BabyBlue
I've been busy painting the motor housing and some other parts. I used high temperature paint from McMaster for the housing and epoxy based high temperature electrical varnish (also from McMaster) for the field coil cores.
There were not a whole lot of colors to choose from and since I was ordering from a catalog I had no idea how the colors would come out. I picked blue and black since they seemed like fairly safe colors.
Czonka! I found a Kilovac Czonka II relay on eBay with a buy it now price of $75, they normally retail for around $400 so needless to say I bought it immediately.
The Czonka II/EV250 is a DC contactor capable of conducting 400A continous and can break up to 2500A. It also has a very nice economizer feature which reduces the power consuption of the main relay coil to a measly 4W.
Field Coils
After much scrubbing the coils are finally clean and the full extent of the damage can be seen. Varnish is missing in several places but it is not too bad.
The motor components are finally starting to get clean. I used a lot of different products but the most effective one was Easy-Off oven cleaner. I am in no way affiliated with them but if they want to send me a big check I will not turn them down :)
The beast has been parted
After much grunting and pulling I managed to separate the rotor and face-plate from the motor housing. Working on a 100lb motor is quite exhausting, luckily no toes were crushed during this disection.
I bought a GE forklift motor on ebay with the intent of fixing it up and eventually sticking it in the Rabbit. The motor arrived about a month ago, it took me a while to get this blog up so I'm currently playing catch-up.
I decided to convert a car to electric drive sometime after I started working at AeroVironment, the birthplace of the modern electric vehicle. I think it may be something they put in the air here, or maybe it's just contagious and I've been around too many EV nuts for too long.
Since I now live less than 10 miles from work in the very EV friendly city of Pasadena, I rarely ever need to drive further than ~30 miles in a day. Your typical EV conversion will give you about 30-80 mile range between charges, depending on battery technology and how you drive it
