanks for the sound advice, guys. I have my eBay app set to notify me when certain auctions come up, "1221C" and "1231C" being two of them. I erased the one for "Alltrax 7245" for now.

I may be bidding on something later today. Muah ha ha ha ha ha...ahem. I DO have some Christmas money to spend.

I looked up specs for the MX-3. Here is a comparison between it and a Metro:

METRO MX-3
Wheelbase 93.1 96.3
Length 149.4 165.7
Width 62.6 66.7
Curb Weight 1808 2443
Cargo Volume 21.9 36.6

What a beast!!

One more question: is it possible to run two controllers in parallel? Like a 48V 600A controller (hooked up to 8 batteries) in parallel with a 72V 450 A controller (hooked up the 8 battery 48V string with an additional 2 batteries in series. Just wondering, that's all. I realize it wouldn't save money. But it would be....well..er..interesting to try.

A lot of larger motors have separate field windings so you have a total of 4 studs to hook your electrical cables up to the motor, one pair for the armature and one for the stater, in a series wound motor those windings get wired up in series, now as I understand it you could also power them up using separate controllers like you said, this is kind of how a SepEx motor works only it's all done in a single controller, SepEx motors, if I understand them correctly have a smaller gauge field winding so the part of the controller powering up that winding is lower power and thus cheaper to build in to this single controller, but back to your dual controller question, I think you could get away with two controllers controlling the two parts of the motor and I think it should work, I don't think it would give you a huge advantage and as you said it would have the cost of two controllers, altho they would be smaller controllers, it's not something I would bother trying unless I happen to have two controllers laying around... someday I might be at that point in life.
Check the [EV Tradin post] - Advertisement categories too, I bought my Altrax for my motorcycle on there, I did choose an Altrax for that because it's a much smaller vehicle then a car, I also wanted my motorcycle to be golf cart based, at least in the first incarnation, so that I would know what off the shelf golf cart parts could do, but I was able to get that controller for less then what they sell for on Ebay and I know that from time to time other speed controllers show up, you might also check to see if there are any local EV clubs in your area, a friend of mine is putting together a Nissan 300ZX that he bought from an EV club member and is using a motor and controller that he bought from another EV club member from a project that they gave up on, all brand new parts going in to a car that was an unfinished project as well.

Thinking too much
 

Thanks. You had me thinking about this all evening, while I was at work, and that's bad.

As I see it, two cheaper controllers would make a series wound motor perform like a motor being fed twice the voltage. Let's use 72V and 450A as an example with the motor at the perfect rpm to draw 32.4KW of energy (ignoring battery voltage sag). Two resistors in series, the armature windings and field windings, will have a 36V voltage drop across each of them. This, of course, assumes that they both have the same resistance (which I doubt they do). If they do, the same power and rpm can theoretically be achieved by using two 36V, 450 controllers, one powering the armature and the other powering the field.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...Controller.jpg
Thus, if you have a 36V battery pack and two 36V controllers, could you not get the same performance (speed) as with a 72V pack and one controller? If yes, then BAM!...I just punched a high voltage pack in the face!

I just need to know whether the armature has the same resistance as the field. If nobody knows the answer to this, it would be ridiculously easy to figure out. Somebody go for a drive with your EV and a voltmeter. Measure the voltage drop across the armature vs the voltage drop across the field. Who wants to do this for me?

Lots of stuff
 

I picked up the MX-3 today. I took it through AirCare and it passed with flying colors. It seems kind of pointless, as I plan to rip out the ICE in a few months anyway. Oh well...The AirCare is good for two years so I won't have to worry about it for a while. I asked one of the guys there about EV conversions and with a blank look on his face he said something about calling ICBC (our provincial government run & owned car insurance/monopoly) to straighten it out. I don't have to worry about that for two years at least.

The car actually runs really well. 280,000 km on the odometer. I spend much of the evening fixing burned out exterior lights. It took 2 new headlights (both low beams/daytime running lights didn't work), 4-1157 bulbs, a small clearance lamp bulb and some sanding on some very rusty bulb sockets. It has been sitting in a grass field for a while. Maybe light bulbs don't like grass fields. I am kind of looking forward to testing out my hypermiling skills because this is the first manual transmissioned car I have owned since learning about this new-fangled thing known as hypermiling.

I also removed the driver's side front wheel and rear wheel and drum to check things out. Looks like the brakes were done recently. That's good news.

Here's some pictures:
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/be2ef37a.jpg
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/88dbfdc8.jpg
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/e78df4f4.jpg
Yes, that is in fact paint falling off the hood and zip ties holding the front bumper on. It is a $400 car, after all!

It turns out there is WAY more room behind the back seat than I ever would have imagined. Way more than a civic hatchback. Even way more than my wife's Toyota Matrix. Good news for battery storage!

I ordered one of these today:
http://www.amazon.com/Schumacher-SC-...6361551&sr=8-5
I don't have a proper charger to maintain all these batteries I am collecting. I am tentatively planning to eventually buy few more of these for my on board chargers, so I will test this one out before I do.

I think your decision to go for something more than a 7245 is a good idea. I have a 7245, and at 1300 pounds of vehicle weight it is fun, but with anything heavier it would probably be sluggish.

With lead acid batteries, you're only going to be able to pull about 500 to 600 amps out of a single series string before voltage sag gets too great.

The Curtis 1221C is a 120v 400a controller, but a few people I've known complain that they tend to cut back to a much lower amperage setting (300 amps or so) after a few seconds. At 300 amps, a 120v pack is putting out about the same power as a 72v pack at 500 amps. The Alltrax 7245 is only rated for 450 amps, but my Alltrax reports well over 500 amps, and doesn't really ever heat up or have a cut back problem.

The 1231C is a 500 amp, 144v controller. It will also tend to cut back to 350 to 400 amps after it heats up, but at 144v you have more to begin with.

TomEV, what you say all makes sense. Do you think two controllers like I diagrammed above (post #19) would work? I just need to know whether the field windings have the same resistance as the armature windings. I need a current EVer to do the simple voltmeter test I mentioned in that post. If I choose to go with commercial controllers, it would save a pile of money. Two used Alltrax 48V 500A controllers for a total of $500 vs one Curtis higher voltage controller for $800 or more. These are just numbers....I really have no idea.

Anybody want to donate a controller? HA!

How about a picture of my current battery stash....
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/b312e6c1.jpg

I asked the local EV club here your question about using two controllers. The replies were that you probably can do it, but it will not work well and certainly won't be as efficient. Apparently the resistance of each coil is not going to be the same, and you would want some way to try and sync them up which would be a lot of extra hassle. The PWM timing may also mess with the efficiency.

Not sure if this answers your question, but I just tested the spare 6.7" GE 3.5 HP series motor I have. Here are the results:

Field resistance: .22 ohms
Armature resistance: .34 ohms (varies as the armature is turned, but generally settles in to around .34 when not moving)

Using a 12v power source from a portable jumper battery pack (12v, 19aH gel battery) the motor turns about 3,000 RPM unloaded when configured in series. (power in at A1, A2 and S2 jumpered, power out at S1 - this motor 'normal' rotation is reverse from most other motors).

Using this battery, the voltage across the armature posts (A1, A2) is 11.31 volts. Voltage across the field is .191 volts. Running voltage from the battery + and - is 11.47 volts. Amperage was not measured, but probably about 40 amps.

In simulating two controllers (one battery to the field, another to the armature) the motor would not self-start, and the brushes made complaining noises and got hot.

Starting the motor in series mode up to about 3,000 RPM, I quickly reconfigured the power as the motor coasted down, with one 12v battery powering the field, and another powering the armature. This time, the motor accelerated to much faster than 4,000 RPM (estimate), probably because the field battery happened to be weaker than the armature battery (quasi field weakening).

Based on these observations, I believe the two controller setup will not start the motor from a dead stop, but could be useful to reduce back EMF in order to make a fully loaded motor run faster at relatively high RPM. It would be complicated to make a second controller weaken the field enough to control the motor RPM and not induce too much current across the armature. Probably much easier to just make up a simple weakening resistor that is switched in and out as needed.

Additional complications may be synchronizing the timing pulses of the two controllers, although at 20 kHz (artificial DC to a motor) it may not make a difference.

WOW...Thanks! Now we know. It's totally weird that most of the voltage drop was across the armature, but I suspected something weird like that would occur. I guess it's the product of the back EMF, especially considering that you did those checks at max RPM when back EMF basically equals voltage going in.

As far as PMW pulses go, are those not mostly absorbed by the ridiculously large capacitors in the controller anyway? I guess that's neither here nor there anymore. If I can't find a cheap higher voltage controller in the next few months I will probably look at buying the Open Revolt kit.

Put it this way: if two controllers on a split motor was the magical answer, everyone would be doing it!

Two Motors in Question
 

I know I may get a free forklift motor if my local forklift company gets a unit in that they are going to scrap. But I have contacted a local guy here who has an ad on the VEVA website with some parts. He has two motors that interest me, both $350 CDN each.

One is a Prestolite. The tag says MVB 4001, but etched into the case is MVD 4001. It weighs 57 lbs, according the scale in one picture he sent me.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/4953c0db.jpg
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/533696a7.jpg
The other motor is an Advanced A00-4009. According to EV parts sites, they are 50 lbs.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/14440538.jpg
Specs here:
Motor AMD 6.7" #A00-4009 36-72VDC 6HP Single Shaft

These are the sort of motors I was expecting to use, even though I know they are both tiny for a 2400 lb car. I am leaning towards the Advanced motor because it is used all the time in EV applications. With some forced cooling and short range (not running it long enough to heat up anyway), would it survive? Does anyone have experience with the Prestolite in abusing applications? Keep in mind that BUDGET is first on my requirements list.

The Advanced DC motor is about the size that my 1,400 pound commuti-car uses and it seems like a perfect sized motor for a motorcycle, I would worry about burning it up in a heavier car.
I would aim for a 9" motor if you can get one, if that 6.7" motor was cheap or free then I would say go for it! but as it is I think it's undersized and even the Advanced DC K91-4003 motor that is about the same size but rated for a higher voltage so they give specs for those higher voltages puts out a peek of 29hp and a continues 10hp at 96v, so you would be working that motor really hard to get it to move a full sized car down the road.

I have an A00-4009 in my golf cart with 25" tires and direct drive. The rear end ratio is 12.5:1. The cart weighs about 1200-1300lbs and can really heat the motor. I dont see how this motor would be big enough for anything bigger then a citi car.

-Adam

Controller!
 

Ok, so I may have...I mean...I have...er...purchased a controller on eBay. I COULDN'T HELP IT! An Alltrax 7245. I know I know, too small. But it was such a good deal - $306 with free shipping, and it is apparently new. So, it will be my temporary controller so I can get a "feel" for the whole EV thing. I can always upgrade later and get what I paid for it if I sell it.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...57NIQ60_12.jpg
Needless to say, I am ridiculously excited. It is, after all, my very first conversion purchase, other than the 12V charger I ordered (that could be considered just another tool for the garage). So far it has been free battery collecting - very little commitment required. But now it's official: I am spending money on it.

Oh, and I am up to 9 batteries in the garage. I'd better stop collecting soon or the wife will notice. HA!

Chargers!
 

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/Chargers.jpg
A picture is worth a thousands words. In this case, 290.

Canadian Tire, 1/2 price for $30 + tax (12% sales tax here. Yes folks, that is correct....12%), so I got six of them. I brought my multimeter to the store to make sure they are isolated, checking for continuity between the input and output side: OL. At home I hooked two chargers up to a couple of batteries and checked for voltage differences between the positive of one battery and negative of the other battery, negative and positive, positive to positive and negative to negative (overkill just to make sure): OL. Then I just took a wire and did the same, looking for a spark: nope. All good news.

My reason for choosing individual chargers isn't because of cost, although these were pretty cheap (and I do have another Schumacher one coming from Amazon as well). I could have bought a used 72V or 84V charger for pretty cheap, after all. The reason is because I have a wildly mismatched selection of batteries (older floodies, newer floodies, AGM's, etc.), and charging them in series without doing damage would be very challenging, if possible at all.

So the chargers. 10/2A. Auto shut off. El-cheapo Chinese made. Some watching with my voltmeter shows that on "automatic conventional & low maintenance" mode, they charge until 15.0V and then shut off with a continuing trickle charge. When the voltage falls below about 12.9V they turn back on. On the "maintenance-free & deep-cycle" mode, shutoff is 15.4V and turn on is 13.0V. Now to choose which mode to use. I think the lower voltage one for the "dual-purpose" floodies and the higher voltage for the AGMs. Can a battery know-it-all please chime in here?

Contactor
 

I won an eBay auction today for an SW-200 contactor with a 12V coil. A never used part from a stalled EV project. The specs I can find are 250A continuous, 360A peak and 1500A rupture. This one has the "blowouts", whatever that means. Sounds awesome, whatever it is. $42 including shipping. I'm pretty happy about that!

Here is my current battery "array" in the garage, all nine floodies hooked together in parallel on a 2A charge, sitting at 13.3V. The AGMs are not hooked up because they don't self discharge like floodies do.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/af973154.jpg

I finally have a line on a motor - the last major piece of the puzzle. I have been searching forklift companies for a while now, but the answer I usually get is that they don't keep motors because they are sent back to the manufacturers as cores. One local company had a bunch of motors but they were either much too big or much too small.

The motor in question is a Prestolite MVX-4003. I am told that it is the same motor that Jet Electrica used in the early 80's in Ford Escort conversions. 18 HP continuous and about 100 lbs. 7-1/2" diameter and quite long. It should do just fine! I think I will buy it tomorrow.

It's being sold by a company somewhere on the east coast. Here is the picture I have:
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/7abb206b.jpg

The diameter is a bit on the small side, but the weight makes me think there is enough motor there to handle some good power. 18hp continuous is pretty decent too.

Are there going to be any problems with it being too long? I know that was almost an issue in Ben Nelson's ElectroMetro.

That's what I was thinking too. I was mostly going by weight in all my motor searching, which tends to confuse forklift guys a bit.

"What voltage do you want?"

"Um....that doesn't really matter - I want it to be around 100 lbs."

(Blank stare in return).

My favorite comment from one guy was, "it would be way better to go with an AC motor. Just buy a big inverter - it will be way cheaper."

"Um...yeah....no."

Yeah, I remember reading about the hammering that Ben had to do. Thanks for reminding me. I just went out with a tape measure and I have a good 19-1/2" from the bell housing to the opposite side of the engine bay. I didn't get a length measurement on this motor, but with a ruler on my computer screen and some quick calculation (knowing the diameter), it is just over 18-1/2" long from the output side of the case to the end of the drive gear thingy on the other side. With an inch to play with it should fit. SHOULD.

I do have a huge hammer, just in case.

UPDATE: I ordered the motor this morning from EV Corp. $388 + shipping. I can't wait to tinker with a real live motor!

More eBay purchases.

Aftermarket 12V vacuum pump that's meant for a Dodge or Ford diesel. The seller says it reaches a certain vacuum and then shuts off. I will have brakes after all! $65.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...VacuumPump.jpg
(6) 4.5-30V panel voltmeters for individual battery monitoring. Seeing as how I am using a mish-mash of old batteries, I want to be able to sort out the good ones from the bad ones. $29.16
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...eryMonitor.jpg
I will install them into a removable/diagnostic panel for battery diagnostics, using this connector that I mentioned earlier:
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/c0208783.jpg
0-100V panel voltmeter for monitoring system voltage. Most meters like this are 3-wire (+ 12V wire, - 12V wire and measuring wire) which is no good for my purpose. This one is a 4-wire meter (+ 12V wire, - 12V wire, measuring + and measuring -), which is better suited for a pack voltage meter. $6.29
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...ltageMeter.jpg
I also got a bag full of surplus/unneeded electrical bit from work yesterday: relays, switches, fuse holders and various connectors. FREE.
http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/...0/549ef03f.jpg

Motor Test
 

I finally went across the border to Blaine, WA to pick up the motor. That's where I send most things, because it is way cheaper to ship to a US address and bring it into Canada myself. I have a Nexus card, so it doesn't take long at all - maybe an hour in total, including the drive and including filling up with cheap American gas!

I got home and quickly hooked up the motor up to a battery. At 12V, it BARELY turns. At 24V, it spins at about 120 rpm. At 48V, it spins at maybe 1000 rpm, but that's just a guess. What the heck? That can't be right. The brushes are advanced to spin the correct direction, and reversing the direction yielded a much slower speed. Shouldn't this motor spin up like crazy on 12V and spin out of control and blow up on 48V with no load? To be honest, I am connecting the armature and field with a 10 gauge wire, but I would think this should be enough for no-load current testing, no? The wire wasn't getting warm or anything.

HELP!

EDIT: I just heard back from the guy I bought it from. Turns out....it's actually a SEP-EX motor! At least my lack of motor speed is justified. But it still sucks. Now I have a controller and motor not compatible with each other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVA6...1&feature=plcp

Vacuum Pump
 

Today I tested my $65 Chinese vacuum pump. Not so impressive. It does not turn itself off when it reaches a preset vacuum like the seller said. And it only pulls 13.5" HG of vacuum. Is that enough vacuum for the brakes? Am I going to have to purchase a vacuum switch so the pump automatically turns off? Maybe I will try to hook it up to the brake light switch so it turns on whenever the brakes are applied. I guess this is something I can start testing already.

Oh hate.

Motor Test - Take #2
 

Now that I know that I am dealing with a sepex motor, I gave it test #2 by hooking up the field to 12V and armature to 12V (parallel instead of series). VOILA - the motor spun right up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mT5wpFMpm0
Paul at EPC Corp is sending me a "field control module". Basically, it is a constant 12V supply with spike suppression that hooks up the to field to give it a constant voltage, so it will act like a series wound motor when I power the armature with my Alltrax controller (notice the massive spark in the video when I disconnect the field from my power supply - this module takes care of this so I don't fry stuff when I shut it off). Honestly, I am a bit skeptical, but he says it works. It won't have regen braking or make the motor reversible, but that's no problem. Maybe it will open doors in the future if I play around with field voltage on a separate rheostat of some sort.

In series motor, you reverse the motor by changing the field polarity compared to the armature. If you reverse polarity with your 12v battery to just the field (keep the armature the way you have it) it should run in reverse...

Yes. I did that to see how the brushes are timed. It spins the same speed either way, so I am assuming that the brushes are neutral.

What I meant was this "field control module" is a very simple device with no other purpose than supplying 12V and suppressing the spike when turned off. I am a bit skeptical that it will work well because if it was this easy to control a sepex motor with a PM/series controller, you would see it all over a Google search, but you don't.

I am also starting to think that my motor is too small. It just looks...well..small.