Guru
Joined: 26/07/2007
Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686
| Posted: 11:29am 07 Dec 2008 |
Well the chainsaw mill has driven a variety of loads lately in order for me to learn what it can do, and how it behaves.
It has driven 12v, 24v, 30v, 36v, 42v, 48v,....80v battery loads, and it behaves very differently on all the different loads. It has directly driven resistive loads (with simple switching), and a hot water service with a 240v element using a 2.5kw home brew square wave inverter
I have fashioned a 12v coffee heater into a hot water element and driven that from a 275A 1204 curtis controller, and 4ohm resistive coils (microwave primaries) in a "bucket" of water. (and saw over 5KW) I had also made a grid tie "inverter"from a DC motor and ac induction motor....single and three phase. (three phase works better).
I was running out of things to play with.... and then at the tip, I saw a very very sad Suzuki swift. It had been cut down and used as a shooters vehicle, with no bonnet, no rear bodywork, crushed roof, no drivers door, smashed windows and windscreen, and totalled motor.... this was just the thing...... an Electric Vehicle to play with (soon to be).
So it was out with what was left of the motor, find a tyre for the front and then a quick conversion.
It looks like this I'm afraid....
I quickly made up an adapter plate, and made a coupling out of the two sprockets with dual chains to connect them face to face. This would be the universal coupling, and bolted it into the gearbox housing. The plate was cut from the hull of an old ship. (waste not want not). I grabbed the 4kw motor I had used for the grid tie experiment... note the chain adapter/coupling:
and plonked it in like so.
The electronics were wired into the car... perhaps wired is too strong a word, thrown into the car describes it better, and became housed in the glovebox. The 1204 controller I blew up when testing the 12v water heater,( a poor battery connection let the voltage rise to high for a split second, and blew some of the fets and other bit ans pieces.... not like Trevs though,) but with judicious use of hot glue, it is back together again. The careful wiring job looks like this:
The batteries were tossed in behind the seat, wired up and we have an EV (forgive me Trev for even using the same name). Here we see the batteries and the input line from the mill to charge them up. The seat was missing before I dragged it home. The roof was caved in but by carefully panel beating it (sat in the seat and pushed it back up), it will keep the sun off anyway.
All that remains is a quick fill of power and were away.
The mill does fairly poorly charging at 36v, so 20 amps is about all it will get up to, but at that rate it fills up pretty quickly.
Soon it was up to 42v,and it was time to go for a howl.
I was scooting along at about 20km/h flat out. The speedo still works, as does the odometer. She has about 4electric Km clocked up so far. I have perhaps 20km of tracks through the forest on my place to play with, so there's plenty of room to play with this thing.
So now I have free car, free batteries, 500 dollar mill, and need no petrol to run around the farm now.
So that was the days work today. I pulled the motor out a few days ago.
Still having fun with this thing
........oztules
Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth