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47 Posts
/cue sniggers from the Peanut Gallery
We have a Cox ride-on lawnmower that has been sitting in our yard for a number of years, slowly decomposing. It's been sitting for so long that I can't actually remember why it was parked in the first place, but recent problems with our John Deere ride-on (intermittent starting, which is a real bugger when you've loaded it onto a trailer and driven 20 minutes down to road to cut your vacant block) have spurred me into action! I suppose it was one of those 'gunnadoo' projects of my step-fathers, but they almost never get finished.
A cursory lookover shows it is a belt-driven mower, single cut, nfi about the transmission, probably hydrostatic or something (forward and reverse with the one pedal). Step-father wants the motor to put into yet another ride-on, which is currently occupying valuable real estate in the garage. So he can keep it.
Current plan (although open to suggestions) is a two-motor setup: one driving the blades, and one for propulsion. The property it is to be used on is 'flat' but with a east-west tilt, with about a 1.5M drop from boundry to boundry (~20M). No hills or gullies, and about 1000M². DC Sepex motors seem to be the go (although major has suggested a 'cumulative compound'), as they'll try to maintain speed. Batteries were going to be deep-cycle PBa, but if I'm only going to get 300 or so cycles out of them I might as well go Lithium straight up.
I'm not going to be mowing hay with this thing, so I was hoping to keep the blade motor to ~2kW. I was hoping to direct-drive the blades, but I read in other threads that it might not be such a great idea, as there's no 'slip' if I hit something. Speed isn't a big issue, so the driving motor could be maybe half a kW? A 48 volt system is the target.
Can anyone who's converted their own mower give me any advice or suggestions before I go ahead and start spending money/pulling things apart?
Cheers.
We have a Cox ride-on lawnmower that has been sitting in our yard for a number of years, slowly decomposing. It's been sitting for so long that I can't actually remember why it was parked in the first place, but recent problems with our John Deere ride-on (intermittent starting, which is a real bugger when you've loaded it onto a trailer and driven 20 minutes down to road to cut your vacant block) have spurred me into action! I suppose it was one of those 'gunnadoo' projects of my step-fathers, but they almost never get finished.
A cursory lookover shows it is a belt-driven mower, single cut, nfi about the transmission, probably hydrostatic or something (forward and reverse with the one pedal). Step-father wants the motor to put into yet another ride-on, which is currently occupying valuable real estate in the garage. So he can keep it.
Current plan (although open to suggestions) is a two-motor setup: one driving the blades, and one for propulsion. The property it is to be used on is 'flat' but with a east-west tilt, with about a 1.5M drop from boundry to boundry (~20M). No hills or gullies, and about 1000M². DC Sepex motors seem to be the go (although major has suggested a 'cumulative compound'), as they'll try to maintain speed. Batteries were going to be deep-cycle PBa, but if I'm only going to get 300 or so cycles out of them I might as well go Lithium straight up.
I'm not going to be mowing hay with this thing, so I was hoping to keep the blade motor to ~2kW. I was hoping to direct-drive the blades, but I read in other threads that it might not be such a great idea, as there's no 'slip' if I hit something. Speed isn't a big issue, so the driving motor could be maybe half a kW? A 48 volt system is the target.
Can anyone who's converted their own mower give me any advice or suggestions before I go ahead and start spending money/pulling things apart?
Cheers.
And this type of overload is why I suggested a compound motor. A SepEx would work well if you have a controller on it. But if you want to use the blade motor without a controller, you should use the compound motor, like you often find on forklifts for the pumps.
