Bed prep and hinge

Yesterday we took the bed off the truck and prepared it for the Herculiner bed lining. The bed was also hinged for easy access to the batteries. With the some extra room under the bed now, we are now designing battery boxes for optimum placement and drawing the designs as a solid model on Inventor to determine where to place battery boxes. We are planning to have the bed raised by a linear actuator if we can determine the correct geometry.

Out with old, in with the new

Eariler this week, we recieved our new adapter plate and motor mount for the truck . We have taken the coupler design to be machined at a local machine shop, Atlantic Tool and Die Company in Hampstead. They will be making revisions to an older design we had from a previous conversion, and creating a new coupler to fit our Ranger transmission.

We also had to grind off an inch and a half of the input shaft of the transmission so the electric motor shaft would clear the input shaft when the motor and tranny were attached. It really made sparks fly!

Truck and transmission back from blasting

We got the truck back from getting a blast from the past. The transmission and drive shaft were bead blasted and the truck rails were also blasted in preparation for painting. The engine compartment was pressure washed to remove all of the oil and grease build-up that had occurred over the past 9 years of driving. We now can begin designing the battery box and engine compartment control board.

Slimmer and trimmer

The truck has lost some weight this week with the removal of the V6 engine. We had an initial weight of 3247 pounds. We removed the unnecessary components such as the engine, gas tank, radiators and hoses, leaving it at a svelte 2460 pounds! Dropping the 800 pounds will be a good thing as we begin the conversion and put back approximately 1400 pounds. We need to stay below the gross 4600 pound vehicle weight to avoid disqualification. We should be fine, but the lighter the better!

Engine extracted!!

We finally have removed the last hurdle in our Ranger conversion , the engine. After making sure all wires and lines were disconnected, we loosened the motor mounts, attached a strap and hoisted the V-6 from the engine bay. Now, the conversion process can be broken down into several tasks and assigned to student teams for design and implementation. Next week, the thinking begins!

Out with the old tranny

This week we removed the transmission from the Ranger. With the help of Mr. Sessions, our technical advisor, it came out with ease and we can now start to plan our attack for creating an adapter plate to mate to the Warp 9 electric motor. Later this week we will be removing the engine and cleaning the engine bay. We may need to have the engine bay sandblasted since there appears to be quite a bit of sludge and oily deposits.

Finally, the conversion is beginning to start rolling. Our next step is to determine which components we intend to use and then begin the ordering process.

Sparks flying!

The first challenge we face in terms of design, is the rear battery box. Structurally, the frame rails and cross members provide stability and rigidity for the rear suspension. The only issue we have is the factory placement of the cross members are not conducive to battery box placement. Without removing the braces, we will have very limited space for our 12 batteries under the bed. We decided to remove the braces and replace them with straight bar to provide the support for our battery boxes. Today, we began the removal process by grinding the rivets. Let the sparks fly!