'84 Ford Laser EV Conversion Project

So every single one of those batteries was dead. Back to the drawing board.

On another note my welding is getting better, as you can see with the before and after. The first mount design is able to hold my weight which is awesome.



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Looking a whole lot better! What is this mount for?

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A mockup for the transmission mount. This will allow me to do some proper testing once I have the inverter board, and if the road authorities need an engineering certificate for any welding I will take this to a fabricator/welder and say ‘make this but good’

I think you are making a good choice having a professional handle the fabrication.

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Absolutely, I am nowhere near skilled enough to have my piece of metal holding a giant 100kmhr spinning magnetic ball of death. Car modification laws here require a fabrication certificate for any structural welding but because I’m not technically welding to the body I’m not sure. Still need to chat with a certification person

So first update in a little while. I have a new job where finally I am working 4-5 days a week. The pay is decent and its fairly easy. While thats gone on, I decided to buy a new PC as my laptop was starting to show its age. Ryzen 5 3600, 32GB RAM, 500gb nvme, RX460 (just had this lying around, waiting for RTX3060). Also now have a 34in 1440 ultrawide hdr 75hz and a 32in 1440p 144hz gsync. Can’t wait for the new GPU. Anyway,.,.,

Made a trip 45 minutes down the road to visit @malJohann to pick up some batteries. He very kindly offered me his old Headway 40152S cells. These cells are 15Ah and are capable of 100A cont and 150A peak. They are used, so aren’t able to still provide this but nevertheless they will be useful. Here we have 4 * 5S packs for a total of 20S plus 12 cells of varying quality, including a few dead ones. I will use as many of these worse cells as I feel safe using, making sure that nothing will blow up. This will give me a pack that can provide enough amps and volts to get some spin from our inverter and transaxle. Still need to buy the control board for the inverter, we’re getting closer.

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Not directly relevant or anything, but it was nice to see one of Damien’s projects covered with a touch of media flair:

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I seen this article pop up on reddit but didn’t realise that it was Damian! Hopefully more funding can be sent his way through Patreon as thats the best way to directly support what he’s doing

Damn Damian has over 200 Tesla drive unit boards in the wild. I genuinely didn’t realise that his stuff was that prolific. I’d love to see him get some large funding to help him develop processes to make this stuff into a business

What’s this? An update? Wow it’s been a little bit, I’ve been working a bunch and haven’t had the motivation or space to do much.

Moved the car to a better spot and I’m starting to size up the transaxle in the car. I made a very crude rig to get this thing up and was bracing for a heart attack every time I moved the crane.

This is the sort of clearance at the bottom. When I get the mounts made up properly I’ll aim to get it a little higher, but where it’s hovering now is a pretty good spot.

Here is the space at the back, there is probably a couple inches between the steering rack plastic guard and the trans. This can be moved forward a bit.

This is the space at the front, a bit if room to move. Those tubes need to come out as they will be routed different eventually. There is some space here.

Here’s the full engine bay, it’s still got a bunch of space on the left of the bay as well as above the trans, which is hard to tell from this angle.

Here is my rough intended mount method. The circle on the right is a few bolt holes through the chassis rails that I will use in combination with some thick steel bar. The other two circles are the original transmission mounts, these will mounts to the bottom row of bolt holes on the trans face plate. There is also a stabiliser rod from the original transmission that runs down a small space where the trans column would normally be, I’ll be also using this for some extra integrity. The lines will be box steel connecting from the main engine mount on the left to the top row of bolt holes on the trans face plate. The box steel will then be used as structure for some of the batteries and other required electrical shizz. Some of this stuff will also be mounted off the chassis itself.

Looking for thoughts on how I’m looking

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Hell yes. So stoked to see an update :grinning:

I think your positioning looks good, the only think I have to add is that when you are drilling

I would be sure to reinforce the area around your new holes by making a mounting point in the style of the main engine mount on the left.

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I will be doing something along those lines. Won’t be drilling any holes, there’s already holes with threads so I’m gonna use those, you can see them if you look closely in the circle on the last image

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Ahh, gotcha. Are you planning to hard mount it into the car (metal to metal)? Or are you gonna soft mount it (metal to engine mount bushing to metal)?

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Not sure which way I wanna go, I was thinking the hard mount as that will add overall rigidity to the vehicle, but at the same time the bushing could help with allowing very slight movement for high torque pulls. But I would imagine an electric motor would be far happier being hard mounted

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I’d probably still go with some harder (pu) bushings.

You don’t have the vibration issues of a gas engine so the old style rubber bushings are overkill, but I’m thinking the hard hits of torque you mention could fatigue the metal if you don’t dampen it out a bit

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Sounds good to me. 3 out of 4 points already integrate bushings so it will be fairly trivial to put it in the 4th. Will also only need simple rectangle shapes of it so will be easy to find it

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I’m still here.

The transmission is now mounted using 3 points, completely self supported. The mounts are dodgy as hell, but as a proof of concept they work great.


This mount here is where the original engine was mounted to. Later on I will add more square tube that goes further along the face of the transmission.

This mount here is borrowed from some random car. I need to find what car this mount is from, as the rubber is old, but it does the job for now.

This one here at the back is not in use yet, still working on it. There is another mount at the front that is also bushing supported.

Next is to learn how to take the hubs off so I can take the CV shafts off so I can make my own

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Still watching how have you been :call_me_hand:

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Yeah good thanks mate, starting working at the job I was doing before being laid off during corona so I’m really happy. I’ve given up on esk8 completely, sold most of my stuff recently and discovered the 10cycle 12s5p that I spent $800 on was dead lmao

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Oof, that fucking sucks man im sorry.

Im glad to see you’re still working on this project though :slightly_smiling_face: this is one of my favorite threads on this forum.

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