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Update: 6/08/09: The motor and transmission are in there.  Still working on fabricating motor mounts, but the transmission is all mounted and the driveshaft reinstalled.

5/13/09: The motor adaptor came back.... and it fits this time.  Almost.  Just a little spacing issue with the transmission left, that can be solved with some spacers.  Pictures of the motor, flyweel, clutch, transmission assembly coming tomorrow.

3/23/09: The good news: I have the new improved motor design with better cooling.  The bad news: it's a different size than the older design.  Thunderstruck motors is modifying my motor adaptor free of charge to match the new motor.  Just have to ship it off to them.

3/22/09: Well........ first major snag.  The motor is NOT the same as an ADC 8" series motor.  The adaptor won't bolt up to it :(  Boooooooo.   The inner aligning circle is larger on this motor, as well as the bolt circle being larger in diameter.  Hmm...........

3/20/09: The motor adaptor finally arrived today.  Beefy looking assembly of machined aluminum.  Hopefully the flywheel will return on Monday and I can start bolting stuff together!

3/17/09: I've been working on the battery box in the back, put new tires on it, and a bit of shining up the paint and waxing it.  Still waiting for the critical motor to transmission adapter.  The motor and tranny have to go back in first, before I'll know exactly how much room I have in the engine compartment to begin placing other components like the controller, charger, auxilliary battery, etc.

2/25/09: The truck is currently de-ICE'd and I've ordered most of the major parts for it. Most of them have arrived.  It's at an artists coop workshop in Boulder, the Phoenix Asylum, so I can work on it out of the weather and such.  Assembly should start in March.  The goal is to have it operational (defined as being registered, insured, and driveable between the shop, the office at work, and the warehouse at work, all in various parts of Boulder) before you can buy a Chevy Volt.  Or a Mitsubishi iMiev that will be for sale by the end of this year (pictures of the iMiev).  In 2011, the electric Ford Focus will be available.  I'm betting I can beat them.  There's also the Chinese company BYD that's introducing an all electric, and a plug in hybrid, this year.  Hmm... I better get to work :)

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It's a banana yellow 1974 Ford Courier Pickup.  This truck was found in a chicken coop in Yakima, WA by a friend in the early 90's, with only 18,000 miles on it.   I always though it would be a good electric vehicle conversion -- lightweight (2700lbs curb weight), lots of weight capacity (1400lbs), no power steering or power brakes, and quite simple to work on.  Over the years, it was used as a second vehicle, but never that much, and only had 36,000 miles on it when the engine was pulled to make it an EV.

The original gas engine specifications:  74 Horsepower, 94 foot-lbs torque at 3500rpm, 1.8 liter four cylinder carbureated.  At the elevation up here (between 5,400 and 9,400 feet) it's quite a bit less than that.  4 speed manual transmission, rear wheel drive.
Ford Courier Collector  has lots more information on these trucks.  Including a 1974 sales brochure for this exact truck. They are actually Mazda trucks, built in Japan, and rebranded by Ford in the 70's before the Ford Ranger was introduced.

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The goal from the beginning was to have regenerative brakes on this conversion.  Most EV conversions use series DC motors, which are difficult to do regenerative braking with.  But, with the stock four wheel drum brakes on this truck, and all the hills I generally drive on, I didn't want to rely only on the mechanical brakes.  Plus.. with lots of hills, there is the opportunity to get energy back, going down them.  Initially I looked at a separately excited DC motor, and I bought a used one -- giant monster of a motor (13" diameter, and about 275lbs).  However, when I came down to it, this just seemed too large to fit into this little truck's engine compartment very easily.  The current plan is to use one of these AC drive systems from Thunderstruck Motors . It's a little small for this truck, especially going up hills, so some sort of liquid cooling system for it will probably be necessary.


The motor bolts up to the original flywheel, clutch, and 4 speed manual transmission.  Some people ask why... it's possible to do an electric car that has a motor hook directly to the differential (the factory Ford Ranger EV's in the late 90's) had this.   Two reasons.  First, keeping the original transmission allows a smaller motor and controller -- instead of having a larger motor that can start out in direct drive (4th gear), by gearing it down 4:1, the motor only has to provide on quarter the torque to start the truck moving.  Second, keeping the clutch allows shifting the transmission a little easier (it can shift without a clutch, but some transmissions are easier than others, and it can be shifted faster if there is a clutch).  And, it's a safety -- if for some reason the throttle sticks and the motor tries to run away, you can push in the clutch to stop the truck. An AC drive is much less likely to do this (they tend to fail off, but DC drives tend to fail full on, at least till a fuse blows), but it is a concern with DC drives.  It does add weight doing it this way, compared to direct drive.  However, some of that is regained by having a smaller lighter motor than direct drive would require.
Motor sitting in there, with the new motor mount being fabbed up

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The controller is a Curtiss AC-31 controller, matched to the motor.  Rated for 550 amps, and 108 volts max nominal system voltage.  This seems a little optimistic to me -- it's rated for 120 volts maximum voltage.  Which is about the fully charged voltage of a 96 volt nominal battery bank.  The resting voltage of a freshly charged 108 volt bank is around 117 volts... so that is technically okay, but under hard regeneration, on an already mostly charged bank, it could rise above that.

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I found a slightly used bank of Saft flooded NiCad batteries.  Similar to these.  16 modules, each being 6 volts 180AH.  These are a bit more expensive than lead acid golf-cart batteries would be (even the used bank was more than twice what golf-cart batteries would have cost).  But, they handler high currents more easily with less voltage swing, and handle cold temperatures much better.  They are also a little bit lighter (only about 10 to 20% though).   Eventually, I might use a Lithium battery bank -- half the weight or less.  However, for now, those are kind of expensive still.

Here's some pics of the battery bank area.  I loaded all 16 of them into the back (800lbs), and the rear suspension went down 1.75" While this is certainly within the specs (1400lbs total weight capacity is the rating) is it a little much for my taste -- looks visibly lower in the rear than in the front.  (but, it's going to get a motor, transmission, charger, controller, etc, all up front, which will lower that a bit.  The rearmost three batteries will be put in the engine compartment instead. 

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I am trying out one of Ryan's new chargers from EV Source.  It can accept either 120V, 208V, or 240V input, and can charge at up to 3kW on the higher voltages.

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Hmmm... yeah.  Have to figure this out at some point, eh?

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The plan is to an a small on demand electric water such as this one, running directly from the 96 volt battery bank.  This should provide about xxxxxkW of heat at 96 volts (compared to 120 volts that it was designed to operate on).  The relay must be replaced with a DC rated one, or it would quickly fuse.

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Currently there are two monitors planned.  A battery monitor from Casa Del Gato Systems that monitors the voltage of 8 sub-banks of batteries, and an E-vision monitor from Metric Mind to give total battery capacity data, amperage, etc....  More info on these as they are installed.

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New tires: because the old ones on it were 19 years old and though they looked fine and had less than 20k miles on them, I thought maybe having some newer rubber might be safer.  They were not specially selected for being an EV tire (actually, I could have done a bit better for rolling resistance, but I selected them based more on what I'll tend to do with the truck.  I know that I'll be driving on unmaintained dirt roads, often with patches of snow in the spring and fall... because I end up doing that with every other vehicle I own, and lots of the local errands around my house are on roads that most people might not call roads :)So I selected Hankook Zovac HP W409 snow tires (not studded) for the rear wheels, and Uniroyal TigerPaw AWP II  tires for the front.  Both of them are 185/75/R14 size, rated for 1290lbs at 44psi.  I've found that running these at 44psi actually gives fairly good rolling resistance, though a little harsher ride than at 32psi.

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I already have 3.3kW of solar on my house, which is quite a bit more than the house needs, however, charging the truck will take quite a bit more energy, so I'm looking at adding another 2kW or so of solar.   These both operate in in a grid-connected system, so they feed the grid during the daytime, and at nighttime, I draw power from the grid.

In addition, I am putting a very small array on the truck -- 240 watts.  This will charge the main battery bank through two voltage boosting charge controllers from Solar Converters.  They won't do much, but will probably add maybe a mile or two a day to the range.

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Contact info:

zyewdall at gmail