Yesterday I made the mounts for the pedals. The brakes were easy, just four 5/16" bolts. The electronic pedal, not so simple. It's from a BMW and it is held to the floor with one M6 bolt... at a 30 degree angle with all sorts of features on the backside also at a 30 degree angle. I set up my sine ...

Finished the upper motor mounts this morning. Had some errands to run this afternoon and after I got back I managed to get the engine installed. It's actually pretty much perfectly balanced with the generators attached to the back. Used the engine hoist to set it in place and hold it in position ...

Make the lower motor mounts for the turbine. I designed them so they will keep the big 5/8" fine thread SHCS that hold the isolation mount captive and even if they managed to unscrew they cant unscrew far enough to extract from the mount on the engine. Also the top strip goes around the tube so it ...

The seats arrived Monday. They fit well and are pretty comfortable. That evening I got out a zip disc and went around the rail and cut loose the old seat mounts and every other piece of crap someone had welded to it sometime in the past. Ill be able to reuse the old 1/4x2" bars the old seats were ...

Brakes are done and it's finally on the wheels. I need to figure out routing for the motor phase leads and resolver, I have some 4AWG wire that should do the trick. Need to pressure was the thing, still has a bunch of grime all over it.

Seats should be here tomorrow and I can start figuring out ...

Finally some dry weather. Got the inverter mount finished. I modified a couple of the feet to get them closer to the same level. Every foot mounts on a different plane.

The seats should be here this week and I can figure out where to mount them and where the pedals need to be. Also took the ...

I spun the engine up on the starter alone to see how everything worked with the generators and almost immediately the belt jumped the pulley. Not sure why, the pulleys are in line and parallel to each other. The only thing I can think of is the belt tensioner. It is on the slack side of the belt ...

Over the past couple days I got the generator section together. I Made the standoff pieces from a chunk of 1" 1144 that I have had around for probably 25 years now. Man, that stuff machines nice.

I decided to mount the second generator though the 4 case bolts like I did with the first one. I want ...

Last night I put the axle stub shafts in the ultrasonic to clean them up, I went to paint them this morning and noticed that there is a lot of wear on the outside bearing journals. So they are junk. Ordered another set that are chromemoly, another $150... sigh. This thing is a money pit.

Cut the ...

Between yesterday and today I got the rear drive mounted. Using 1"x3" 1/8" wall tubing to mount it to the existing transmission mounting points. Did some other miscellaneous stuff too like broach a keyway in the generator coupling and mill off a piece of the HSG housing. Ordered some wrong brake ...

Got the metal for the rear motor mount Monday. Also picked up my MIG machine that I had over at a friend's shop so I can weld all this up. I could TIG it but I want to be done sometime this year.

I talked to an apps guy at work and I should be able to cut .15mm copper sheet with the lasers at work ...

The packs from battery hookup showed up yesterday and after a couple hours I got the pack apart and the cells stripped. Need to see if my laser cutter will cut nickel. I can blast through steel and stainless way thicker but im not sure what it will do to nickel. I have seen recommendations using ...

Ordered a whole bunch of parts today, CVs, brake parts, metal for the engine and motor mounts, bolts, and rubber mounts. I chopped loose the upper part of the rear roll cage which was in the way and will need to be moved. It was barely welded in place. Once the engine is in ill come up with ...

I'll look up that pedal. I picked up a BMW pedal with dial signals but I can get something else. It was cheap.

If I used the 12krpm PTO on the turbine I can probably get closer to 400v but a lot of the bearings are not rated for that.

According to ORNL they were able to pump up to 24kw into the HSG, but really im only ever going to see that kind of power draw on heavy acceleration. Between the HSGs and the LiFePO4 pack which can supply 240A for 10 sec, I think this thing should be pretty quick. Im considering mounting the ...

At this point I just want simple to make it work. The HSGs are good to about 24kw a piece, im going to add some forced air cooling to supplement to keep the exposed winding cooled just in case. The prime mover on this will be the engine, the battery is just the buffer. Honestly, I could have just ...

Brat's spline adapters arrived yesterday and the rear drive arrived today. Drive looks like it survived the trip from Japan even though it was covered in coolant. Guessing they didnt blow the water jacket out. Rotated the motor by hand through the drive hubs and it turns smoothly.

I lifted the ...

Got the support plate bolted to the adapter and started figuring out how I am actually going to attach the belt driven generator, Once the coupling and bearing arrive I can start machining the outer shaft. I ordered a parabolic drill to drill out the shaft, it's going to be pretty deep.

Also ...

Parts are starting to trickle in. The VW 90mm hubs showed up a couple days ago, the poly-v belts yesterday, the pedal and inverter unit showed up today. Waiting for the rear drive to ship.

I machined the plate that interfaces the back and front bells from the old generator and holds the second ...

Second Kia HSG showed up today and I managed to get the pulley off this one and lucked out with it being the keyed shaft version. This will make it a whole lot easier to couple to the PTO shaft on the engine.

Ive decided to build a low capacity pack to act as a buffer. I think it will be about a ...

OK, I need to download the software to read that file. I mostly use altium for work.

I made my own design now with the same form and signal pinout in mind. That way if i would replace first VCU with my board the thing would directly work with the teensy chip and cable harness. The only difference would be the new expanded input, output pins with two new analog pins.



Do you ...

you need a HV battery in between to buffer the torque demand when (de)accelerating. Experience has shown us torque reaction from ICE to PMSM are order of magnitude apart and to bridge this gap you need a power source that can quickly buffer the torque lag. Either battery or supercap of some kind ...

This sand rail frame showed up on FB Marketplace this morning for $200 so I jumped on it and picked it up this afternoon. Everything turns, pretty basic VW bug based buggy. Will need a sandblast and paint when I am done making modifications. Oh, and real wheels.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535 ...

So I am planning on doing something a little different than your standard hybrid. Instead of a IC piston engine I am using a small-ish Garrett GTP30-150(F) turbine engine. Turbines kind of suck for cars, other than their horrible fuel economy, because the shaft output is mostly a fixed RPM. In the ...