Bad Cat

Bad Cat
Officially Bad Ass

Saturday, March 19, 2011

More work on the body....

Well quite a bit done on the body today, no pics yet, those are soon to be posted. Still hoping to start doing fiber glass work in a few weeks. Also, I've been finishing up my controller design. With the help of some very nice folks over at the "ecomodder" site it should be quite the beast. I have a few of the components and am actually going to start machining the heat sink section next week. And yes it will be liquid cooled for anybody wondering.
It's very important to keep the controller as cool as possible. Heat breaks down the efficiency of the mosfets that are switching all that power on and off to the motor, the hotter they get the less power they can carry. Ask them to do to much while hot and poof, out comes the magic smoke. Then it's all over but the crying.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Shoestringin Along..

This site needs an update.
Let's QandA with Mister Mechanical:

Assistant: On October 12th we posted a pic of a Tsubaki PowerLok. You mentioned something about shaft squeezing..? Have you had any luck with that?

Mechanic: Well, first I needed to make certain that the Powerlok fit the output shaft of the motor.

Assistant: How'd you do that?

Mechanic: I chucked the armature of the motor in the lathe and machined it to fit the Powerlok. Then I needed to machine an adaptor that would go between the Powerlok and the input shaft of the transmission.

Assistant: Got any good pics?

Mechanic: This is the piece that I made:


I took some tooling steel stock, chucked it up in the lathe and starting cutting and milling. Basically, I used the Powerlok as the template to mark my points that I needed to machine, and then used the input of the transmission as a template for the other side. (We have a 3 in 1 lathe mill machine that comes in handy). (Found on Craig's List for $400).


Here is the completed unit. This is the input shaft of the transmission which is bolted to the adaptor which is bolted to the Powerlok.








Assistant: Nice. Is this actually pretty cool that you did this?

Mechanic: Yeah, it's very cool because of the Tremic (a.k.a. "transmission"). The way the transmission is set up I was able to use part of the torque tube which made the adaptation very simple. Very modular. I like modular designs.

Assistant: So, what happens now?

Mechanic: Once the motor modifications are done I'll be able to bolt (this is where the shaft squeezing comes in) the Powerlok to the output shaft of the motor and then mate it to the transmission.

Assistant: And in 9 months...?

Mechanic: Hopefully way before then.