EVMaine: You have a lot of experience working on these vehicles and tinkering with them. Have you considered teaching classes on how to convert a vehicle to electric?
Tom: Not really, I have taught classes in solar in the past. As people have asked me to teach classes over the years on different things that I deal with I always wonder if that’s a valid thing to do because I’m more of a tinkerer, than I am an expert, although I know a lot about them and probably more than a lot of people do because its relatively new. And I have opinions that do fly in the face of more experienced people. I love to scrounge things, I love to do things on the cheap, I mean there’s always bragging rights in that. And that doesn’t necessarily translate over for everybody to be able to do. I think a good example of this is to not use electronics, to be able to use contactor-type controls. I’d love to develop or put together a package with a contact controller that would be something anybody could do. And really, with the plastics we have I don’t think it would be an alien concept for someone to do a drum type controller that would use contactors. There’s a guy online who has an electric drag racer and he has a shifter that’s made out of plywood and copper bolts. It goes from one voltage to another, and they are fairly high voltages, and it looks cool. I see something like that, some savvy entrepreneur could make that piece of hardware because DC motors, I think, lend themselves really well to do-it-yourselfers.
EVMaine: So it would be feasible for Mainers to build their own vehicles?
Tom: I think so. Gosh, look at hot rods. Everybody builds hot rods and I think electric vehicles are a lot simpler. I think if somebody was doing a kit car with a fiberglass body that screams to me to be an electric vehicle. Its lightweight, and a lot of them are VW-based. There are tons of adapters out there for those, whether they are Rabbits or Beetles. The other one is if you use a big enough motor you can eliminate the transmission if you have a vehicle with a standard rear wheel differential. That’s sort of my holy grail now is I’ve been shopping around for a motor, a big ole forklift motor. A generalization for motor capacity is based on diameter. Most of the standard motors are nine inches in diameter. I’m looking for bigger motors, 11 or 13 inches in diameter. Those motors are big enough and torque-y enough that you can mate them directly to a differential and lose the transmission, and you sit there and spin wheels, which is kind of not necessarily an energy-efficient kind of thing to do, but … That’s where it gets people’s attention – performance. The electric vehicle of a hundred years ago didn’t accelerate very fast, most gas cars then didn’t either. We know we’re jaded, and love our performance and we don’t have that with most electrics, and that’s where T-Zero and Tesla and those people, you know, have really come up to the plate, and the EV-1 too, for that matter. They’re selling performance, and then they say, “Oh, by the way, its an electric vehicle”, and everybody goes, “Wow.” Well we’ve known that all along that they’d be able to do these things.
EVMaine: I read recently on the Internet that it would take five thousand to ten thousand dollars to convert a vehicle to electric. If a person already has the vehicle to convert is it going to cost them that much? Does it have to?
Tom: Yeah, the short answer is yes, for the average person, but if you can really scrounge I think you can do it for only two or three grand easily. Ah, it depends on what you want to do, if you just want to scoot around town and you do ten miles a day you could really do it on the cheap. I think you could probably do it for $1,500 dollars, or less, especially if you know somebody who has old forklifts, or shop ebay. Ebay’s a great resource because a lot of times the more arcane the electric vehicle stuff, the less people are buying it. Electronic controllers, standard-type motors they go for a lot of money on ebay and you can do better just shopping directly with a vendor, but oddball things, like many times forklift motors are a great deal. There’s forklift places all over, even in the State of Maine. We’re at the end of the World in terms of delivery, but people junk out electric forklifts all the time, and those motors don’t go bad. They might need new brushes, they might need a little bit of service, but they’re all over the place. If you ever want to do a motorcycle, then it becomes really simple. It’s a more lightweight vehicle, so a motorcycle can be done really cheap. So there’s a lot of opportunity here. Charlie McCarthy told me when he started fooling around with electric cars, long before I ever was thinking about it, they took beetles and they put motors in them, and when I first met him back in ’79 or ’80 I said, “What do you do for controls? He said, “We don’t have any controls, we just slip the clutch.” I said, “You must go through a lot of clutches.” He said, “Yes, but they’re cheap.” And they still are, clutches are still cheap, and you can still slip the clutch and get away… Its not necessarily the safest way to run it, and its not the best thing to do for a motor, it would just be bang on/bang off, but you can do a lot of … You know a lot of the old electric motors used big resistors, they just stepped through a resistor to get the car going. A giant resistor you can make yourself or you can buy one cheap and use that to start up. Its like an electronic shock absorber, so if you run some power through a resistor to a DC motor you start it nice and easy. You get a lot of heat, but you know for about eight months of the year we’re happy to have that heat.
EVMaine: So you’d put the resistor in the car?
Tom: I’d put it somewhere where I could shunt the heat into the car, not necessarily in the car they do get hot, but its kind of fun. I did one once that had an electronic controller and I converted it into a contactor-controller and I had a big piece of plywood with all this stuff jury-rigged in the back of the car for awhile and it slid around as we went, and you could smell that resistor get real hot and you could feel the heat radiating from the back. I thought if it hits the seat or something, it’ll catch on fire, and I’ve done that, yes.
EVMaine: Did you make that particular resistor?
Tom: No, it was one I bought. I found a surplus place that sold what they call ‘braking resistors’ which are a big wire wound resistor usually with ceramic insulators. I bought that one for seven bucks. Over the years, not so much anymore on ebay, but over the years I have bought every electric car manual I could find. And some so-called cable cars are also electric cars, so I wound up buying some cable car manuals too and they are very simple, they might’ve had two motors in series and parallel with resistors in and out of circuit. That was it, they didn’t play with voltage or anything else and because if you stop and think about that, if you kind of analyze when you drive a car, a stickshift car, you’re only starting out for a few moments so the resistor only needs to be in the circuit briefly, and you get up to speed quickly and the amount of waste heat goes off that resistor for maybe five seconds, maybe ten seconds, unless you’re creeping around the parking lot, there it gets a little bit tricky. But you start to learn a new way to drive if you have a vehicle that’s simple.
