Motor Mounts Completed and First Cable Made

It's amazing what you can find at a metal recycling yard. I browsed around again recently and found more half inch aluminum plate to make the Warp9 CE (commutator end) motor mount. I was also lucky to find some loose short pieces of quarter inch to half inch thick aluminum angles (90 degrees) that were used to anchor the plate to the chassis motor mount.

Here is a shot of a pile of aluminum to be recycled at the yard I visited.



Below is the half inch aluminum plate mounted to the commutator end of the motor and a 90 degree aluminum angle held in place to the stock chassis motor mount for hole markings and drilling.



Once the top bolts were fastened, a clamp was used to keep everything flush and in place to mark and drill the side holes.



Here is a side shot showing the side bolts of the CE motor mount plate. Notice all the aluminum cuttings after drilling the holes. This is why one must always make sure to tape up and cover the motor venting screens/grills in order to prevent unwanted debris from getting inside the motor.



I have been very anxious to do a motor power test so I proceeded to making my first cable. After much reading, I noticed that most people were simply crimping the cable connections and others simply soldering. Since I was not sure which way to go, I decided to first crimp my connections and then solder them. I used a hack saw with a 32 tpi blade to cut my cable since I did not have a big enough cable cutter. Don't kid yourself, this worked just fine. I recently purchased a hammer-on crimper on ebay and found that it did a pretty decent job crimping. I left a bit of space between the lug and the cable shield/jacket in order to allow just enough room to apply resin and solder for soldering the connections. After the soldering was finished and the lugs had cooled down, I attached two layers of heat shrink tubing (a short piece first followed by a longer overlapping piece). Considering this was also somewhat of an experiment, I think the cable turned out good enough for me to feel confident with this approach for the rest of the heavy large gauge cabling.

Here are the tools and parts that were used to make my first cable (2/0 welding cable, lugs, three quarter inch heat shrink tubing, lead free silver solder for electrical use, resin, hammer-on cable crimper and heat gun).



Here is a closer up shot of the hammer-on crimper.



This is the final result of the short cable that interconnects the A2 and S2 terminals of the Warp9 motor.



The next thing to do is a 12 volt motor power test but I will need to borough a battery charger and/or charge the donor car battery.

Jim