1951 Ford Vedette Zombie

[omegon]

Hey everybody,
i would like to introduce you to this little project i do together with a stunt crew from Berlin. Its 1951 Ford Vedette piece of rusty metal.

We found it on the scrapyard and thought it is too beautiful to let it go back to mother earth. And actually the material isn't too bad under the bonet, frame/structural parts are good. The car is more or less just a shell, it did't have a motor, gearbox, driveshaft or whatsoever, just a bunch of ratshit we already cleaned out. We already rebuilt the rear leafspring suspension, welded together some preliminary motor mounts and are currently testfitting parts of the drivetrain. We still don't have a driveshaft and gearbox, despite the rearwheel 9:1 diff wich seems to be from a chevy s10.

I should note that we dont aim to get this to a street legal state after the conversion. This build is straight for the lulz and learning and "artistic expression" i would say. Maybe we punish it on some racetrack who knows, but we don't aim to comply with any rulez other than our imagination and newton. So we'll see where that goes

you see we are fans of that precision german cardboard engineering,
but we are probably going to replace some of that cardboard after the mockups work.
We have some of that startrek machinery at hand

and will probably use it after we are cool with the general setup.

Ah yeah i should not that we are fitting a leaf motor and inverter with the obvious openinverter magic.

I will post progress if there is some.

Happy automotive upcycling everybody.

L

[Kevin Sharpe]

Amazing project

[mike77cos]

That is awesome

[deaglan]

This looks like a pretty cool project, and will make a really unique car when it runs.

Are you going for Rear Wheel Drive, or what's the layout?

Can you give a quick description of the main systems (steering, braking, heating etc)?

Thanks,
Deaglán.

[omegon]

Hey!

yeah its a rear wheel drive. The overall idea for this build to keep it verry puristic. So in terms of steering, yes it has something like that, it has drum brakes and such. And we are probbably going with that for the first phase until that things brake and are going to replace them with some salvaged racing parts we have lying around. We have some desintegrated Porsche 924 and might salvage the gearbox, driveshaft and other parts. Our intention is to use recycled parts as far as possible and build the remaining bits from scratch. So there is going to be some billet parts which we are going to machine on an old Deckel FP-3-50.

Instead of heating and all the other comfort stuff its gonna get a rollcage. We want to keep it rough... there is actually moss growing on the outside of it, and we don't intend to remove it

For the drivetrain we are currently putting the leaf propulsion system init and see how much fun we can extract from that. Johannes fieldweakening progress is verry promising in that regard.

Its definately going to be a rat style of car but probably more like a cyber-rat, bladerunner style. So we probably embark on some experiments with interfaces, light, lasers and sound.

[omegon]

So the hubner is running, i swapped in a new openinverterboard and flashed the newest FOC firmware. Next weekend i'm gonna try to spin the motor first time, press thumbs.

Also I hooked up a little round diplay interface i made, into the old gaugecluster which fits pretty nice. Software needs to be rewritten but from the looks i think its promissing and suits the build. But we might as well take another route in terms of the cockpit "design".. something more nasa (or RAKA) would be cool.. segment displays or something.. a bit more retro might just be more suitable

[EVPanda]

Can you show more details on how you did the round display, I would like to do something like that in my build. Thanks!

[omegon]

Sure! its basically a 3.4" circular display with a hdmi adapterboard + a raspberrypi and canbusshield (PiCan2 in this case) and some code. The displays are affordable, you can find them on alibaba. There are european distributors but they take it from the poor, so better get them from china directly.

For the case i designed and 3d printed something that fits the display and the hdmi board. The Pi stack is in a seperate box which i can place somewhere more accessible than inside the dashboard.

I will post the code as soon as its viable here. But here is the stl files for the case as an inspiration, probably needs some adaptation for your car.

[omegon]

Ah yeah and you might wanna just ask ZeroEV, i think they have something in store which you can just drop in and save yourself some hassle

[Kevin Sharpe]

The displays are affordable, you can find them on alibaba.

I purchased one from ebay a while back (here)... would be great if we could build an open source solution for car displays (assuming one dosen't already exist).

Ah yeah and you might wanna just ask ZeroEV, i think they have something in store which you can just drop in and save yourself some hassle

Agreed their solution looks amazing

[omegon]

Hey Kevin, that would be great!

Am happy to share my work on that. I bought the displays for roughly 40€ plus another 30€ for the hdmi board directly from the chinese manufacturer. Plus another 30 for the Pi and 45 for the PiCan2. So for roughly 150€ one can build a nice digital gauge...

[kiwifiat]

... would be great if we could build an open source solution for car displays (assuming one dosen't already exist).

Take a look at automotive grade linux that has a dashboard module and runs on the raspberry pi. The project is also supported by a number of large car companies including Toyota.

[omegon]

looks interesting!