A friend of mine in Belgium got one of these buses, and he had his local forklift repair shop put it back on the road. He mentioned that it handled like a forklift. Probably has to do with the ton of batteries.
This is not exactly a conversion. The bus has been electric since new, and was built by Volkswagen in Germany as part of a collaboration with some other German companies including Siemens and Varta. The earlier Volkswagen buses used reduction gears, but that ended in 1967. This bus uses a double-jointed independent rear suspension system. I have removed the axles so that I can test the bus on the ground without it moving. Before I removed the axles, I turned them both at the same time which forced the transmission to turn the motor. Reverse is achieved by a switch on the dash. I assume that reverses the polarity. The negative cable into the controller from the battery pack is isolated from the frame of the bus and the body of the controller. I am aware that this is ancient technology. I do plan on having a more modern drivetrain in this or another bus at another time, but for my my purposes at this time, I want to have this one as original as possible with the likely exception of the batteries. I view the batteries as a relatively easily solved thing, although I have not decided on which direction I go with that. I want this to run with its stock drivetrain for its historic significance. It is pretty cool that VW was developing electric vehicles over 40 years ago. This bus in this configuration won't get driven regularly. I recently bought an electric VW Karmann Ghia from my friend, John Bryan, who pointed me towards this list/forum as he mentioned that it was very helpful for him and an overall great community. The Ghia needs new batteries (hopefully the same ones that I use in the bus). The Ghia will be a regular driver for me in the coming years. Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list wrote > Glad you found it informative. > > These motors are frequently called "forklift motors", probably > because, well, they were used in forklifts... Your Siemens controller > is likely a "forklift controller", assuming that the conversion > company didn't design one from scratch and have Siemens construct it > (them). It might be possible to find more information on that unit by > haunting industrial material handling equipment sites and forums. > > > If the van is limited to second gear, how is reverse accomplished? > Shutting down the motor to reverse it's rotation seems like a > nightmare for an on-road vehicle, would make parking a real hassle. > Stop motor, reverse fields, restart motor, repeat as necessary. Uhg. > > If you get it running, you might want to consider changing the > transmission setup. I use all four gears and reverse. 4th isn't > useful until about 50 MPH, but a lot will depend on your final drive > ratio. Don't some (all) of the old VW vans have reduction gearing > after the differential? > > Something to consider: It would be fairly easy to design and build a > substitute controller with an Arduino, some instrumentation-grade > op-amps and a couple hundred lines of code. The days of using > TTL/CMOS discrete components to build logic and control circuits is long > past. > > Overloaded yet? -- Sent from: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/ _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
