Inserting the motors

Thursday, January 12th, 2016

    Today, we started off by attempting to insert the electric motors in without them being connected to anything so that we could see what the motors would look like once we added them into the car. We also had to decide how far back to put the motors. We could have them farther towards the front of the car, which would give the car better weight distribution, show off the engine, give the car better handling, and would mean the car would be more structurally stable.

 If we put the engine in the middle, we would have more space in the hood, but the interior would have to be disassembled so that we could put sheet metal on the floor of the car so that the car will be more stable. We would also have to insert support beams and mounts that are not currently there. 

    We decided to place the motors further towards the front of the car, where the gas engine originally was.

 

    This is what the motors will basically look like when they are finally inserted into the car.

We decided to then spend the rest of the day designing the mounts that will hold the new electric motors. The mounts will hold the motor to the frame of the car. The problem is that the old motor mounts will not work with our motors, so we will have to design new mounts to attach to the bottom of the car.

    We designed the mounts for the very front part of the car which will attach to the end of the black motor that is the farthest away from the red motor. 

    

This is the design for the front motor mount, looking from the back of the car to the front of the car. The mount has to attach to the frame of the car, but the issue is that there is no mount that we could weld the new mount to, so the new mount will have to be attached to the chassis of the car.

    Designing a new mount is very complicated, because the mount has to be custom built, which means that there is no pre made design that is guaranteed to work. So if the mounts are too weak, they could collapse and then the motors would put very high amounts of stress on the other mounts, which would mean that they could break as well. But the mounts that we have created are very strong and are made of very strong metals.

  

    This is a picture of another mount design meant to go either in the middle of the two motors or at the end of them. It is very similar because of the shape of the engine bay requires the mounts to take on a similar form.

I feel like we made a lot of progress today and I feel like we took a big step towards converting the car.