Electric Vehicle (EV) conversion guides review and information from the web

Do you own a Toyota Prius hybrid car?

That is the current craze nowadays with Toyota heavily pushing its green cars especially the Prius model.

Do you know the hybrid batteries have a limited life span of 8 years or 150,000 miles on average?

Many Prius owners do not know that because like most of us, they don’t bother reading the car manual.

How much would it cost to replace the battery pack?

Since not a lot of workshops know how to replace the Prius battery, you have to go back to Toyota authorized service centres. And the cost of the battery pack replacement is about $4000!

That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?

If you own a Toyota Prius and the battery is dying, what other choices do you have?

You can try to rebuild the battery pack at a fraction of the cost.

Here’s a web site that I found at www.hybridbatteryrebuild.com. The creator, Pete, will show you how to rebuild your Prius battery versus replacing it.

Pete is a professional mechanic and he has been rebuilding Prius battery pack for his customers for under $500. That is a great savings!

What Pete will show you in his guide is how to take newer cells with a better design out of the newer Prius battery pack and then put into your current battery pack. Think of it as changing the battery of a cell phone.

It is understood that not a lot of people will be able to do the battery replacement on their own. Pete’s guide was created with step by step instructions in great detail how to do it using pictures each and every step of the way. Imagine someone holding your hand throughout the process.

If you need more help, there is a support forum that you can have access to. In the forum, you can talk to Pete and his partners if you have any confusion during the rebuilding process.

If you own a Toyota Prius and the battery pack is about to expire, check out Pete’s web site. You don’t have to spend a ton of money replacing the battery.

==> Click here to visit Pete’s web site now!

One of the key areas you want to work on during an electric car conversion project is the transmission. The transmission is a little more challenging.

The transmission was originally designed to coupled to a clutch plate. When you are building a Do It Yourself (DIY) electric car, you are not going to use a clutch. The electric motor will be coupled directly to the transmission.

The main thing the clutch does for a car is allow you to leave the internal combustion engine running when the car isn’t moving. With an electric motor, you can just switch it off.

The other reason you don’t want a clutch is to minimize the amount of mass or the amount of weigh the electric motor has to spin because that will cost you valuable energy.

When the electric motor has to spin a bigger resistant, it will consume more electricity hence making your EV less efficient and it won’t go as far.

When connecting the electric motor to the existing transmission unit, most EV retrofitters will use the Lovejoy metal coupler. Putting the coupler on the motor shaft is easy. But how do you put the coupler on the transmission shaft?

Reason being, the end of the transmission shaft has grooves and teeth while the coupler doesn’t.

To solve this problem, you need to have some creativity and do some modification. You start out by removing the old clutch plate. Look at how the plate is attached to the transmission shaft. You will see a little coupler in it that had ridges that matches up to the shaft of the transmission.

Cut out that small coupler and weld it to the center of the Lovejoy coupler. Make sure the weld is strong so it does not spin. The Lovejoy coupler with the old clutch plate ridges can now be fitted to the transmission shaft. It is a lot of work, but that’s how you solve a problem in a DIY project.

Once you have all the couplers in place and the rubber spider separator in between, you can now connect them together and be able to transfer power from the electric motor to the wheel of your electric car. One of the advantage of the Lovejoy couplers is it allows for a small amount of shaft misalignment.

If your electric motor is not perfectly align with the transmission, it is not going to create much problem. It would not handle too much misalignment though, only one of 2 degree, but it’s better than trying to hard weld two of the shaft together on a straight line. You will never get the line perfect.

DIY Electric Car Conversion Guide

Looking for more information about DIY electric car conversion? If you do, check out Gavin Shoebridge ‘s Electric Conversion Made Easy e-book.

Gavin is from the land of kiwis, New Zealand and he has personally converted his old Mitsubishi Tredia into an EV in his garage.

For more creative tips and tricks to convert a gas guzzler to EV, check out his manual.

==> Click here to visit Electric Conversion Made Easy now!

One of the trickiest processes of a DIY electric car conversion is coupling the electric motor to the transmission unit of the car. To make the connection work easier, it is recommended for you to take out the transmission and put in on a workbench. It involves a lot of work, but it will save you a lot of time and unnecessary headache.

When the electric motor and the transmission is on a workbench, you can now handle the alignment, get the holes drilled and get everything working.

To start of the connection process, there are 2 things you need to consider.

1) The physical piece of the electric motor.

You have to find a way to somehow bolt the motor to the transmission. The motor will be using an “L” shaped motor mount.

A lot of electric cars use a motor that mounts off the face and you’ll actually end up with a piece of metal plate between the electric motor and the transmission.

2) Connecting the power from the electric motor to the transmission.

When doing this, you will notice two different size and very different shaft. You will need to come up with a way to connect both together. The most common way electric car converters are adopting is to use a brand of connector calls Lovejoy connectors.

The connector comes with 2 pieces of steel with finger. There will be a piece of rubber insert that sits between them. The Lovejoy couplers are not very expensive and you can get them from Amazon.com.

You can order the steel pieces independently with different size hole to match the different shaft.

The Lovejoy couplers are designed for industrial work and are made to go right on the shaft of the electric motor. Look closely at the electric motor shaft. It is smooth except for a groove in it. That is where the “key” goes in.

The key is what keeps the coupler from spinning once it is on the motor shaft. That is how you connect the electric motor to the transmission unit of the donor car.

DIY Electric Car Conversion Guide

Do you want to find out more on how to convert your gas guzzler to a pure electric vehicle? If you do, check out Les Oke’s Convert2EV manual.

Les and his family live a green lifestyle and use an electric car for their daily commute. Les has converted numerous conventional automobile to EV. The Convert2EV e-book is all his EV conversion experience penned down.

==> Click here to visit Convert2EV now!