Ray's EV

Ray's Stealth Buggy	I may not change the world, but at least I won't be part of the problem!

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maasr@cox.net

Welcome!

So why did I decide to build an electric car? Well, my beautiful and charming wife Mary bugged me (no pun intended) for years to get rid of my 1970 VW Beetle, but I couldn't bear to do it. I still think the original air-cooled Beetle was the best designed car ever built. But it really was beyond repair - it was so rusty one of the fenders fell off the car just sitting there in my back yard. I had to do something with it.

I've been interested in alternate fuels for quite some time. In fact, I seem to remember doing a paper on ethanol fuel for a college class around the mid-1980's. I had never really considered an EV before - I was more interested in ethanol or hydrogen. But even though I do own a 2004 Explorer that will burn E85, there are no ethanol stations around here where I can get the stuff! And hydrogen is still a long way from being practical.

There are many websites dedicated to Electric Vehicles - but there are several I need to single out that really got me going on my project. First, there's Drive Electric. John Q. McMillian, a former Air Force officer, has assembled a team of experts to design and build an efficient, two-passenger, affordable EV - but before that, he built a variety of EVs, starting with an electric go-cart when he was a kid! How cool is that! Second, check out Wilderness EV - these guys sell kits for do-it-yourselfers. The kits include the electric motor, controller, charger, adapter, and all the parts you need to build your EV except the batteries, for a very reasonable price. They also build EVs for sale. Finally, there's Robert Q. Riley Enterprises, which sells plans for people who are interested in building their own cars. I had already bought plans for the Doran, which is a pretty cool car, but it is a three-wheeler with a custom-built chassis and I'm not ready to tackle that. So I bought plans for the Town Car, a VW-based hybrid that is supposed to get up to 100 mpg. This is a nice set of plans. It not only has a fully-illustrated bound 8x10 assembly manual, it has a detailed blueprint for each stage of construction. The ad says this car was featured in the movie Total Recall. I'm going to look for it the next time I see the movie.

What do I hope to accomplish?

I mean, what are my primary goals?

My car must be simple to maintain. I agree 100% with John McMillian - I think it should be a crime for Detroit (or anyone else) to design a car that you have to roll the engine forward to get to the spark plugs (my Lumina) or remove the gas tank to replace the fuel pump (pretty much any car). Anyone with opposable thumbs and a $29.00 K-Mart tool set should be able to easily maintain their own automobile.

The car should be fast enough to drive safely on the Interstate.

I want to have a 100 mile range. This will require designing and installing some kind of gas or diesel powered internal combustion engine to supplement the batteries. Initially I'll probably use a small generator with a rectifier.

I want be able to use my battery pack as an alternate power source in case of an emergency (I live on the Florida Gulf Coast where everybody has a generator but no one can get gas for them when you need it, like after a hurricane).

Long term goals - I want to install a solar/wind system and be able to power my home and recharge my car with it. I'd like to try out a fuel cell, if those ever come down to a reasonable price. Someday I want to replace my lead-acid batteries with lithium-ion or even a newer technology, but right now those are too expensive and/or not available to the general public. Maybe after I retire I'll have time to build a really nice body for the car.

Getting Started

The first thing I had to do was to get the VW into the garage. This was harder than I thought it was going to be (I'm sure my bro Stoney can vouch for this, as he had helped me drag the car across the back yard when the right front wheel was locked up). But by the end of the day I would have made Jeff Foxworthy proud - after I got it rolling, I towed it to the driveway with my riding lawnmower. As you can see from the pictures below, the car is pretty much a rust bucket - so much so that I couldn't get the body off in one piece. I ended up cutting it off with my saws-all and an air chisel.

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Floor Pans & Wheels

Uh-oh, looks like the floor pans are pretty much a goner. I ordered a new set of pans from California Pacific J-Bugs (about $70.00 each as I recall). In the meantime, I have to do something about the wheels - they're as bad as the body. I decided against getting some big custom wheels. For one thing, I'm too cheap to spring for nice wheels. Also, I'm going for range here, and the original VW wheels are about the best you can do for that - tall & skinny, and not too heavy. So I called my friend Paul Daigneault (coincidentally the previous owner of the VW) and we took a ride to Harbor Freight Tools in Pensacola. This place is a guy's paradise. I've got the credit card today, Honey! Among other toys, I bought my MIG welder for $119.00, and a sandblaster for $15.00! It only has an 18-ounce reservoir for whatever abrasive you're sandblasting with, but it works great. The glass beads & walnut shells they wanted to sell me were real expensive, though, and in case I didn't tell you - I'm cheap, so I went to Ace Hardware, bought a 100-pound bag of coarse sand for $3.99, sifted it through an old window screen, and blasted away with no problem. Below are before-and-after shots of the wheels. I picked up the cheezy plastic chrome hubcaps at Big Lots for $10.00. That's $10.00 for all of them, not each.

The Body

I've been thinking about what kind of body I want to put on my car. The Town Car plans have detailed instructions on how to build the body, but it requires many, many hours of painstaking work and not a little artistic talent. Since I have no artistic talent, I started looking for some kind of body I could just buy and bolt onto the car. I logged on to TheSamba.Com and found a rather distressed dunebuggy body in Fernandina Beach that the guy let me have for $100. Why would I drive an 800 mile round trip to get a $100 dunebuggy body, you ask? Well, there aren't as many dunebuggys around as there used to be. And if you do find one, chances are it was made for a shortened VW chassis, as the majority of them were. I need all the room I can get for batteries, so I wanted one that would fit a full-length VW chassis. Since I couldn't find what I wanted locally, Mary and I made the trip on Memorial Day Weekend. We hadn't been to the East Coast in awhile. Fernandina Beach is a nice, laid-back town. We had dinner at a really good seafood restaurant and saw the Atlantic Ocean. I know the body looks rough, but I'm thinking of painting it flat black and calling it the Stealth Buggy (hence the name of this web page).

Welding is not as easy as it looks!

15 Jul 2007 - OK, now that I've started documenting, I'll try to remember to put in the dates. Today I welded the driver's side floor pan. I did the passenger's side pan a couple of days ago. I found out that welding is an art form. As you already know, I'm not very artistic. But the welds seem to be holding, even if they're not pretty.

The parts are here . . .

1 - 3 Sep 2007 (Labor Day Weekend) - Well, most of them anyway - the motor, battery charger, controller, about 40 feet of really thick wire, and various other electronic parts. I had a little trouble with the motor - it was damaged in shipment and had to be sent back, but it has been returned and seems to be OK now. The shaft coupler was just a tad too small to fit on the motor, so I had to send that back. I have my new brakes, wheel cylinders, master cylinder, shocks, brake lines, CV joint boots, transmission gaskets and mounts. My friends Dan and John at Gulf Coast Tire & Automotive ground the brake drums for me, and they're ready to go back on. Guess I'd better get back to work (sigh).

Talk About A Rust Bucket

I thought I'd get started on something easy. The front shocks don't look too bad - just a nut at the top and a bolt at the bottom, right? Yeah - rusted solid. Out comes the saws-all to cut through the top nut. The bottom one wasn't too bad, but the bushing didn't come off with the old shock. It was (you guessed it) rusted solid. The air chisel turned out to be the best tool for that job. On to the rear axles. I took the drums off a couple of weeks ago - that was an experience! Those 36mm axle nuts did not want to come off. They broke my 1/2 inch drive Craftsman rachet. My impact wrench wouldn't budge them. I even tried heat. Finally I used a special tool (pictured below) in a way that I don't think it was intended to be used - I held it on the nut and beat the living daylights out of it with my trusty ball-peen hammer. Success! So anyway, I wasn't going to remove the axles, but the bearings felt like they were grinding a little, so I figured I'd better clean them up. I wasn't sure how they came off and had to Google it. After a couple good smacks with my big hammer and a 2x4 the axles and outer bearings came out easily enough, but the inner bearings resisted repeated pounding with the hammer and a large punch. So I cleaned them up as best I could, re-greased everything and put it back together. The wheels turn a lot more smoothly now.

It's already Monday and I don't feel like I've done that much, so I thought I'd get the new brake shoes on. Now that can't possibly be that hard. I was wrong again. You know those little star wheels that you adjust the brakes with? Right - rusted solid (how did you know?). A vice-grips, a can of WD40, and a lot of jerking back and forth and I've got them free. We're not exactly home yet, though. Those little springs that hold the brake shoes in place - the new ones are not the same size. As you can see from the picture below, the pin is shorter but the spring is longer. Not to mention the fact that the new spring is about 10 times the strength of the old one. There was no way I was going to compress it enough to get it on. I ended up having to cut the new springs. BTW, springs are quite difficult to cut with wirecutters, but they're no match for a bench grinder.

Well, you can only do so much in one weekend. The kids are coming over in a couple hours and we're going to burn some burgers. Guess I'll get cleaned up.

Starting to look like a car . . .

23 Sep 2007 - All the wheels are back together with new wheel cylinders and brake pads. The transmission and axles are done, and I installed the motor today - sort of. A couple of the mounting holes don't quite line up, so I have to work on that. I did get to run it a little, hooked up to the battery charger. Dad's coming down soon, and I hope to have the car far enough along so that he and I can drive it around the block. Check out these pics:

Now it's a Stealth Buggy!

4 Oct 2007 - Well I don't know that it will be invisible to radar, but I said I was going to spray-can it flat black, and here it is! It is also becoming increasingly clear that I'm not going to do a lot of highway driving with this $100 dunebuggy body. I don't know who made this thing, but I lined up the pre-drilled holes on the sides and the firewall is about an inch and a half too far forward on the passenger's side and about half an inch off on the driver's side. The whole thing is kind of twisted if you look from front to rear across the top of the dashboard. Parts of the bottom, where it mounts to the chassis, are cracked and deteriorated, and it will take a lot of work to get it right. I don't know if it's worth it. However - I can use it to experiment and get everything running right. Maybe I'll find a VW kit car, like a 1929 Mercedes replica or something similar, either put together or something someone bought and then decided not to tackle.

First Ride

16 Oct 2007 - Below are some pics of the batteries and throttle, as well as the controller, contactor, shunt and all the wiring. We had a few setbacks over the weekend, but between Dad and me we finally got everything working. There's still much to be done but this was a big accomplishment for us as we finally got to drive the car.

Click here for the video!

Feb 2008 Update

In order to use a standard AC generator for my alternate power source, I have to change the current to DC. A rectifier will do that. So I bought some SCRs on EBay and made that scary-looking bridge rectifier in the picture below. I tested it by disconnecting my battery pack and powering the car with an 1800-watt McCulloch generator (with the car on jack stands, of course). It worked like it was supposed to, but of course you're not going to go very fast with 1800 watts. I'm hoping it will be enough to extend my range somewhat and keep me from having to call a tow truck if the batteries die when I'm not near an electrical outlet. NOTE - the astute observer might notice that two of the SCRs seem to be backwards. Well, it turns out that two of the SCRs have the anode on the tail end, while the tail on the other two is the cathode - so it works out OK.

I also upgraded to the Curtis 1231C-8601 controller and added 4 batteries, because I wasn't getting the performance I wanted. I know it's faster now, but I still don't know what the top speed is because my transmission is broken and won't go above 3rd gear.

OK, so what's next? I've pretty much come to the conclusion that it would take too much effort to make my buggy street legal. I'd have to add bumpers, lights and a windshield. I'd have to have someone make some kind of convertible top, with frame. I'd have to do some major repair work on the body because it is cracked and broken in several places where it attaches to the chassis. Not to mention the fact that I'll have to repair or replace the transmission. And after all that, I still won't have a vehicle that's very practical or safe. So a couple of weeks ago, I went to Atlanta and bought a 1974 VW Thing (picture below). My Bro Dave drove down from Alpharetta and met me for lunch and helped me hook up the towbar, so it was a fun afternoon. Now - I haven't seen snow in a good many years. Wouldn't you know it, the very day I go to Atlanta to tow this car home, I get caught in a blizzard! But I made it there and back in one day. I've had a chance to go over the car in my garage and it looks like it's in pretty good shape. It shouldn't take too much work to transfer all my parts over to it. There's lots of room in the back for batteries, etc. and it doesn't weigh that much more than a Beetle, even if it is a little less aerodynamic. Besides, I always thought they were pretty cool cars. And of course, I ordered a license plate that says E-THING!

Starting on my E-Thing

18 Feb 2008 - My Thing-a-ling, My Thing-a-ling, I love to . . . Oh, did I type that out loud? Sorry.

I was lazy most of the weekend, but today I took a wire brush and started going over the floor pans. They're not really too bad for a 34-year-old car, but they'll need to be replaced eventually. Not today though. Today I turned Stephen's old bed frame into a battery rack. I must admit my welding has improved, a little bit anyway.

First Road Test

15 Mar 2008 - The motor is installed, and the batteries and electronic components are hooked up. I did a better job this time and mounted everything to a piece of plywood so it won't slide all over the place.

My first drive around the neighborhood today revealed that my car needs some TLC. The tie rod ends are bad, I only have rear brakes, all the bearings and CV joints need to be cleaned or replaced, and I need to put some air shocks on the back because it's bottoming out with the weight of all the batteries. Also, I don't really care for the snow tires. But considering how easy this car is to work on, it's all relatively minor stuff. I'll just go through it like I did the stealth buggy and when I get done everything will be new. Then I'll give it a decent road test on the highway.