On 4 Nov 2013 at 7:08, Zeke Yewdall wrote: > My question is, what use would a HPEVS motor be without the matching > controller anyway?
You're lucky they'll even sell it to you, warranty or no. Solectria would sell motors and inverters only as a set. They said that every inverter was "factory tuned" to its motor. AFAIK, this policy is, if not standard, pretty common with AC drives. Metric Mind has the same policy for the MES-DEA and Brusa drives they offer. On the inverter page, Victor states : "Programmed for and work together with AC motors produced by respective manufacturers, therefore sold only as matching pairs." A little historical tidbit here. Back in the early-mid 1990s, Ford briefly offered a Ranger pickup custom conversion done by a third party. They evidently had a stock of Ford-branded, Siemens-made spare motors - probably more motors than Rangers. (AFAIK, these are not the same as the motors used in the much more widely sold Ranger EV from later in the 1990s. Someone please correct me if that's wrong.) About 20 years on, these spare motors are STILL being offered, usually at absurdly high prices - I've seen them as high as $5k, and a couple grand is common - by surplus dealers. You can see one listing here : http://www.commoditiesrecoverycorp.com/electricmotors.htm For years we had regular posts from newbies on this list, asking where they could buy an inverter to drive this motor. The answer was, and is, "You can't." No such critter exists today, and probably none was ever available to hobbyists. My guess is that Ford scrapped whatever spare inverters they had for these trucks. Or maybe some Ford buyer, unfamiliar with what kind of spares the small fleet of vehicles needed, just went overboard with ordering motors. (Is anybody here who worked on this project and knows the real story on where all these orphaned motors came from?) I vaguely recall hearing that someone was trying to either build an inverter for these or adapt an industrial controller to work with them, but I don't know how that worked out. As far as I'm concerned, with no tested inverter available for them, these are just very pricey doorstops. Anyway, to get to the point, I would say that HPEV's policy is actually somewhat more hobbyist-friendly than the one in place with most EV drive suppliers. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
