I had been saying innocently that my donor vehicle has a hydrostatic drive. I discovered that I am wrong; it is a belt and pulley CVT that is more like a snowmobile drive than anything else I've worked on. As long as I had everything apart, I replaced those cracked and flayed belts with new belts. Of course new belts are stiffer than worn belts. (I'd like to note that the belt will be much easier to replace now than before the conversion due to better access.)
The shaft on the ME1004 is slightly shorter (it turns out) than the shaft on the ICE I pulled out. The bolt that holds the pulleys on is therefore slightly too short to engage the shaft. I was able to get the threads to engage by leaving out the lock washer and did a test run without the mower deck or mower belt installed. (I couldn't find a longer replacement bolt locally but one is in the mail so next week I can fix that right.) Friction against the idling belt costs a few amps vs. free running. Engaging the belt (by pressing the accelerator pedal) with the transmission in neutral (just adding CVT losses) initially cost about 50 amps with the stiff new belts. After a few minutes of breaking it in it cost about 30 amps (and smelled of hot rubber) and kept slowly reducing as the belt limbered. I've read that it can take a few hours to fully limber a new drive belt so I'll expect high losses initially. I might use the old mower deck belt until the drive belts limber just to manage current draw. I ended up using a power pole connector instead of an SB connector for my emergency disconnect. Same rating (in fact, same exact ferrule) and I needed only one pole. That also gives me a convenient loop to put my clamp ammeter on as my only instrumentation so far. I discovered that the double pole switch I was going to use for power is a 3 amp switch, which doesn't help much when I want to to connect my 6 amp charger through it. Off to eBay, I guess. Right now I have a very temporary bundle of wires that is just enough for testing but it doesn't prevent me from turning the tractor on with the charger still connected. I also haven't yet hooked up safety interconnects or settled on a system for securing the batteries to the trays. Plenty left to do, but at least I'm now reasonably confident I'll be able to mow the lawn this spring. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140201/d3910c94/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ 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)
