[WIP] EV Racer Pikes Peak Special

[clarkdef]

Hello everyone, just thought I'd share my small Technic car.

The Pikes Peak hill climb is on at the moment, so I thought I would build a EV (Electric Vehicle) entrant :). Some of you may know that Pikes Peak now has an electric class, which is doing very well!

Of course you can only really make electric cars with Lego, but a lot of what I/we build is a spiritual replica of tradition gas powered vehicles. This car is all EV Baby! (intended)

However it fails to be a proper replica of a EV as it's drive train and suspension are actually made up incorrect, maybe next time.

So here are some pictures of my [WIP]

First picture here shows the underside. Two large motors for propulsion, which looks to be 1:1 ratio so will be pretty slow, though I can do a large to small cog at the motors. The motors act as a chassis brace.

Rear suspension is solid axle, you won't see this on any EV race cars but I didn't have enough of the right parts to do it any different. However it feels quite nice to push down on. EV cars also don't have diffs haha.

Another view of the rear suspension, you can also see my broken servo connector :)

Front end worked out quite well, feels strong, good pivot point, and a touch of subframe tilt resulting in some degrees of caster. Positioning the servo was a pain with the subframe angle and given space, the servo merely sits in between those shock tower uprights and is held on by yellow pegs at it's rear end, this seems to work nicely but the steering axle has to bow to bridge the gap between motor and rack, no biggie.

You can see that it should be a crawler instead of a hill climb car haha. The car at this stage is under 600 grams helped largely by my lipo battery pack, which is lighter than the lego lipo battery and can be charged to 8.4v

So my goal so far was to make a car that weighed under 600 grams, I may need to move to a lighter tyre package to achieve this as the build is not finished. Cheers guys, here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdvidMa7SJc&feature=youtu.be

[Doc_Brown]

Sweet! Looking forward to seeing this car run.

Been a while since you were on here, welcome back!

[clarkdef]

Yes it has been a while, glad to see your still going hard! As for the running of the car, it will blow away a snail for sure ;)

[vmln8r]

Love the concept. However, I always thought that connecting two motors together like that is going to cause losses due to variances in their speed? If each motor powered a single rear wheel, you could lose the diff. The ratio at the moment I believe is 1:1.19 (20:12 * 20:28).

(also great to hear a NZ accent + Technic in the same video)

[clarkdef]

Love the concept. However, I always thought that connecting two motors together like that is going to cause losses due to variances in their speed? If each motor powered a single rear wheel, you could lose the diff. The ratio at the moment I believe is 1:1.19 (20:12 * 20:28).

(also great to hear a NZ accent + Technic in the same video)

Agree man, I would prefer independent rear with one motor per wheel, struggled to fit in or had to make it bigger, I do lack parts atm. I'm going to rebuild the chassis in black on the weekend, might figure a new rear end.

As for the doubled up motors, no they will not loose power infact I am sure that the diff couple method loses more power due to friction. I think if there is a weaker motor then the stronger motor will at least run to the lesser motors power still effectively doubling the power, and since the lesser motors power deficit would be negligible so would the loss of power.

Knew it looked to be 1:1 might actual make it slower, because my power functions keeps running when I don't want it too haha.

[zux]

Keep the good work. Wish to see the body with those huge spoilers!