[MattsAwesomeStuff]

I'd like your opinion on a motor.

My opinion is that they're charging 4x what it's worth.

Go to, or call up a local forklift repair yard and ask for old DC motors they may have sitting around. You'll get something better for closer to $200.

 

[MattsAwesomeStuff]

I have been struggling to find a forklift yard locally.

Dunno if you wanna say where you are, but... the thing about forklifts is literally everywhere in the industrial world has to have a place that services them in just about every city over 50,000. Everyone needs forklifts, everyone needs a place to fix them.

I have a sweetheart deal with mine. They'll move a forklift up on jackstands for me, outside the gate, and I can come help myself to it at night over a week or two, gutting what I want off it. And they don't charge me for anything I take. And I can occasionally borrow tools when there's something I don't have big enough tools to tear up. And they leave me deserts sometimes. The tradeoff is I show them pictures of what I'm working on.

 

[MattsAwesomeStuff]

I looked up repair shops instead of salvage yards, and I found a few local ones and sent out some messages.

Bingo.

There aren't really any boneyards for forklifts because it's all proprietary shit and not worth fixing.

But guys who repair them will often buy clunkers for their batteries, because the most common servicing issue is some old piece of shit that was deep discharged too much needing new batteries and they can only afford $3k, not $40k.

Also, service lights and cracked dashes and stuff. Contactors, power cables. Foot-sized Anderson connectors, fuses, all get stripped out. The rest usually sold or given to some lower tier scrapper who'll haul it away for free, use the steel salvage to break even on gas money, and strip out the copper and aluminum to make it worth their time.

Unless a place services the same make and model of motor repeatedly (big cities), they won't bother to use shelfspace for them. They'll have a few "just in case" in the back, from a decade ago when they thought they might actually use them, and some pump motors that they might actually put into lifts once in a while, but not be attached to any of them. If they can get salvage price for them, that's probably more than they were getting from their scrapper.

 

[MattsAwesomeStuff]

So, 48V motor is what I need?

Series-wound motors don't really have voltage limits. They just have the voltage that the truck was run at. I'm skeptical if there's even a difference between a motor from a 24v lift and a 48v lift. I dunno, maybe there is.

Either way you'll be running them at several multiples of their original voltage.

You need a motor the right size. With a light car like that you might pull off a 9" motor, but 11" is probably better. Generally anything that diameter will be the right ballpark size.

It sounds like battery will be the "not cheap" part of my or any project.
How much of a battery pack do I need?

You have quite modest battery requirements.

You only want 30 mile range. For your light car, perhaps 250 watt-hours/mile, so, 7500 watt-hours. That's incredibly small, you won't find anything that small in an OEM EV.

A Chevy Volt pack is quite small, and even it is 16,000 watt-hours. I'd go with one of those.

 

[MattsAwesomeStuff]

Dude, Where are you located and if you're not too far will you sell me a motor?!

Canada.

So, no.

I'm in the Los Angeles, CA area and am having trouble locating one. When I call repair shops or forklift scrappers they all seem confused and say something like "No, we repair motors, we don't sell motors" like I'm crazy for asking.

Yeah, motor rewinding places aren't somewhere I'd suggest. They don't have motors in inventory that I've ever seen (though I haven't seen many).

...

Maybe try Bakersfield

So, problem with Bakersfield, and Southern California in general, with free, is Mexicans.

Where I'm from, everyone is generally well-off, well-educated, and there's not a lot of poverty. So there's not a large culture of squeezing every drop of value out of something. There's a high amount of waste.

For example, around here you can fully furnish an apartment, every day, for free, with good stuff, just from Freecycle or free facebook or our Craigslist equivalent. People here throw away appliances not because they're broken, but because they're the wrong color. Perfectly working, expensive items have negative value because people just want them gone. Ditto for couches, kitchen tables, etc. Back in the day, most of my friends bought a new computer every year. If you were okay with a 1-year old computer, they were just going straight to a landfill.

That doesn't exist in places with poverty, or a lot of illegal immigrants that can't participate in the formal economy, or where a large portion of the population grew up with very little. People don't just leave money on the table like that. If there's $20 to be made, someone's out there making that $20.

When I lived in SoCal (and Bakersfield), there was basically nothing anywhere for free. For a scrounger, that upset me.

The flip side of this, is that there is a heavy underground scrapper market for everything down there. Up here you'd have no choice of buying something really cheap, because it's not worth anyone's time to administer selling it. You can even ask and offer to take it away for free, and most people don't even want the hassle. We have giant scrap metal dumpsters here, that people PAY to have someone haul away for them, as if free metal is a waste product (because, it is). But down there (and, in worse parts of town up here I'm sure), if you just ask around, you'll get hookups for everything. If you put out to the right people that you want a forklift motor, and you'll pay $50 over scrap value for it... the hunt is on. They'll find you one. Zero chance of that ever happening up here. You'll have to be where scrappers go though. Places that might throw away scrap metal perhaps, or scrapyards itself, if they have a posting board.

You have almost no chance of getting one for free, but you have a great chance of there actually being a market for "slightly above scrap value components".

Also, one thing perhaps I, and perhaps others neglect to consider... is that some of us are just socially charismatic and persuasive, in unconventional ways. This isn't a cocktail mingle event, but lots of people on the bluer collar of town have their equivalent of it, and, knowing how to read people, inspire them to go a little out of their way and a little ways around what their lawyer might say, to find common ground about what parts of your project they find sympathy with and excitement in, is a huge part of getting this done. I talked my way into every single recycled tool battery in my half of the province being put in a bin with my name and number on it. It's probably not reasonable to suggest that because I was persuasive, that anyone else could be in a similar way.

A common thing people say is to just show up with a case of beer and talk to the guys in the back. They'll eliminate what you want from the waste stream without the front office having to approve liability and why the sales team isn't involved. I don't really even know how to do that, or to start that conversation. Do I bring the beer with me? Do I leave it in the car? Do I drop it off later? Won't you just get run off the property if you show up at the back where the maintennance guys are? And yet that's probably the most common piece of advice for blue collar currency for uncommon requests. The guys who can work that into conversation are a whole other tier above me. I have a feeling this power arrives when your beard turns grey.