More Metal

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I had one other major piece of metal that needed fabrication. The old gas engine had a mounting place where the right wheel's drive shaft was supported. Since the transmission is on the driver's side of the compartment there's quite a bit of distance for that drive shaft to go. So the engineers created a mount, with bearings, to support it.

So I needed to connect this mount to my Electric motor. Drilling holes in the motor is out of the question, what I need is a nine inch diameter bracket with a flat steel plate that the mount could bolt to. I didn't have any way to make two half circles with these dimensions out of steel bar, so I got the local steel outlet to do it. It was a little expensive (at least more than I expected), but it does fit the motor. So last night I fabricated the mounting plate by welding together two pieces of steel bar (1 1/2 inch by 3 inches) butted against each other, to make a 3 x 3 steel plate. Then I put everything in place, lined up the plate against the drive shaft mount and the steel ring, tacked it into place with the welder, disassembled, then welded the rest of the joints.

I know...looks insanely simple. That's why I described the process, some of these things take an incredible amount of work and thinking.

A much easier fabrication was the mounting bracket for the accelerator cable, which was made out of thick aluminum. That and the pot box are in the right side of this picture. I'm waiting until the controller board is in place before mounting the accelerator cable and bracket. Also I haven't figured out how to hook the cable to the potbox yet!

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