Motor Attached!

So today was pretty exciting. Worked with David all day and finished making the motor plate, thanks to him and his awesome machining skills. The plate we decided should be made out of 1 inch steel, mainly to space the motor away from the input shaft away from the drive shaft of the motor, rather than for strength. After finishing machining I took it to the tractor and bolted it on to make sure it fit well.

It did.

Next step is to finish design of the battery box so it can be fabricated by next weekend; and making the control board.

Tuff built tractor

To give you an idea of what we are starting with, here is a Tuff built tractor that looks brand spanking new. Hopefully ours turns out this nicely.

Parts are in

Parts are in! EVAmerica shipped us a bunch of goodies last week and they came today, all nicely packaged and marked clearly. 

Here is the heart of the electric tractor, a 12hp DC electric motor, we will be running this motor at 48v.

Old Parts Removed

Here you can see all the parts removed. The system is a combustion engine that spins a hydraulic pump, which in turn works all the hydraulics on the tractor, plus propel it through the hydraulic motor, that we are replacing. There is a 12V hydraulic pump we are replacing this mess with in order to retain the hydraulic lifting of attachments. 

Intorduction

So around November I responded to an ad in  my School's job search website about building an electric Tractor. The following Friday I met with Richard and David to discuss their ideas. thee had a vision of making an electric tractor, to be used for cultivating. Their idea was that you want organic food to be organic, not have a gas engine spewing it's chemicals over the food you eat. I couldn't find any flaws in this argument. So the planning stages started. I was attending school so time was limited and I mostly allocated time to research and planning.

As we all know the internet is full of good and bad information. A couple of websites I have found to be very helpful: http://www.flyingbeet.com/electricg/ and http://www.EVAmerica.com/  .So after getting alot of the details squared away we purchased some parts from EVAmerica.