Hi, I'm a 20 year old student who is very interested in eletric vehicle conversions. I'll be studying and therefore poor for the next three years which is the major opponent to doing a conversion, but i'm planning to do one as soon as i am finished. I'm thinking of doing a mazda RX7 since they look pretty nice, are resonably aerodynamic and the rotory engines have a tendency to stop working (meaning i can pick up a donor car pretty cheap). I was just wondering what kind of things I can do between now and then to make doing a conversion easier. I have never done much work on cars but am pretty practically minded and know i could probably pick it up pretty quickly. What i had in mind was one (or several) of the following, just wondering how helpful you think they would be?
1. Do a smaller cheaper project on a go-kart or power-assisted push bike to learn the basics of conversions which hopefully would scale up to a full sized EV.
2. Tag along and help with someone else's EV conversion, helping where i can and learning in the process (anyone want a spare pair of hands on weekends?)
3. Do a course in basic car mechanics and/or welding (any suggestions?)
4. Buy a wrecked car and take it apart to sell for parts (in order to get used to dissassembling motors and how everything works on a ICE). This would hopefully end up in me breaking even money wise or making a small profit(is this viable/wise or too painful for the reward?)
5. Work very slowly over the project over the 3 years and buy parts individually as i can afford them. This option sounds good except for the amount of mistakes i would ineviatable make going straight into a conversion without knowing much about them. I'd rather learn in a cheaper less frustrating way and i'd like the final product to be good quality.
Just wondering how useful you think each of those options are and whether you have any other suggestions? It would be great if anyone doing a conversion wouldn't mind having me tag along every once in a while (I live next to Maquarie Uni but don't mind travelling).
Cheers.
Matt
ZEVA
1:16pm, Wed, 12 Sep 2007
Hi Matt,
Ah the student years, I know how you feel The Mazda RX7 would be a great car to convert, especially the series 1-3 since they were nice and light, and are a bit of a classic now. In response to your points:
1) Learning on a smaller scale would be useful, and much cheaper than a roadgoing EV! It will still end up costing you a few grand though to make an electric scooter or similar.
2) Helping out a little with someone else's conversion is definitely useful. You might want to get in touch with the Sydney AEVA club ( http://sydneyaeva.googlepages.com/index.html ) to find out who's got conversions on the go. In fact I'd recommend heading along to a meeting or two for a chat with people who've done it before, and taking a ride in their EVs for inspiration!
3) Not sure about this one, a lot of what you would learn in a mechanics course is the stuff coming out of the car anyway! But maybe just to learn correct disassembly procedure. Depending on how you do the conversion, you don't necessarily need to weld anything, but such skills are always useful.
4) There's a LOT of work involved in disassembling a car and selling the parts - I'd only do this if you think you'd enjoy the process!
5) I wouldn't recommend starting until you feel comfortable with the conversion process, but it does take a surprisingly long time to convert a car anyway (lots of research, designing, waiting for parts, etc!) so you may want to look at buying the donor car a year or so before you were hoping to finish, and taking your time. Things like batteries you always want to purchase last, since they have a finite calendar life, and their technology is improving rapidly.
As another option, you could approach your uni and see if they might be interested to fund an EV conversion project. (The car would then belong to the uni, but would be very good experience and is great exposure for EVs.) It's quite a popular project at unis these days, with climate change being so topical.
Good luck!
Jens
5:39pm, Sun, 13 Jan 2008
Hi Matt
Doing EV conversion yourself is a fraught and expensive way to learn the technology. There may be a way through to doing a conversion on the cheap (say, "an electric car on a beer budget"). The quote is not original, it comes from Darin and Ivan's Project Forkenswift. In a nut-shell, they bought a second hand forlift for $500, stripped the electric motors, wiring and controllers and on-sold it for $360. They bought two old rusty Suzuki Swifts, stripped and cannibalised as they went (selling parts to fund the project as well) until they had a good donor car. They begged and received cast-off deep cycle batteries, testing each one as they went and selling the duds for the scrap value. The final product was an EV Swift running on 48 volts with a 200A current limitation for the princely sum of Canadian $960. It runs around their town at about 50 km/hr, and they are very happy with it.
The Mazda RX7 would be a great car to convert, especially the series 1-3 since they were nice and light, and are a bit of a classic now. In response to your points:
