"Racing" the Duff Beer Electric Car (Page 10 of 13)

Made some progress, although slower than I'd like. While the engine and generator head are unused, they have been sitting for 12 years. The engine was simple enough, whatever assembly lube they used on the fuel pump had turned into a brown crusty substance. I had to knock the piston out of it with a hammer, but it cleaned up fine. It fires up every time now. The generator was a mess. This has got to be the worst QC that I've ever seen. Every wire junction was between dissimilar metals and twisted together by hand, except for the four main power leads, which were copper/steel, but crimped. So after 12 years of galvanic corrosion, the exciter and harmonic windings both opened as soon as I spun it up, and all of the leads were loose. I managed to reach in there and crimp the five exciter winding connections, and soldered all of the leads, but had to buy an aftermarket voltage regulator to bypass the harmonic winding because I couldn't reach it. The bearing grease had dried out and gotten crusty, so I had to pop the case ends and clean/repack them, and the tiny little brush holder bolts snapped off when I looked at them, so I drilled/tapped new holes and bought some good SS screws to hold the brushes in place. I need to further brace the mounting skids, but it's basically working. Next step is locking down the VR and rectifier, then putting a load on it to see if anything smokes. I figure I'll wire a 50A outlet to it and run the Duff bus AC's off of it for a few hours:

https://youtu.be/SgJvPe3nE0s

I see nothing but a steady torque curve rising to a glorious future.

Will the driver need to wear ear protection? How loud is the setup?

If the car ends up not being a viable race car, it should be a great portable welding rig.

The fuel tank on the engine will have to be removed before tech and replaced with a fuel cell. I plan on putting a fuel cell under the rear of the car where the factory charger was mounted. The generator at full load should use about 2 gallons per hour, so a 5-gallon cell should easily get us through a driver stint. I may also order a stock 1981 Plymouth TC3 gas tank from Rock Auto and see what's required to mount it in the factory location. I still have to see how much water boils off under load and see how often we have to top off the cooling hopper. We'll have to have a 5-gal fuel jug filled with water for that.

There, got the important part taken care of:

Just one whistle? Hell, go for the whole enchilada and slap in a steam-powered calliope.

Only if the exit nozzles are also steam whistles.

I got the top on the cooling hopper today, so now it just spits steam out of a tube. A big fancy brass/glass sight glass assembly is on order to replace that piece of rubber hose so we can keep an eye on the hopper level. I also broke out a 8' 2x4 (to pry with) and some shim washers and got the engine-generator coupler properly aligned. It was close before, but the tolerance is .1mm, so I lined it up pretty much perfectly. I don't know if my wooden mounting frame will survive long term or if I'll have to build a proper 4" c-channel frame for it, but we'll see how it goes:

Next up was mounting and wiring the traction pack charger, 12v DC power supply, and getting the generator starting battery boxed. I put a small 2A maintenance charger on the generator battery and wired it all up in a marine battery box with an extension cord running to a 120v outlet that I ran off one side of the gen head. That outlet also runs the DC PS and the Arduino that controls the charger. There are probably too many bungee cords for it to get through tech, but I think that it's ready for its first real drive:

I fired it up and let the charger come on line. It was still programmed to push 4500 watts from my previous trip to CMP with the small HF generator, and the genset hardly noticed that. The gen head is good for 15KW, but the engine will only support about 12KW, so I compromised and programmed it for 9KW. It definitely noticed that. This charger can put much more of a load on it than the RV could. I had to open up the throttle quite a bit (involves climbing out of the car, unscrewing the throttle lock, setting it to a new position, and locking it down). The throttle valve is slightly misaligned from when I disassembled the fuel pump, and I've compensated by backing the throttle stop way out, but I'll need to open the fuel pump up again to properly align the valve if I want much more power out of it.  It dumps a lot of energy back in to the battery pack. I can watch it go up rapidly when I'm off throttle.

For a while an alarming burning smell came out of the gen head, so I stood by with a fire extinguisher, but I think that it was just the "new" burning off of it, because no smoke came out of it and it eventually settled down and stopped smelling like it was burning. At this point I'm a little nervous about climbing inside this contraption, but it was time to take it out on the road.

HOLY CRAP THIS THING IS SCARY AND AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I'm still smiling from my brief ride. It started raining pretty hard after I'd only made it a few blocks, so I cut my drive short, but that was enough to get a feel for it. It is loud, but not buzzy loud like it was before. It only turns over at 1800 RPM, but when the engine is loaded the tone of it gets deep and is very distinctive. You can definitely hear it coming a long way off, and it doesn't sound like a car or a generator. It sounds like a big old tractor, or like a sped up version of the Star Wars pod racer that made the thumping noise. I don't get the wash of heat and exhaust fumes that I got from the HF generator, but I haven't gone that far yet. It shakes, a lot. The whole car shakes violently at 1800hz and you can feel it through the ground surrounding it when you really load the generator. Everyone that you pass stops what they are doing or talking about and stares at it, their heads swiveling to follow it until it is out of sight. The whole time that I drove it, Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" kept going through my head:

"You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around."

When I got back to the shop, the pack level was several volts higher than it was when I left, and I only went a couple of blocks. I'm charging these batteries much faster than I ever have before. This may actually work, or it may really blow up. Ricky thinks that we need to wall the driver away from the machinery and electrons with some nice thick Lexan. I'm starting to agree with him.

I took it out on the beltline around Raleigh today. Running at 9KW still isn't enough to keep it charged at 60-70 MPH, but my battery box was flexing a lot. It was never meant to handle the torsional stress of something like this. At a light load, it's not bad, but under a serious load, this setup flexes way too much. It snapped off one of the coupler bolts after a couple of hours. I tried bracing the mounting platform, but it's still not good enough. I'm going to have to build a heavy metal frame for this before I turn it up to 11. Other than my wooden frame being too flexible, it worked great and I drove around Raleigh belching soot and steam for over an hour. Imagine being behind this at a stop light:

https://youtu.be/NFI3tcZ8Aso

Way too much flex in the gen set mount. I fired it up yesterday and it snapped all of the coupler bolts and snapped one of the legs of the engine stand. I have placed a moratorium on starting the engine until I can get a proper frame built for it. Tonight we charged up the batteries from track power here at Savannah so we can turn some parade laps tomorrow. I also ordered a proper curved jaw Lovejoy-style coupler from Central Georgia Generator.

The shredded and shattered remains of my direct coupler bolts/isolators and one of the engine mounts. Talking to someone from another team who does power generation for a living, considerable precision is required when coupling a generator head to an engine, and my idea of a precision Lemons vehicle assembly tool is a framing nail gun, so this is not really a surprising result, and probably was the best result under the circumstances.

When my new coupler gets in, I'll have to make a much better frame. Either that or farm the frame out to a local welding/fabrication shop that does this kind of stuff. I will probably try it myself first, because I am stupid that way.

That's a spectacularly thorough failure right there.  I applaud your dedication.