First Test Drive of the Electric Drive
The rain let up for a little while today so I decided to take the car for a spin. This is the first time the car has left the garage under electric.
The batteries have not been charged and I have no real controls set up yet for it. I am using an old game controller joystick for the throttle and it is not mounted. It was acting up a bit though. You can see that when I got out on the road and it quit pulling till I messed with it and made it start pulling again. I got up to 35mph with the electric. There was enough traffic I decided to pull out with the gas motor and just let it idle in neutral just in case I needed it.
The gearing is not really good the way it is set up. It has 4:1 gearing right now but if I go to 5:1 gearing it should pull much better than it does now. The chain was jumping a bit at the start. I don’t really have it adjusted or even lined up perfectly so that is expected.
Overall the car is doing pretty good and I am happy with how it is running. This weekend I will start putting the controls together and actually finishing things up with it so I can start driving the car again.
Rick,
Very impressive!
Congrats
Trevor
March 27th, 2009 at 10:35 pmDumb question….Why didn’t you run the electric motor to the extra pulley on the crank?? Seems like it would have been less difficult.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 amIf the motor was mounted to the crank then it would have to spin the gasoline motor all the time. The way it is now I could have the motor off and the transmission in neutral and run on electric only. It would be possible to mount it either way I just chose this setup to fit the way I drive.
April 3rd, 2009 at 8:40 pm