(Somehow this post was accidentally deleted from the blog. It was originally posted in January.)
I’ve received a number of questions about the electrical vehicle project. Last semester the students did planning and preparation for this project. This semester, starting on Saturday, January 17, the students got started with the dirty part of the project, removing the gasoline engine. The Engine is now out. In a sense that was the easy part of the project because obviously it has to be done. On the other hand, the students learned a lot about front suspensions and other parts of the car from their experience disassembling the car.
The students decided to remove the engine and transmission as a unit since it will then be easier to mate the electric motor to the transmission on a workbench. This required them to disassemble of much of the front suspension (tie rods, control arms, etc.) in order to remove the axles and free the transmission of the wheels. Then they had a choice of lifting the engine/transmission assembly out the top or raising the car and lowering the engine/transmission out the bottom. The engine mounts face downward, making a bottom exit more obvious, but then we would have to arrange for a lift. Instead the students removed two of the engine mounts from both the engine and the body and then used a “cherry picker” (a type of crane) to lift the engine/transmission out the top.
In the photo above you can now see that the car is (temporarily) human powered!
I’ll continue to report on the progress of this project and other matters in future posts.
Some decisions now need to be made such as exactly which brand and type of battery to use. Your comments are welcome.