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I've been talking about this for long enough and I've changed my mind about how to do it countless times, but I've finally made a start on my Mini conversion.
I've got to come clean first and say it's not a completely authentic Mini, as it was rebodied some years ago with a glass fibre shell. Otherwise it's a Mini through and through, complete with leaks, ageing 1275 A-series engine and gokart handling.
She's currently buried outside under 12 inches of snow, but I've bought a spare front subframe so that I can get the motors mounted and refurbish the front running gear over winter. I found a couple of Prestolite 7" motors a while back, via an ebay contact. They're rated at 130A continuous at 36V. I've advanced them by eight degrees and plan to run them at around 120V each.
The motors have actually been shortened by around 40mm since I took the photo below. This was done by removing the internal fan, and machining back the alloy "legs" on the drive end. It was the only way I could get the two motors to fit across the subframe and also gave me a decent length of plain shaft to mount the drive sprocket on. I'm not going to worry about whether it's unbalanced the motors yet...
Each of the motors will drive a chain sprocket mounted on the inboard ends of the half shafts, so no gearbox, no diff. I'm busy making up two pairs of bearing carriers that will each support a short shaft with a sprocket on one end and a CV joint on the other. I'll post some photos in a few days when I've got something worth showing.
Now to the first of many daft questions: I want to keep this conversion as simple (and hopefully cheap) as possible. I've been looking at options for providing vacuum and 12V power and the simplest way I can see to do that would be to use the tail shaft on one motor to drive a mechanical vacuum pump, and use the tail shaft on the other to drive a lightweight alternator. The question is, if I have the motors wired in series to a single controller, is the small difference in load on each motor likely to cause any problems?
I've got to come clean first and say it's not a completely authentic Mini, as it was rebodied some years ago with a glass fibre shell. Otherwise it's a Mini through and through, complete with leaks, ageing 1275 A-series engine and gokart handling.
She's currently buried outside under 12 inches of snow, but I've bought a spare front subframe so that I can get the motors mounted and refurbish the front running gear over winter. I found a couple of Prestolite 7" motors a while back, via an ebay contact. They're rated at 130A continuous at 36V. I've advanced them by eight degrees and plan to run them at around 120V each.
The motors have actually been shortened by around 40mm since I took the photo below. This was done by removing the internal fan, and machining back the alloy "legs" on the drive end. It was the only way I could get the two motors to fit across the subframe and also gave me a decent length of plain shaft to mount the drive sprocket on. I'm not going to worry about whether it's unbalanced the motors yet...
Each of the motors will drive a chain sprocket mounted on the inboard ends of the half shafts, so no gearbox, no diff. I'm busy making up two pairs of bearing carriers that will each support a short shaft with a sprocket on one end and a CV joint on the other. I'll post some photos in a few days when I've got something worth showing.
Now to the first of many daft questions: I want to keep this conversion as simple (and hopefully cheap) as possible. I've been looking at options for providing vacuum and 12V power and the simplest way I can see to do that would be to use the tail shaft on one motor to drive a mechanical vacuum pump, and use the tail shaft on the other to drive a lightweight alternator. The question is, if I have the motors wired in series to a single controller, is the small difference in load on each motor likely to cause any problems?
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