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Forum Index : EV's : an EV from the ashes.. or the tip
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oztules Guru  Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Well the chainsaw mill has driven a variety of loads lately in order for me to learn what it can do, and how it behaves. It has driven 12v, 24v, 30v, 36v, 42v, 48v,....80v battery loads, and it behaves very differently on all the different loads. It has directly driven resistive loads (with simple switching), and a hot water service with a 240v element using a 2.5kw home brew square wave inverter I have fashioned a 12v coffee heater into a hot water element and driven that from a 275A 1204 curtis controller, and 4ohm resistive coils (microwave primaries) in a "bucket" of water. (and saw over 5KW) I had also made a grid tie "inverter"from a DC motor and ac induction motor....single and three phase. (three phase works better). I was running out of things to play with.... and then at the tip, I saw a very very sad Suzuki swift. It had been cut down and used as a shooters vehicle, with no bonnet, no rear bodywork, crushed roof, no drivers door, smashed windows and windscreen, and totalled motor.... this was just the thing...... an Electric Vehicle to play with (soon to be). So it was out with what was left of the motor, find a tyre for the front and then a quick conversion. It looks like this I'm afraid.... 
I quickly made up an adapter plate, and made a coupling out of the two sprockets with dual chains to connect them face to face. This would be the universal coupling, and bolted it into the gearbox housing. The plate was cut from the hull of an old ship. (waste not want not). I grabbed the 4kw motor I had used for the grid tie experiment... note the chain adapter/coupling: 
and plonked it in like so. 
The electronics were wired into the car... perhaps wired is too strong a word, thrown into the car describes it better, and became housed in the glovebox. The 1204 controller I blew up when testing the 12v water heater,( a poor battery connection let the voltage rise to high for a split second, and blew some of the fets and other bit ans pieces.... not like Trevs though,) but with judicious use of hot glue, it is back together again. The careful wiring job looks like this: 
The batteries were tossed in behind the seat, wired up and we have an EV (forgive me Trev for even using the same name). Here we see the batteries and the input line from the mill to charge them up. The seat was missing before I dragged it home. The roof was caved in but by carefully panel beating it (sat in the seat and pushed it back up), it will keep the sun off anyway. 
All that remains is a quick fill of power and were away. 
The mill does fairly poorly charging at 36v, so 20 amps is about all it will get up to, but at that rate it fills up pretty quickly. Soon it was up to 42v,and it was time to go for a howl. I was scooting along at about 20km/h flat out. The speedo still works, as does the odometer. She has about 4electric Km clocked up so far. I have perhaps 20km of tracks through the forest on my place to play with, so there's plenty of room to play with this thing. So now I have free car, free batteries, 500 dollar mill, and need no petrol to run around the farm now. So that was the days work today. I pulled the motor out a few days ago. Still having fun with this thing ........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
What a fun project. Its a wind powered car! Good reading Oz Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| Dinges Senior Member  Joined: 04/01/2008 Location: AlbaniaPosts: 510 |
Talk about shock and awe on a sunny sunday afternoon... Now *that* is one green vehicle; and I'm not just talking about the plants growing in the driver's compartment. Peter. (torn between 'OMG!' and 'I want one too!') |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Hehehe  ... what I loose on the sine waves I win on the car Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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| Robb Senior Member Joined: 01/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 221 |
Do you just step on the brakes hard or wasn't it boosted or is it a hand brake special ?
Love it  |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
It wasn't boosted on this model. The wife loves it. Her chooks are 1/2 a kilometer away (otherwise I'd strangle the rooster). She checks em twice a day, and just came back after her maiden voyage over there using this thing... I might have lost my EV. I think she is going to commandeer it. .........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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| matt down south Regular Member  Joined: 20/10/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 50 |
hi Oz great concept i like it!you could paint it green and sign write CHOOK CHASER on the sides!! ive got to put together a suzuki 185 dirt bike rolling chasis and 24v 400w motor with 2 sets of chain drive solar powered to visit all the niebours around my farm to save starting the car matt |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Matt, Quiet amazingly, this is by far the best use of the wind power here. If I grid tie it, the best I could hope for is to demolish my power bill.... which is only $5.00/day or so. The mill would have to run 24/7.. With this setup, 4-6 kwh would more than save 2-3 litres of fuel/day. As you know on a farm, you putter along, checking the fences, the dams, doing odd jobs, etc etc. On 400 acres just plodding along around the boundary may take 30 mins... or a couple of liters. Over here that is $4.00, add a few trips here and there getting stuff together to do something, and you probably save $6.00. The mill only has to run at night to get that. I have tried all sorts of other combinations to see what is the most effective saving of money via wind, and this seems to be it. Hot water is best done with solar, and a proper grid tie induction one will do for the grid. This thing can do 20kmh happily, and draws about 70 amps to do it.... thats a few hrs driving about the place. My best idea yet I think to utilise the mill for the best bounce to the ounce. If you can track down and old suzuki swift or similar, and a old ride on floor scrubber to get the motor and controller out of.... well it's a fun effective project. This thing needs windows though. Will look out for some other vehicle to use the idea on if I can find one.... over here that is the problem. On the mainland, it's no problem at all. Have fun with it. .........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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Gill Senior Member Joined: 11/11/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 669 |
Oz, Good to see there's plenty of room in the engine bay for when you fit the air con.... was working fine... til the smoke got out. Cheers Gill _Cairns, FNQ |
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| matt down south Regular Member Joined: 20/10/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 50 |
Oz just thinking instead of cutting up a old valiant ute that has rusted sills and other small rust spots making it to far gone for restro but to good to cut and it keeps dry inside would make a good ev on the farm and tafe could teach me how to make adaptorplates as an exersize and a quad stator mill like phils 1kw unit with a tooth step up drive to a single or duel f and p using a car aircond clutch triggered by a frecency/rpm switch to make use of the higher wind speeds,the teacher like his students to make something usefull and i go there to make up the numbers so the kids dont have to go out of town matt |
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| Dinges Senior Member Joined: 04/01/2008 Location: AlbaniaPosts: 510 |
This concept car has a lot of possibilities as a practical work vehicle. It's basically a large battery on wheels: - wire in the headlights for lighting so you can work at night. - throw in some welding equipment, wired to the battery -> DC welding in remote locations. - add a cordless drill, with original battery removed and directly wired to the EV battery bank. - I like music when I go about... car radio ? - could even throw in a small generator (lawnmower motor and car alt) in case the batteries run out of juice. Admittedly, this will all drain the battery (the welding extremely so, but you'd probably do that at only very limited duty cycle anyway) but would greatly increase the practical uses of such a vehicle in remote parts of the property. A true ute. I was wondering where that motor came from... Now I know where to look for one. (as if an EV would ever pass MOT here... but if you have 400 acres of private property, who cares about MOT.) Peter. |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Matt, My thinking at this stage is that a light car is a good candidate. The valiant will do, but you may well need a serious motor to get good results. I first tried this one on a subaru, which though small is quite heavy. The suzuki.. well to change the front tyre, I lifted up the front of the car after I had loosened the wheel nuts, and kicked the tyre off with my foot. (no motor or batteries at the time). It is very responsive with this smallish motor@36v. It can put out lots more if you overdrive it at 60v, but for what? The valiant will have a much lower ratio to the large wheels, and will need a lot of torque at low rpm to shift it in heavy soil... maybe ok on the road. A suzi or diahatsu 4x4 would be ideal (early models) as you have low range g/box, and large wheels.. and light car (sierra not vitara). The adaptor plate was cut up with a 125mm angle grinder with those thin 1mm blades... maybe 10 mins. Drill a few holes for the bolts, a holesaw for the large one in the middle and your done. It's about 1/4"steel plate. This isn't a flash project by any measure. The best machines to get the motors from are old Advance floor scrubbers. They were made of steel in the 90's and so by now look terrible...(acid and steel don't mix) so are worthless. Auction houses can't get rid of them as they are past it. The modern ones use smaller motor gearbox drives, but the oldies used ohio motors... very tough... and good curtis controllers. The newer ones seem to use Italian underpowered computerised controllers... and you can keep em. Don't wish to upset Glen, but if you want decent amounts of power in modest winds, I think 4m is as small as you can go, and an axial is probably the best for good power, and flexible design to match your load. No good building an EV to be powered by the mill if it can't power it up in 12 hrs or so. (overnight) Mine will do that easily, and it's at ground level, and looks like crap, but it seems to beat most other mills for raw power. Dinges, Its all true, and it will evolve I have no doubt, but this one is a test bed, until I can get hold of a more suitable contender (4x4 sierra I think will be ideal). It is terribly easy to use a jerry can of fuel in a week for farm running about.... thats $50. You can justify the new batteries with this kind of money, it is not a love job like most other battery banks around the place, where they will not pay for themselves before they need replacement.... no longer a wasteful hobby... but one I can justify to the boss (who loves this thing already) If you park it next to the house where you have your big inverter for just those occasions when the power goes out, you can power the house too... yes big justifyable battery on wheels.
.............oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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fillm Guru Joined: 10/02/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 730 |
Hi Oztules , You never cease to astound me with the projects you come up with , is it the air down there or necessity being the mother of of all invetion ? Would have been great to see the ev as a VW beetle , maybe you could strap a small wind genny to the car and get into the perpetual motion thing ..
You might get a little buzz out of these pic's I snaped the other day of the electric cabnets on the trucks here , and a couple of a cap blow up... 
3 phase rectifier 
phase modules and cap bank 
Inverter and optic fiber controlls for phase modules 
DC breakers for the dump load 
Would these caps be good for our testing 
Letting the smoke out ...BIG BANG !!! PhillM ...Oz Wind Engineering..Wind Turbine Kits 500W - 5000W ~ F&P Dual Kits ~ GOE222Blades- Voltage Control Parts ------- Tower kits |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Thanks for the piks Phill. I'm going to go away and sulk now with my little 1204 
"is it the air down there or necessity being the mother of of all invetion ?"...... it's rabid stupidity I think ..........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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| Dinges Senior Member Joined: 04/01/2008 Location: AlbaniaPosts: 510 |
Oztules, Now that the Big Three in the US are in deep trouble and begging for government handouts, will you jump into this market niche (gap) they've left unexploited? Who knows... maybe Flinders Island could become the 21st-century Detroit... With Oztules Motors (OM) the major employer of Flinders island. Watch out Holden! Move over GM/Ford/Chrysler and other dinosaurs! Toyota, get your overpriced Prius (which can't even pull a trailer) out of the way! 'Oztules Motors' is here to stay, with the car every self-respecting yobbo needs (empty beercans not included). And for the more sophisticated customers a hood, doors and windows are available as options. Available in all colours you like, as long as you like white. Peter (who is interested in the job of CEO. I'd really want to be head of R&D, but I figure you'll reserve that desirous place for yourself; so CEO would make a nice 2nd choice for me. With your technical expertise and my management skills I think we can really make this happen... you know what happened when Charles Rolls and Frederick Royce teamed up, don't you?) |
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wdyasq Newbie  Joined: 29/07/2008 Location: United StatesPosts: 21 |
I could easily round up 535 folks or so as crash-test dummies ... as long as you promised not to send them back to Washington DC! Ron Adventure is just bad planning." -- Roald Amundsen |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
Dinges, it's been renamed the Chook Mobile. Strange thing is everyone who has seen it hooked up to the windmill, then taken it for a drive loves it...... which is pretty strange as it looks like a pile of the proverbial. No accounting for taste over here apparently. (we must have a very low expectations. It does run well, and only takes a short time to recover on the mill from a 4km trip round the paddocks. The mill seems to charge at 10-20 amps in most winds since it was built. I managed to get it into third gear, and she does near 35km/hr. would do 40 on the bitumen I reckon easily. She now done nearly 30km of paddock bashing so far... no oil, water or petrol. I have taken the position of assistant sh*t kicker in OM inc... somehow it suits me.
So move over you other moguls, were coming through with the wind car. Ron, we know your prowess with the beans.... maybe a methane motor will do for your purposes. The lads on the hill (all 500 or so) will get good mileage on a still day .... with their combined hot air, maybe a stirling for them instead. ..........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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| Dinges Senior Member Joined: 04/01/2008 Location: AlbaniaPosts: 510 |
Oz, have you considered expanding from cars to, let's say, farm equipment? I bet there's a market for electric flying combines too. I know of at least one potential customer.
[quote=Oztules]Strange thing is everyone who has seen it hooked up to the windmill, then taken it for a drive loves it...... which is pretty strange as it looks like a pile of the proverbial. No accounting for taste over here apparently.[/quote] I'm not surprized at all people like it, Oztules. But maybe that says a lot about my taste too... Pity the car was in such a bad condition; with just a hood, windows and doors it would have been a perfectly serviceable electric car. [quote=Oztules]no oil, water or petrol.[/quote] But sooner or later you'll have to top off the batteries with water...
What capacity is your battery bank (nominally vs. actually)? The voltage was 36V IIRC. Presumably the batteries have already seen a long useful life in some other application and were then given to you to spend their final remaining days before inescapable death? Would be interesting to measure batterycapacity; that way you could also estimate the range (and re-charge periods) when installing fresh new batteries. The motor is rated at 4kW so about 5.5hp. There are lawnmowers with more powerful motors than that  . But if you don't require fast acceleration, who needs lots of power. As long as you have enough power to overcome hills and pull free out of the mud/grass. Anything more is just unused capacity 99.9% of the time and extra dead weight. Would be very interesting to find out what the maximum range on decent asphalt roads would be. Endurance may well be double of what you get on your property. As for speed... who cares anyway. Anything that's faster than walking is good.
As you mentioned, it all comes down to weight. In your case, with relatively low speeds, aerodynamic resistance will be smaller than tyre fricion. At normal car speeds and on normal roads, aerodynamic friction would dominate the total drag. But since your car drives slowly and on non-smooth paths... Anything that can be done to reduce weight and reduce tyre friction would further improve performance. I notice there's still some dead weight on that Suzuki in the form of a passenger door and roof. A human weighs about 70kg on average. A full-sized car (well, ok, my tiny car) is ~800 kg. Which means only about 9% of transported mass is actually 'useful'. If you could change that ratio to, say 25% (tiny car frame, motor and batteries comprising most of the mass) you'd have made a huge gain in endurance and efficiency. Considering that your Suzuki is little more than some sheetmetal, 4 tyres, a motor and a battery... you're getting pretty close to the ideal. The Apollo moon-rover comes even closer though: 4 wheels and a frame. But then, they had to haul it all the way up to the moon too. 
A golf-car comes pretty close to that ideal too. Finally: I notice a loitering dog in your pictures. Have you considered giving it a harness and testing its skills as sledge dog, pulling the Suzuki? If it worked for Santa... Peter. |
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| oztules Guru Joined: 26/07/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686 |
I mentioned your cunning plan to the dog...... she lay down, rolled over and put her feet in the air.... I take it that that is a no way guesture
Sealed batteries, about 8 years old.. I have not taken it for more than 6km at a time, then a quick stint on the mill, and she is ready to go again. It seems that there may be donor cars available. But none as light as this one so far.... we'll see. Next is the control for the mill to shutdown when charged. ..........oztules Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth |
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| grub Senior Member Joined: 27/11/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 169 |
Years ago a friend of mine had a tiny Dihatsu (phonetic spelling) with a 360cc two stroke motor. One of them would be a good contender in the fly weight division :) |
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