2009-01-06

Motor holder made and installed

Last couple days I've spent manufacturing the motor holder from accessory end to remove any temporary hanging arrangements. The part is quite simple but to make it right took some time. As I am using native rubber pads to attach the gearbox and motor to the car body frame. I've seen some builders attach the motor with hard parts but I don't like such approach. Even if there is virtually no vibration from electric motor the rubber pads help to remove the stress from holding parts and dampen torque shocks which should give even smoother operation.
This decision complicated the task of deciding on holder's measurements. The rubber parts stretch and you cannot be sure what measurement of the holder would be the best. Even if this is not critical I want to build things as right as possible from engineering point of view for this conversion without cheap shortcuts.
I decided that I would trust Honda engineers to determine electric motor fitting position. The removed 1.6l Honda IC engine weighted over 90kg. The electric Warp 9 is around 80kg which is quite similar. So I took measurements from ICE native holder part picking crankshaft center at the front as position reference. Then I used Warp9's CE shaft center to calculate the required part dimensions which would hold the electric motor in the same attitude as original petrol one. This measuring and design drawing alone took few hours. After that there were series of operations of metal measuring, cutting, grinding, drilling, sanding, welding, trial-fitting, grinding, sanding, painting and assembling (this is simplified procedure :).

The part turned out ok - approved by sleepy Baja below.

And here ar some photos of it installed - no more temporary attachments. View from car front.

From below

And from top.

Looks alright. We had some debate about thickness of the flat steel plate. But after trying to mentally model the forces applied to this part we came to conclusion that this thickness is definitely enough as the load is distributed through bigger area of it.

That's it for now - motor is installed safely. It gets to -20 Celcius at nights and its no fun working the garage. I'll focus on BCMS electronics now until it gets warmer or I need to remove the dashboard for instruments connection to BCMS.

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