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The Electric Motor and Adapter Plate

What's in the box?

An Advanced 8" DC electric motor that I picked up today, November 18, from a Yellow Freight terminal. This is a 72 - 120 volt motor, a good size for a 2500 to 3500 pound car. I will design the car for 120-volt operation:

100 pounds of copper, iron and aluminum.

How do I put these together?

I need a metal plate that will bolt to the transaxle housing and to the motor. I need a coupler that will smoothly transfer the power of the motor to the shaft of the transaxle. I can't buy these at Auto Mart. I could send my clutch disk to EV America with some measurements and they would send me everything I need to connect these together.

I would like to try to do this myself. I found a detailed description of what I need to do here:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/4429/cl3.htm

November 22. I got a 1/2" thick 15" square piece of aluminum at Fazzio's for about $3 a pound. There it is behind the transaxle:

You can see that I transferred the two alignment pins from the original ICE housing to the transaxle housing. Here is a close up:

I dabbed some red paint on the pins:

Then I leaned the aluminum plate against the pins to transfer the location of the pins to the plate:

I need the lift to inspect the brakes on my son's car, so I put the ball joint studs back in the lower arms and put on the wheels so I could push the car out of the garage. I took this opportunity to reweigh the front end, got 470 pounds at each wheel. So the car lost about 425 pounds when I removed the engine and transaxle.

Here is the car outside, where I gave the engine compartment a little bath. The front end is sitting high without the engine and drive train:

November 25. I measured the alignment pin diameter with a caliper, got 14.2 mm. The closest I came to a 14 mm drill bit was 9/16ths which is 14.28 mm by calculation, or about 6 thousandths large. I would rather be on the small side and ream out the hole a little, but I suspect the fit will be snug after both holes have been drilled.

I drew a cross on the red circle to help define center:

Punched a with a center punch:

Drilled a hole with straight sides about 9/32nds deep:

November 27. I drilled the other alignment pin hole and as hoped, the plate is snug when sitting on the pins.

Now I can find the center point of the transaxle shaft. I used my handy caliper to measure the inside diameter of the hole in the pilot shaft and turned an old bolt down to the correct diameter on the lathe. Then I cut a little tip at the end on which I will dab some paint:

Centering pin in the shaft:

I had to cut another pin because the first one stuck out too far. Here is the second pin with paint on it:

Then I set the plate on the alignment pins to mark the plate with a red dot:

I center punched the dot and got out my measuring tools. Using the engineering drawing of the motor to get the correct radius, 3.325 inches, I drew a circle centered on the red dot punch mark. I used the properties of a right triangle to figure out the distance between the bolt holes: 4.702 inches.

I measured and punched each point with the center punch. Measure twice, punch once:

I machined another pin long enough to extend beyond the plate:

I drilled the center hole in the plate and lined the plate up over the alignment pins. The center pin stuck through very nearly centered:

So I drilled the four mounting holes and drew a rough outline of the transaxle case on the plate:

Now I need to figure out the motor-to-tranny coupling.