Electric 32

This is the original E-32.  I got up and went down to the DoNut shop a couple of Sat. mornings ago. There I was, happily riding around oggling hot rods, when this guy walks up and seys, "how much ya got in it?". I said ,"I guess about $1000 bux.". That's usually the end of the conversions, but this guy persisted, "would you take $1000 bucks for it right now?". "yeah, I guess so", I answered (like what was I going to say). The next thing I know I'm standing there with $1000 bucks and he's riding away on my car. When I got home I started adding up what I had in that thing and I'm beginning to think he got a pretty good deal.



 

The first thing I did to get started building E-ROD#2 was to go out and buy one of those electric scooters. It had 24 volt batteries, a controller, twist grip speed control, a 24 volt motor, a battery charger, every thing I needed and the best part, it was only $160 dollars. I hurried up and made a frame and transferred all the scooter stuff to it. Well the first thing I found, was that the motor was way under powered, it wouldn't even start out with me on it.. The scoter was advertised to go 17 MPH, I didn't need all that speed so I figured a gear box was required...... TA-DA, I got some gears and made this thing. My gear box is about 3:1 which made the overall step down about 20:1. Now it had plenty of power, in  fact since I was driving only the left rear wheel, every time I opened the throttle, it would rare up and make a sharp right. That's good, right? Well the bad news was the top speed was a blazing 4 MPH. Fast enough for tooling around a swap meet, but getting there is another story. When I took it to its first swap meet, I discovered another short coming, I only made it down a couple of rows and it ran out of juice. The batteries are way to small (AH wise). All right, new bigger batteries on order.



While I was ordering batteries I ran across this transaxel.  Voltage 24, AMPs 4.4, RPM 170-182, gear ratio 20:1. Perfect right?



Whoops! A little to wide. How am I to get that big transaxel in that little frame?



TA-DA again, This is the mount I came up with.


 

Here it is with the transaxel all mounted and the slicks on that I picked up. You know this thing is getting way over budget all ready.



This is the body I'm going to use. Another swap meet find.


 

Another motorcycle seat. I find that a big seat like this beat the heck out of a bicycle seat, after a couple of hours. Notice I've already got the trunk/toolbox on it. Yellow, humm we'll have to do something about that.


 

.It's starting to come together. All I need now are the batteries. This is a pretty good look at the frame. I bent it up out of 3/4" tubing. You can see I used the whole scooter front end. I had to mount the thing on 2" blocks to get the fork ends off  the ground. The steering, A piece of angle (1X1X1") bolted to a fork leg, connected through two rose joints and a length of 5/16" rod to a bell crank. I won't describe the front end because I hate it, the first thing I'm going to do is make another one. Two  pieces of 1.5" angle (facing each other, separated by 3/4") run from the rear to a 3/4" cross member welded about midway across the frame. That's something to bolt the scooter front end to,  the 3/4" seat tube and 3/4X1.5" angle brace are welded to this as well.


 

 While I was waiting for the batteries I had the frame and front wheels powder coated.  Funny thing happened when I was trying it out. I stuck the old batteries in and was running it up and down the street, I discovered that it does great wheelies, so I was practicing my wheelie technique when I happened to look back and there was a police car following. The poor guy in it probably would have given me a ticket but he was to embarrassed. Can you see him telling his boss (or his buddies) he gave an old man on a wheelchair a ticket for doing wheelies?



IT WORKS!!! You know, buying that scooter was an inspiration. I was able to use everything but the motor and batteries, actually I probably could have used the motor too. I wasn't sure about the controller but it seems happy, 24 volts is 24 volts no matter how long it lasts. Of course the motor I'm using is a little more powerful (more current), but they probably current limit the controller. I takes quite a while to charge using the scooter charger.  but hey, what did I expect?

Update: 12/13/02

I just found out that my precious, cheap controller was shorting out my expensive batteries. I bought a new bigger charger off Ebay

Controller:$100.00

Charger:$50.00

I guess the only thing I’ve got left from the scooter now are the handlebars, maybe it wasn’t such an inspiration after all.

Here's the finished product ... get real ... if you know anything about hot rods/rodders you know something like this is never finished.

here's a shot of it all loaded up on the trailer I built for it, hooked up to the beemer  I drag it around with and the little Uhaul trailer I found. I won't mention the new wheels or the fuzzy dice, you can't see the chrome tail pipes.
 
 


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