Progress!: My most previous (still unfinished, for those keeping score) EV took me 5 years to even figure out if the salvaged motor worked. It used a 250lb 11" AC motor out of a forklift, and I used a Prius Gen 2 inverter with a custom brain board to control it using the OpenInverter firmware. But I couldn't figure out how to make it work, got tired of pestering the community for free tech support on an open-source project, would put it down for a few months or a year, etc etc. Meanwhile, that particular board wasn't very popular, so almost no one ever used it, the people who developed it moved on, etc.
Well, my Bradley GTE uses (of course, it was 1980) a DC motor. In about 60 seconds I'd shorted a cable across an arbitrary armateur and series winding, slapped a car charger on the other two terminals, and confirmed the motor rolls. On only the second evening of playing with it, (the first was mostly vacuuming and wiping), I'd mounted the motor, jacked up the rear end, and got tires a-spining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hokOLWxdg Yeah, okay, it's cheating. It was a "factory" EV, sort of, not a conversion. And the Italian ZAPI speed controller is sitting on a shelf waiting for me to figure out. And it's not connected to the accelerator pedal. But, after years of dumping what seems like endless amounts of effort into projects to not see a result... boy was that satisfying to see some tires roll. I bought the car because I wanted it, but, the excuse of it being the shortest path to actually driving an EV was there, and, looks like it's going to be true. I think I'll even hook up an old 36v golf kart controller and 3 little 12v batteries just so I can take it up and down the back alley until the rest is "done". Also, I'll have to learn how to drive stick (sort of, maybe, minimally). I also heard of another GTE that was just rescued from a junkyard in North Carolina who's missing all the documentation, so I've started scanning all the documentation to share. I haven't worked on an EV project in a long time that didn't feel like a deathmarch of obligation and getting in over my head. My spirits are riding high. ... Oh, and I took out apparently 1000lbs of lead-acids from it. 16x 8v batteries. All my other EVs, finding weight and space for batteries was a concern. There's no way I'd be able to afford 1000lbs of modern lithiums, it's nice to have extra space and weight. https://i.imgur.com/WPb23qj.png _______________________________________________ Address messages to [email protected] No other addresses in TO and CC fields HELP: http://www.evdl.org/help/
