Possibly against my better judgement I have given my Chili Red 02 to science. We (and I use we loosely because I have almost nothing to do with it) are building Tasha into a full electric torque monster. I think she'd been abused by her earlier drivers so the 120K miles had been hard on the engine anyway and this sounded like too much fun to pass on. So I'll be biking (and borrowing the 07 MINI from the shop) for the next month or two while they get her retrofitted with a 9 inch electric motor. I have been promised 273 lb/ft of Torque available at 0 RPM at the end of the trip. We have chosen to limit range at first and keep her light and quick. For some more of the initial info and figures you can check out the blog I started. CravenSpeed Electric MINI I'll put further updates here and there but you might want follow both in case I get lazy and miss one or the other. We are looking to have her finished in July, I will not be holding my breath for the date but the car better take my breath away when she's ready.
It just occurred to me.... Can you have torque at no revolutions? Hmmmm..... I guess you can, it would be like setting a torque wrench at 273 ft/lbs on a bolt set at 274 ft/lbs. The force is there but nothing is turning....
Very cool, I am really looking forward to see how this turns out. Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk
subscribed! We thought about something similar for a not-a-MG, for track abuse. This sounds like just the thing when Gromie gets a little older!
Sure is a lot of extra room in the front there... Not a lot of updates but a few nonetheless. CravenSpeed Electric MINI
Thanks for posting Nathan. I do have another image as well that is kinda cool. We'll be making use of the mounting points for the standard ICE, but we are machining a bracket to attach to them to the new motor.
Will the forces on the engine mount be greater with the "instantaneous" torque of the electric motor? My guess is a poly mount would be more useful than the hydraulic 04-06 R53 mount because vibration is almost nonexistent?
We will be using a poly mount, we'd like to use one of the stiffer aftermarket models. Luckily, since it is an 02 we do not have to deal with that hydraulic unit. Good call.
Update: It's Alive! We have been making some real progress on the build. Things are happening much faster now than they were over the first few weeks where everything was getting drawn out in CAD programs and talked about theoretically. This morning, our Motor was hooked up to the Getrag from the MINI using a custom Flywheel, and held in place by a series of solid mounts combined with the oem mounting points. When offered a few volts from a Lead-Acid battery the wheels got turning, almost silently. It was a big moment for us, but there is still a lot of work to be done before our first scheduled drive on Monday. I have been creating daily 2 minute video mockumentaries, and having some fun with them. Today's will be the 10th episode of our reality TV show that does have some good information about the build despite the tone. Here is a link to the first one;
Still working on making it a little faster, but we have some real progress... [imglink]https://www.cravenspeed.com/product_images/uploaded_images/burnout-3.jpg[/imglink]