Are you ready to… Save Money On Your Fuel Bills Build Your Own Electric Car Or Truck By Les and Jane Oke ©Les and Jane Oke- 2008 1 Legal stuff our lawyers made us say. Let’s get this out of the way first, so we can get to the good stuff… No Part of this document shall be reproduced or resold without permission from the authors. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The authors of this book assume no responsibility for accidents incurred while following the enclosed directions. There is always a certain amount of risk involved in any human building project. The following plans have worked for others in the past, but we assume no financial or legal responsibility should you not follow the directions exactly. Please be careful. These instructions as recorded have worked for others in the past and should work for you too. Use this document at your own risk. We know you can do this, as we have done all of the things outlined in this book, and many others have too. But if you are for any reason not comfortable with the procedures then ask a competent trades person (mechanic) to assist you. Contact us at our website and we will help you. The building advice given in this book is up to date and as accurate as we could possibly find. Of course, some (experts?) will disagree with our findings. That is fine. We know this system works and it will work for you. Of course as with any lifestyle change it does take time. We don’t believe in providing anything but the best advice we can. We want you to succeed and following the plan that has worked for our family for over 30 years and for other families is a great place to start. Don’t be afraid to contact us about anything. Use the contact form at www.convert-to-ev.com If you don’t understand something, just send us an email. We promise to respond promptly. 2 This book is intended to be easy to read and easy to navigate. Our purpose is to provide you with the very best guidance setting up your own Electric Car Conversion. This text is designed to be read from cover to cover, step by step in order to achieve that goal. You can bookmark later for your own reference, but for now read the whole thing. You will notice a number of text links that appear in blue, just like the preceding one, throughout the book. For those of you not familiar with text links, just by clicking on them, they will take you directly to a web page on the internet for you to read, or to a bookmarked section of this book, such as the following. You have to be connected to the internet when you are viewing the document for the text links to work. 3 *** IMPORTANT*** Please Read This First If you have any Problems, Questions or Concerns about this book, please contact us immediately. Use the Contact form on our website or you can send me a personal email at [email protected] We want you to know that you are important to us. Your success is important to us. That makes your questions important to us. Your total satisfaction with this book is our aim. Please remember that it does take some time to digest new information. There are times when it takes me 2 or even 3 times reading a book before I ‘get it’. You are not alone if you don’t get it the first time through. This can be a very complicated subject to understand, especially if it is new to you. Take your time and let us help you if you need it. We are here to help you and we will walk you through every step if you need us to. 4 Table of Contents Preface – What will you need to get started and how will you begin. Chapter One – Finding a vehicle to convert. Using Cars or trucks is covered and where to find them. Chapter Two – Electric Motors, where to find them, AC vs DC, Advantages , Transmission considerations. Finding free electric motors is covered too. Helpful websites too. Chapter Three – Controllers for motors is covered, where to find them and which one is best. Chapter Four – Finding free batteries for your electric car conversion, how do you figure out the overall range of your vehicle too. Chapter Five – Many other components are necessary to make your electric car conversion work, we explore the diverse list of components. A parts list is covered too. 5 Chapter Six -Getting started with your conversion. Let’s take off the exhaust and the fuel system. Let’s carefully take out that old gas motor too. Measuring once, and getting it right. What about the power brakes and power steering? Chapter Seven - Electric motor mounting is next. Where does it go and how is it supported? Chapter Eight - Battery positioning is next, safety and layout considerations are all covered. How are they held in place? Supports and laying out the design. Wire routing is covered. Chapter Nine – Final layout of the controller and charger. Schematic drawings to get it right. Chapter Ten – Starting up your vehicle the first time. Safety concerns and having an expert check it out first. Let’s go. 6 Our Mission- Your Purpose And A bit of History… Our mission is very simple- we will show you how to build your own electric car with detailed plans and pictures that any handyman or woman could follow. Congratulations on your investment in How to Build An Electric Car. We know you will have as much fun building your own as we did. A Bit of History Back in 1994 our family moved off the grid to use only Renewable Energy to power our home. That decision has proven to be a good one for our family both financially and environmentally. We use mainly wind generators and solar panels that we built ourselves. You can read about these building projects later. After much research into the design and building of wind generators and battery systems it hit me one day like a brick. Why not use the same renewable energy technology to run our car, our off road vehicle or any vehicle for that matter? We had found sources of free industrial batteries, inexpensive DC motors and simple building techniques that anyone could use. The same sources could be used to build an electric car. All the best, Les and Jane 7 The Building Begins This is not an original idea, to build an electric car; the idea has existed for many years. This is, however an original plan for building an electric car using inexpensive sources of parts and simple building techniques. One problem we met with was finding larger DC motors that were powerful enough to run a car, but we did find them and we will share them with you shortly. You should know that the process can get technical at times. For that reason we, again recommend reading and rereading the plans until you get it. If you need help a friendly local mechanic or in our case the local high school shop (tech) teacher was a big help in designing this vehicle. 8 Build Your Own Electric Car Challenge Here at our off grid home we are always looking for new and better ways to use renewable energy in our lives. We took on this project as a challenge to all of those people who said it could not be done. We want to share this information with as many people as we can; the suppression of knowledge in the area of alternative fuels for vehicles has gone on too long. That is why we are in the energy crunch we now face. The electric car is the answer we think. You will find out why very soon. We had seen electric cars and hybrid electric vehicles on the roads for a few years and we knew that with our experience in the field of Renewable Energy, especially DC motors and battery systems that we could make it work. What Will You Learn? • Convert your car to electric for under $500 • Sources of free industrial batteries • Safe installation of batteries and all parts • Documented conversion of our vehicle with pictures • Sources of DC motors and controllers • Sources of Electric Car Conversion kits • Where to find the right car or truck to start with • An off road electric vehicle conversion • Your electric car will travel 50 mph • You will be able to drive 200 miles between charges • Renewable Energy charging options 9 Parts List To Get Started You will need a minimum amount of tools at the very least, a small work space area (we used a 10 foot by 10 foot shop for most of our work). It doesn’t need to be very large. Tools Needed Jigsaw, small grinder, various wrenches, socket set, various screw drivers, #80 sand paper. Work bench, welding equipment and a hoist and a big pile of initiative mostly. Simple Wiring Diagram 10