Got the Go-ahead from HQ for my IoE idea (Page 10 of 10)

Did you ever talk to Mike Bream of EV West about helping with advice/parts/etc?

i send him a message, but never got a reply

It's a LeMon... I thought they came with speed resistance already built-in.

We are having a problem with the Open ReVolt controller....
I'm going to call the creator in the morning, but it is locking us out with a throttle voltage error.
I think it has to do with the settings, but hopefully i didnt damage the controller.

John is still at the track, but I came home tonight for a dry change of clothes and a bed more comfortable than the driver's seat of a Grand Marquis, so I guess I'll drop some updates.

Bill [forgot last name], who is one of those genius/black magic EE types, came by on Friday and reprogrammed the motor controller. Apparently the throttle was also hooked up wrong. Big thanks to him, as he got us from totally hosed to practically functional. We spent all day and much of the night Friday wrenching on various things, and managed to take the car on a victory lap of the paddock at 2:00 Saturday morning.

Most of the day Saturday we spent getting last minute stuff straightened out: windshield, cage padding, fender flares, front suspension, and especially steering, which had been frighteningly terrible due to negative caster from the front subframe being put on backwards for RHD. Finally got everything tech-ready about 5:30 PM. The rain had even been stopped for a few hours. The three of us threw our suits on to hopefully each take a lap around the track.

John took the car out and managed the slowest lap of the day (around 9:30), during which the skies opened up again. Luckily, nothing on the car short-circuited OR exploded despite being subjected to several minutes of torrent. After he got back from one lap, the batteries were mostly dead. We plugged it back in to charge overnight. The current plan is for me to take the car out for another lap after the green flag drops tomorrow morning, then we'll plug it back in for Dana to do a lap. Hopefully we'll have enough time to juice it up for one last lap at the checkered flag.

I believe John is currently welding up a rear bumper from our last remaining metal stock, on which will be painted "PLEASE PUSH ME". Maybe that'll improve our range.

Big thanks to Ben Nelson and Paul Holmes for providing tech support on such short notice. Bill Heckel was invaluable, even though he helped for less than an hour. He always came in at the right time with the right advice.

I took the car for a painfully slow lap and could not figure out why it would not go faster than 19MPH. It had the acceleration, but felt like it was throttling itself. The sky was clear when I got on track, but 47 minutes later and still 4 turns to track exit, it started raining. I don't remember the last time i was so religious.

That night I let a bunch of people drive it and the reoccurring comment was "why did you put a roll cage in a golf cart"?

Yes the car was butt-terrible, but hella-sweet at the same time. Everyone had a smile after driving it. Even DJ, the 1/4 mile racer, who was pissed he couldn't get the tires to smoke had a half smile.

Bill suggested saturday night that i recheck the setting on the controller, and sure enough, we accidentally limited the motor to only 100 amps. After upping it to 380 amps, we sent Frank out sunday morning. I could tell right away that we tripled our hoursepower, put when he came to a stop in the carrousel i knew all that power had a price. Luckily, we didn't kill Frank.
Jeff came down from control to personally tell us we could not go back out. There was too much of a speed difference. Good thing, cause Dana was too scared to go on track, so he got to putz around the paddock.

We got Organizers Choice for bringing a knife to a nuke fight.

I'm already working on a sponsorship deal for some lithium batteries to increase speed and range. The upgrades should even put us in contention for a class win... provided all other class C cars have some mechanical mishap that sets them back an hour or so.

This is only the beginning of the Lemons EV.

Don't you need more battery?  Have you considered electric forklift batteries?  They are heavy, like 2k, but 36v and huge amp hour ratings.

I still think you should have swappable battery packs.

Holy crap! thanks, but no
my motor works fine at 68lbs
we are making about 25-30 HP we will throw it on the dyno next month

It ran all weekend with only one breakdown and that was the cheap cast battery terminal that was a little undersized. I replaced it with a heavier duty connector and cut out about 3 feet of 4/0 wire to reduce the resistance

The car topped out at 50 MPH with a range of 4 laps with 80% charge (although the last time out I pushed it to 5 laps just to say I passed the dead Buick). With a distance of 2.3 miles around the track, that means I have a range of 14 miles at full throttle. It took us 3 hours to bring the charge back up to 80% where we could do another 4 laps.

Right now i'm planning on changing the transmission to a T5 which will have a nice over drive, and some taller rear tires which should help us get a better max speed.

The next race it will have hot swap batteries