Guru
Joined: 26/07/2007
Location: AustraliaPosts: 1686
| Posted: 01:53pm 08 Dec 2008 |
Matt,
My thinking at this stage is that a light car is a good candidate. The valiant will do, but you may well need a serious motor to get good results. I first tried this one on a subaru, which though small is quite heavy.
The suzuki.. well to change the front tyre, I lifted up the front of the car after I had loosened the wheel nuts, and kicked the tyre off with my foot. (no motor or batteries at the time). It is very responsive with this smallish motor@36v. It can put out lots more if you overdrive it at 60v, but for what?
The valiant will have a much lower ratio to the large wheels, and will need a lot of torque at low rpm to shift it in heavy soil... maybe ok on the road.
A suzi or diahatsu 4x4 would be ideal (early models) as you have low range g/box, and large wheels.. and light car (sierra not vitara).
The adaptor plate was cut up with a 125mm angle grinder with those thin 1mm blades... maybe 10 mins. Drill a few holes for the bolts, a holesaw for the large one in the middle and your done. It's about 1/4"steel plate.
This isn't a flash project by any measure.
The best machines to get the motors from are old Advance floor scrubbers. They were made of steel in the 90's and so by now look terrible...(acid and steel don't mix) so are worthless. Auction houses can't get rid of them as they are past it.
The modern ones use smaller motor gearbox drives, but the oldies used ohio motors... very tough... and good curtis controllers. The newer ones seem to use Italian underpowered computerised controllers... and you can keep em.
Don't wish to upset Glen, but if you want decent amounts of power in modest winds, I think 4m is as small as you can go, and an axial is probably the best for good power, and flexible design to match your load. No good building an EV to be powered by the mill if it can't power it up in 12 hrs or so. (overnight)
Mine will do that easily, and it's at ground level, and looks like crap, but it seems to beat most other mills for raw power.
Dinges,
Its all true, and it will evolve I have no doubt, but this one is a test bed, until I can get hold of a more suitable contender (4x4 sierra I think will be ideal). It is terribly easy to use a jerry can of fuel in a week for farm running about.... thats $50. You can justify the new batteries with this kind of money, it is not a love job like most other battery banks around the place, where they will not pay for themselves before they need replacement.... no longer a wasteful hobby... but one I can justify to the boss (who loves this thing already)
If you park it next to the house where you have your big inverter for just those occasions when the power goes out, you can power the house too... yes big justifyable battery on wheels.
.............oztules
Village idiot...or... just another hack out of his depth