Project Logs

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• Power Transmission is Iffy

  Eric • 04/21/2020 at 14:42 • 0 comments

  I finally switched out the chain and sprockets between the motor and transaxle for a timing belt and some pulleys. Although it's much smoother, I'm starting to think I still won't get as much speed as I could. The transaxle came from a mobility scooter and obviously wasn't designed to go 20mph, and it's starting to show. I haven't bought the 36V battery pack to test the whole drive system on full-power so I still have some hope, but I think there's a good chance I'll have to find a replacement that can do what I want.

  A new rear axle would also most likely give me some more space for a brake system that doesn't have to sit so close to the wheels. Currently, there's almost no room for the tires to flex.

• Steering Wheel is Somewhat Functional

  Eric • 01/21/2020 at 03:50 • 0 comments

  The steering wheel has made some progress after a long time CADing and re-CADing, printing out pieces for sizing, and testing how it feels in my hands. It is now physical! I do have a regular sheet metal steering wheel that I bought online for cheap, but it's a little big and I couldn't fit as many bells and whistles as I wanted on it.

  I had a few iterations of shoulder levers that didn't feel right. The biggest problem was finding the right shape to get a good amount of contact with my pointer fingers while also allowing for a significant range of motion. In the end, I went with a simpler straight-bar shape but that extended a little bit deeper int the z-direction to contact more of the width of my finger. The metal tubing for the grips and torsion springs for the shoulder levels all came from a rusted out bike at GoodWill that I bought for a couple bucks.

  The electronics aren't anything special, there's an Arduino micro (cuz it's easy), a CAN bus breakout for sending info around the car, the pair of potentiometers for braking and accelerating, and a key switch. I don't exactly know what the key is going to do yet, I'm waffling between enabling acceleration and toggling maximum speed. If I have some extra time at the end, I want to put a speaker and amplifier somewhere for a cool horn and also some engine revving for when the key switch turns.

  I do have a lid CADed out but I'm waiting to print until I'm sure the contents of the wheel are final for this first iteration. I've toyed around with the idea of a dedicated button for the horn as well as some status LEDs to help debug.

  Here's another picture from the back. It's cool I guess.

  Yes, everything is still PLA. I know that PLA isn't great for things that take any sort of beating but PLA is cheap and super easy to print. Once these initial PLA parts start breaking, I'm going to replace them with PETG and see how it fares. I haven't ventured outside of PLA before but I'm sure I'll do so by the end of the first test drive.

  Also on the way: a new 1st stage speed reducer! The chain drive, as pointed out by others, isn't great. It's loud, spews grease everywhere, and gets hot real fast. I ordered some timing pulleys off of Amazon and am hoping they can more gracefully handle the high output of the motor.

• From Inception to Now

  Eric • 11/28/2019 at 05:17 • 0 comments

  This blog is being transferred from my own website to Hackaday so this post is going to serve as a summary of progress from inception to present-day.

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  Earliest post

  Since I'm starting from scratch and I don't know anything about go-karts, I decided to start out by putting together a BOM of obvious components and start tweaking in the direction of what seems like success. I found a really nice sale on some slick wheels at BMI Karts (along with a bunch of few other things).  I was also having a lot of trouble finding a Power Wheel and a cheap mobility scooter to salvage parts from and, as soon as I put out a notice on Facebook, I found a good pair of deals on Craigslist for exactly a Mercedes Benz 300SL Power Wheels and mobility scooter. High quality German engineering.

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  After what seemed like forever building up a bill of materials, I finally ordered the first batch of parts. I would have spent longer designing and measuring stuff out in CAD, but BMI Karts was having a pretty irresistible sale on some stuff I would eventually need and sometimes you just need to have the parts in your hands to get a better understanding of how everything should go together. I got a set of wheels, a steering column, steering spindles and brackets, a pair of tie rods, a steering wheel, and a pair of pedals. After receiving the parts, the steering wheel is probably too big and the pedals too heavy but I paid $4 total for both of them so I’m not crushed.

  Instead of pulling apart the car right away, I decided to piece out the scooter so I could figure out what parts I’ll be able to use. All the scooter yielded was a transaxle and a pair of two-piece rims, but that's all I was really hoping to get out of it. The wheels I bought online are all free wheels so the plan is to pull the tires off of two of them and put them on the scooter rims. Luckily, the tires happened to be the exact same size that the scooter used which was pure serendipity and something I did not plan for. Very neat.

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  The Power Wheels I bought was way too small for a full grown man-child as myself to fit into, so I had to do a bit of modification. I put down a tape outline of the planned wheelbase of the car on my floor and sat in it to get an idea of how big everything would need to be. The dimensions I had come up with seemed to be just big enough to fit me but the Power Wheels was much too small to wrap around the potential frame.

  I initially cut out the base of the body to see if I could fit inside without the seat and floor to no avail so it turned into a full on quartering. I stitched the thing back together with some good old cardboard and duck tape so its width fits nicely around the salvaged transaxle and the rest of the shell lined up with the lines taped on the floor. The next step with the “biggening” of the body was to get some bondo or modeling clay and fill out the holes so it's smooth and streamlined again.

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  Making everything nice and pretty took much longer than I had hoped. I severely underestimated the amount of putty-ing and sanding and re-putty-ing and re-sanding that’s required so the process went on for quite a while. The detailing power sander had become pretty much my best friend along with second best friend belt sander. It’s super satisfying to just hold a power tool against a rough patch of Bondo and watch it turn super smooth.

  It took forever, but I finally got a smooth body over which to apply a fiberglass shell. Creating the buck for the fiberglass was time consuming, but fiberglassing is probably one of the worst things ever. The resin is sticky, dissolves everything, and just ruins everything it touches. Fiberglass frays everywhere and sticks to everything via splashed resin. It took several grueling hours of brushing and tapping resin into every dry crack of fiberglass but I finally finished and will never do that again unless it's absolutely the only answer.

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  I ordered some of the major electronic components...

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