[Woodsmith]

OK, this may be a very slow moving thread as I have to keep to a very small budget and with minimal time to do this but I might as well start somewhere.
My primary income is as a part time college teacher with the occasional furniture or carpentry commission. Most of my time is taken up with studying for my Masters Degree in environmental architecture, attending teacher training, renovating my house and voluntary working for the local amateur theatre.
I will be keeping my diesel estate (station wagon?) and two self built 1.5 ton trailers (one closed box, one open and extending) for the heavy long distance work.

I'll start with my EV requirements:

To seat 1+1 - ie. me and some luggage or me and a small friend.
To have a comfortable range of 35 miles to work - may need 70 miles if no charge point at work.
To drive 2/3 of that distance at 60+mph.
To be weather proof.

What I would like if I could afford and achieve it:

To seat 2 with luggage.
To have a comfortable range of 100 miles.
To cruise at 70mph for around 50 miles.
To be able to tow a small trailer occasionally
To look good.

I am happy to convert a suitable vehicle if I can find one. I am also keen to build from scratch.
I don't mind a reverse trike if it is light enough to have legislation benefits in the UK and improves range.
If I scratch build I am tempted to build a plywood monocoque on a steel subframe given that I am a cabinet maker.

Skills base:
I have restored Land Rovers and MGBs, built a racing MGB, built a 6x6 Land Rover with my own design 3 speed transfer box and three point suspension.
I am a qualified as a:
Motor vehicle mechanic and pipe welder
Electrician (house and light industrial)
Carpenter
Furniture maker
Part trained as a mechanical engineer
Can do some panel beating in steel and aluminium

My father is a electrical engineer trained by the British Army and for the first time he also thinks this is a good idea so he is on side.

I have mechanical hand tools, angle grinders, a couple of MMA welders and a pillar drill. I am currently looking for a small engineering lathe and then set up some work space at home.

The downside is that I have no garage, just a large driveway, and my workshop is for furniture making so no metal filings or greasy marks allowed. I am also not that knowledgeable about electronics - if I can't see how it works I generally don't understand it.

OK, so that is where I am at the moment. I think the plan is to find and recondition a forklift motor, sort out the motor side of the coupler, sort out a controller and then start looking for a vehicle to convert or to start scratch building. Once I have a vehicle or chassis plan I can look at getting batteries and chargers.
Throughout this process I will need to learn the requirements for the British IVA process to get anything other then a straight conversion legislated for road use.

Any advice from here onwards would be most welcome.

Thank you

[Amberwolf]

I don't yet have any suggestions for what you should do except that I would *love* to see a wooden EV! Even if it is not *all* wood, but still styled in it, just to see a lovingly-made electric horseless carriage would be wonderful.

[Woodsmith]

For a woodie I was thinking of steel chassis rails to hold the mechanical bits and batteries under the floor and a roll over hoop. The whole thing would then be clothed in angular ply panels to look a bit like the Apache helicopter or the T-Rex so it would be a single seater with luggage or a small seat behind. Not so much horseless carriage really.

I would use an MGB front suspension member and shaft drive motorbike rear wheel to make it a reverse trike.

A simple conversion would be easier though.

[fritzgutten]

Hey Woody, yes a conversion would be mush easier without having a shop to work in.
If you havent yet, you might want to check out the plans built vortex. I've only seen gassers but for the most part, the chassis is plywood built, with a fiberglass overlay. the drive and suspension bits are steel.
theres a huge weight and complexity issue with doing the fiberglass overlay though.
there are other wood based trikes out there as well. you can check out reversetrike.com to see whats out there.
fred

[Woodsmith]

The options on whether to build or convert will wait until I am there and I will then see how it goes. The lack of covered space is an issue, Manchester isn't known as the rainy city for nothing!

In the meantime I have very roughly mocked up the mechanical speed controller as featured in this thread.
I did it as simply as possible using some 22mm copper water pipe cut and then glued to a 20mm pvc conduit with some epoxy.
The 12v supply went to the moving contact and the fixed contact at the bottom end of the controller went to the motor.

The copper tube doesn't need to be full length but it saved the trouble of maintaining the diameter across the cut.

You can't really see the speed of the gear motor very well due to the resolution of my camera phone, however, you can hear the sound of it speeding up and slowing down.
Here's the video:

As you can see it is very low budget and made from the scraps bin.

[SimonRafferty]

That's fantastic! Well done!

Si

[Woodsmith]

Originally Posted by SimonRafferty

That's fantastic! Well done!

Si

I was looking at the amount of arcing and thinking how cool that would look in a glass tube mounted in the dash. It would be an easy way to monitor brush wear and provide a 'Back to the Future - flux capacitor' effect!

Anyway, I figured that if I had two micro switches fitted on I could have one at the 'no throttle' end to switch the controller drive off and another at the 'full throttle' end to switch in a short circuit contactor to take the controller out of circuit and switch off the controller motor again. That way the controller motor only spins during part throttle settings and the controller doesn't need to carry the full throttle currrent.

[order99]

Well, I have nothing to add, except:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/...ny-sports-car/

Not quite what you're planning, but perhaps you can get some ideas about the chassis.

Given my own current budget though, i'll be lucky to get one of these:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/...-this-flivver/

[Woodsmith]

Originally Posted by order99

Given my own current budget though, i'll be lucky to get one of these:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/...-this-flivver/

That's about my budget too!

I like the woody build link too but I was thinking along the lines of the Africar from 1984 for plywood simplicity though this Hispano-Suiza would be much more fun to make.

[Qer]

Originally Posted by Woodsmith

though this Hispano-Suiza would be much more fun to make.

That one's awesome! I don't want to know how long time it took to build it and I definitely don't want to consider how it'll handle a collision, but it's beautiful.

About the mechanical motor control, drop that idea. It's one thing to run a few Volts and Watts through a tube for fun and quite different when you start to get into SERIOUS power. Get a cheap Curtis on E-bay instead.