Got the Go-ahead from HQ for my IoE idea (Page 7 of 10)

Obviously you're never going to do well in BS inspection with your inability to lie to us on a forum.   Luckily you have a car that will be so pathetically slow that you may be given laps.  As in POSITIVE laps. 

so, the lift had a pump motor rated at 11.5 kW with a female splined shaft
This motor is in good condition, but i think it is spinning the wrong direction. it would suck to have 1 forward and 5 reverse.

The lift also has 2 traction motors each rated at 9.5 kW
they are normal male shafts with brakes on the tail end. I'm going to take some measurements tomorrow and see about removing the parking brake rotors and connecting them end-to-end
This would give me a 150 pound motor which, overvolted to 96v, should give the car a top speed of about 85MPH maybe even 100+

the male shafts may be easier to adapt, too

I applaud your effort to actually post a picture.

Do you have any information on the controller you pictured?  Is it a DC PWM unit or AC VFD?  The latter were more common on high starting torque applications (like lift pumps).

insomnia sucks, so i'll update you on what little was done today:

i was hopping to remove the 2 traction motors and join them to make 1 large drive motor for the car. once i tore into the lift, i discovered they were 4.5kW each instead of 9.5kW. that would have given me 9kW total instead of 19kW. The pump motor is 11.5kW. looks like im sticking with the pump motor.

The pump motor is a counterclockwise rotation. this presents the problem of spinning the wrong direction. It is a series wound motor and can not be reversed by switching the polarity.

I called Brian of Property Devaluation to run some ideas. we discussed flipping the differential and overfilling it with oil, but the high torque the electric motor puts out would not be great for this. We also discussed chain and sprocket to get the motor to spin the right direction before it connects to the transmission, but that would be a lot of torque for my terrible engineering skills.

I then had the idea to turn the motor around and run the car off of the commuter end instead of the drive end. This would give me clockwise rotation, and would solve the issue of the female splined shaft on the drive end.

As i was looking at the motor to see how feasible this could be, Judge Scott called with some contact information. A friend of his, Curtis, is a forklift mechanic. I called Curtis and discussed my thought with him. He was optimistic. After describing the lift, he realized it is a fairly new machine. if i had an older one, it would have had 1 large traction motor (probably twice the size of the pump motor). oh well.
Curtis did tell me that my efforts to remove the fan from the CE with an impact driver was futile. He said it has either green or red thread lock on the screw and would need to be heated to 350?. Use MAPP gas! not acetylene!

so i'll take to the motor to work tomorrow and see if i can get the fan off.

in other news, i pulled about 10 lbs in 2/0 and 3/0 copper wire from the lift, an Anderson connection, the contactors and fuses, the pot box with go peddle and the NEDRA required power indicator light

here is the video showing why the lift probably didn't work.
keep in mind this was after i had already blown air with the compressor through it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1XKZImUufQ

that looks like way more electronics than are needed for this. attach all three motors and hook it up as follows. just off idle, use a 100% duty cycle relay to fully power the first 4.5kW motor. a bit more throttle and you bring in the next 4.5kW. a bit further on the throttle and you bring in the 11.5kW motor for a total of nearly 30HP!

use the money saved on the controller to step up to 60V and have a worthy 50HP at that point.

going from 0-10hp may be a bit tricky around the pits, but it should be workable or get the crew to push you onto the track.

And like that, i'm getting a Open ReVolt 500A controller good for up to 144v!!!
Freeway speeds, here we come!
Within budget too.

Thank you Paul

I've got a 60 HP VFD sitting in my garage.  Been bouncing around the idea of building my own hybrid/electric vehicle.

Use batteries in series as DC bus, run the motor w/ a potentiometer attached to gas pedal.  Zero throttle would be maximum braking w/ the motor.

Good luck w/ this.

I only read the last page but if nobody else mentioned this, 144 DC volts w/ batteries would be a huge explosion when short circuited. Thousands of amps of fault current available.  Fuse accordingly and insulate the hell out of the stuff.

I think at this point, it would be faster to leave them in and plug into the 30 minute charger.
9 batteries at 28 lbs each with a grade 8 fastener on either side would take forever to unbolt and lift.

If I have the batteries arranged in 36v banks with Anderson connectors, I could series them in the car, but make a harness to parallel them on the charger. In theory it will work, but so does communism (in theory).

New thought. Use ALL THREE motors. the two traction motors driving each of the front wheels and the pump motor hooked to a diff for the rear.

This doesn't look like it would pass NEDRA. However, putting the battery banks on one or two big plates, attaching lift-hooks, and using a couple of BIGASSED grade 8 bolts to fasten down the plates would pass. This is in addition to the grade 8's holding the individual battery straps to the plate.  Either thread the holes for these plate fasteners, or weld a grade 8 nut to the other side. Alignment holes and pins at the corners of the plates are also necessary to make sure this shit ends up in the right place.

This way, you aren't removing the individual batteries, and the only fasteners you have to undo aren't wedged up in between batteries, but are instead out on the edge.

A 'refuel' would work like this:
0) Disconnect the battery pack from the car.
1) Attack the fasteners holding down the plate with a pneumatic impact wrench. Even the most paranoid bolt layout shouldn't take more than a minute
2) Grab the lift-hooks with an engine lift. Heave the battery pack and its mounting plate out of the car.
3) Grab a charged battery pack with the engine lift, drop it into the car, taking care to use the alignment pins and holes.
4) Impact-wrench the plate fasteners back into their nuts/threaded holes
5) Connect battery pack to car.
6) Dispatch car
7) Rearrange the battery connections to a configuration acceptable to the charger
8) Charge the battery pack
9) Rearrange the battery connections to the in-car configuration.

here's the other potential problem. let's say you're using 20HP on average out on the track. to stay on the track you need that much power going into the batteries constantly.

even before you account for innefficiencies of the charging system you're talking about a 67A @ 220V draw. realisticaly you're probably looking closer to 100A @ 220V just to keep you out there. and there's still the battery overheating issue potential.

where do you plan on getting this kind of power trackside?