The Flux Buggy

Building the gearbox!

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!).

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!

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.