Electric Rock Crawler ?? - Who's In !

[TexomaEV]

Stopped by "Baker's Tire" today with our student's Electric Truck for an inspection. Got to talking about how the students in Ag-Mechanics would love to build an Electric Rock Crawler.

If we could pull this off with the school officials, would anyone be interested in helping with such a project? Being that the DC Electric Motor has all the torque output available from the start, no minimum RPM required, seems like a perfect match for an interesting rock crawler................

Who's in? , Comments?

Here's a link to the Electric Pickup and Electric Farm Tractor. We're currently working on converting a Zero Turn Lawn Mower into all electric drive.

www.flickr.com/mbarkley/sets

 

[Texican]

Guys, he was in the shop and we got to discussing the possibility of building a RC I sent him the link to the Beater Build to let him know what we did.....
Butch

 

[TexomaEV]

I was looking over some of the DC Motors we have been given today. An idea popped into my head for the RC project. We have a very large Hydraulic Pump (DC powered) which could drive a very heafty hydraulic motor. The hydraulic motor could be direct coupled to the input shaft of the vechicle's transmission. This would be a particularly interesting conversion project, with powerful torque capability. This would allow the DC hydraulic pump to run at a consistent/constant speed, and maximize the runtime on the battery bank in the vehicle.

 

[Fireman]

Sounds like a cool project. An old mini truck would be cool to convert.

 

[TexomaEV]

A friend from our Electric Auto Association suggested upscaling something like this into a real Rock Crawler. Once you see the video, you could see where we could use a hydraulic motor at each differential, with two separate accelerator pedals in order to power each axle individually if needed.

Now that being said, I'm certainly not a real RC, so you guys would have to tell us if this setup would even work, or not. The beauty of it would be both hycraulic motors could still be operated from one single electric power plant.

Gosh, there could even be two separate drivers, one operating a different axle each.

Now watch the video: Super Galveston 05-02-2010 on Vimeo