Electric car

uncle jeremy's electric car
We've been working on an electric car conversion for quite a while now - its currently a Suzuki Alto (front wheel drive) with a Solectria AC55 motor and UMOC440TF controller. Pavel Kuznizov of Musach Nir Etsion is the mechanical mastermind here, Jeremy bought the motor/controller on ebay, Guy Weiss did the dirty work the last time we made a push to get it done for greekers, and Aviram S. recently brought money and initiative to the table.

We connected the motor to the flywheel using a taperlock adapter for torque and a metal plate with bolts to hold motor to flywheel bell. We left the gears in after the flywheel as most people (see the evdl mailing list or austin ev archive of ecar conversions]) seem to do that tho in in principle the motor has torque at the low end sufficient to drive the thing with no gearbox.

Anyway after years of neglect Aviram of the ecoop wind turbine group got wind of the thing and breathed life into it in the form of enthusiasm and money. We bought about 30 small lead acid batts (12V 5Ah) and hooked them up to the controller with a control box  we banged out. We had no results till i rtfm and saw that the controller likes to be started in neutral - imagine that! Then we got a bit of rotation that stopped after a quarter wheel turn; it seems the current draw was enough to pull the 240VDC of the batts down below the 200VDC minimum operating voltage. So we connected my good old bad-boy charger  (a fullwave rectifier feeding a 350V, 37000uF capacitor) after taking cover (the thing cold welds the screws onto the cap every time you connect it). That seemed to do the trick - the famous 'ev grin' came to Ein Hod at last - Pavel and Jeremy nearly danced a jig but we are far too serious for that.

first rotation - utube

Next steps - get a few kWh of lithium ion batteries, and get the show on the road...