Hey Tom, it’s always been that way in dealerships, that’s why I left them back in the 70’s and went to trucks, buses and heavy equipment. The big problem in the dealers today is they pay only 50% time for warranty work, which is most of the jobs.
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My thoughts exactly Chris.
Its so good to see an up and coming company taking a rational approach to EVs.
Woodgas feeding a small 2 or 4 cylinder generator at constant RPM would really be ideal.
And the fact that their promoting restoring the old trucks instead of adding to the already populated vehicle market is a really good approach.
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I tried spinning the Japanese motor from the Citroën C-Zero in a lathe at 1,500 rpm—hmm… it only generates about 50 V… What now? Well, you know me—I took the electric motor apart to look at its “guts.” It’s an 8-pole motor… after examining the winding configuration, I discovered that the four windings for a single phase are connected in parallel; this allows it to generate high current at low voltage. However, I need the opposite: high voltage and lower current. Will I need an additional transformer? No! I undid the lacing cord holding the windings together and separated the individual coils; I plan to connect them in series. This will give me four times the voltage—200 V. If I spin the motor at 3,000 rpm, the phase-to-phase voltage should be 400 V, which is ideal.
I’ll let you know how it turns out…
permanent magnet rotor
animation of the operating principle
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In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t know how to do any of that. In fact I have spent 3 hours trying to get the wheel bearing out of the steering knuckle on my chevy 4x4 and it’s still stuck in like it was welded. Seems to be a common problem on You tube as well so I only feel a little useless.
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Hello Tone,
I agree with Tom, it must be nice to be smart.
You might want to start a thread about the motors (not that I’m trying to tell you what to do), because this information seems very useful and would be hard to find later on.
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TomH. an air hammer is your friend in rust country. Have all of the possible bits.
The knuckles on these are aluminum. Heat is not an option. Smacking the sides of. the knuckle HARD with the ball end of a hammer like you can do with steel forgings is probably not a good thing either. Ha! Use fine threaded bolts and nuts as your pusher tools. And grease the threads!
S.U.
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I have drawn a wiring diagram for this motor; on the right is the factory configuration (with the four windings of each phase connected in parallel), while on the left is a series connection of these windings. In reality, the windings are connected in a star configuration; the factory wiring diagram might be confusing because it shows two star points, but this arrangement is used because physically connecting all the windings to a single star point would be very difficult.
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tone, professor doctor in science, art and crafts…what i have always said…
impressive what my friend tone always makes…
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I did it on a traverse and beat on it for like a day, and it didn’t work. I used a method similar to what steve showed. Or I put the bolts back in but not all the way, then used my cheap 5 dollar HF air hammer from the backside, with a socket to hold it in place and it pounded them out enough to get wd-40 in the gap(do the backside too), and then tightened it up to work it in, and repeated. It was something that stupid simple. I did 3 of them but I don’t recall hacking a lug off.
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I had six hours total of trying everything the internet had to offer. Part of the problem was the bearing disintegrated and the wheel mounting plate and bottom of the bearing race came off so I had nothing to pull against. Finally just hacked it off with an angle grinder and cut off disk and managed to do so without screwing up the face of the steering knuckle. Never knew rust was such a good adhesive.
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Steel bearing race and the aluminum knuckle freeze hard. I hope you put anti-seize grease on the new one before you installed it or else it will be the same story or worse next time. I had to cut one out like that on the explorer I think.
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I promised to report on the performance of the automotive electric motor with permanent magnets in the rotor… it is working excellently; the Jenbacher drives it smoothly, and it seems to run more easily at the same output power—theoretically, the drive system should be 15–20% more efficient. I configured a new operating table for the wind turbine, and it runs according to that; it also operates without issues in MPPT mode.
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thanks for report,Tone.
that seems to be good method to raise alternator voltage without rewinding stator.
coincidentally right now i am doing similar thing to a electric scooter motor (60v 1000w) for wind turbine.
preparing for dark months.
the motor has nine .5 mm wires in parallel, so there is just one option of rewiring - 3S3P.
spun it on lathe at various RPM, the results were excellent, better than i expected. ))
decent amps, not much of voltage sag.
at 380RPM and 9 ohm load, it was 84v and 12a.
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Two pic’s from last weekends camping trip, the fall is pretty cosy when i think about it.
“Tivedens nationalpark”
Sometimes our brains need to take a break, just be there (well, i snuck a book along with me, 800 pages, the early development of gas engines… my brain gets a little restless sometimes)
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Tone, I was thinking about my saw motor now when sawing gengas wood, does putting capacitors on it matter, I don’t think we are paying for reactive power?
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Jan, I have 25,000 boardfeet of dimentional lumber to be planed. Are you up for it? 
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You can borrow the planer when I’m done if you want.
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Thank you! That’s a generous offer, Jan.
I will have to sleep on it until spring. Snow can be here any day now.
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