The Flux Buggy

Details

So as you may or may not know, the Delsolectric never made it onto the road legally. In fact, we had to scrap it since it was just sitting in my friend's parent's backyard for... a few years.

Anyway, we did keep all the parts. We had wanted to build an electric go kart for a while, but never really had the space. I just moved into a new place, with my very own garage, and we decided it was time to do it.

We found this custom home made dune buggy on Kijiji for $1,500, marked down from $3,000. A guy had it commissioned and it is slick. It had a 13HP Honda engine in it and didn't go that fast, but it was built extremely well. The whole thing is made of 1-1/4" steel tubing, with lubed bearings, shocks, and a fancy aluminum tread plate cover. It was ripe for conversion.

Watch the following video for a brief introduction to the project:

We bought it, sold the engine for $300, and started work. Follow the complete video chronicles here -- and don't forget to subscribe for updates!

Components

1 × 880lb Dune Buggy

1 × General Electric DC Series Wound 36V motor We'll be cranking it up to 11 with 72V!

6 × 12V 140aH Marine Grade Lead Acid Battery These things weigh 67lbs each!

1 × Alltrax 72V 450A Speed Controller Typically used for a golf cart

1 × Custom gearbox Made by hand

Project Logs

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The Gearbox
James Hobson • 08/08/2014 at 10:42 • 0 comments

Building the gearbox!
Battery Mounts
James Hobson • 06/16/2014 at 12:28 • 0 comments

Time to start modifying the frame! We picked up a bunch of steel from the local Metal Supermarket (no seriously, that's what it is called!) and designed battery mounts off the side of the buggy.
These help keep the center of gravity very low to the ground (the batteries weigh almost 500lbs), but do not hang any lower than the current frame (we still want to be able to go off-roading with it). It looks like we'll have to upgrade the suspension too, as the front suspension is completely bottomed out now with the weight of the batteries in the buggy (let alone a driver!).
The Shopping Trip
James Hobson • 05/25/2014 at 13:00 • 0 comments

After sketching up some ideas, we needed some parts! Off to our favorite hardware store -- Princess Auto.
Some of our spoils:
We'll most likely need more, but at least we can start fabricating something now!
Picking up the Buggy
James Hobson • 05/25/2014 at 12:58 • 0 comments

So we just got the dune buggy home and started taking a look at it. Let the design ideas flow!
So we weighed the car (rather crudely) by putting a bathroom scale under each tire.
Apparently this thing weighs ~880lbs! Holy cow.
We also started a few rough calculations based on the pre-existing gear ratios in the car.
Using the high speed gear configuration, it looks like we'll be able to hit about 111km/h ... we're going to need some seat belts! We also plan on having a low-speed, super high-torque mode, where the top speed is only 60km/h ... but you could drive up a wall with it.