E-Lorean Electric Conversion

[bitMuse]

Hey all,

I have no idea if anyone's taken this project name yet! Here's my attempt to bring back 000983. Consider this an official build thread while I ambitiously chase after the title of the world's fastest electric DeLorean.

The donor car (000983) I found thanks to Mike at DeLorean Midwest. The exterior was in near-perfect condition, the inside had a little damage, and the motor was seized / frame was rusted out. Thanks to Mike I was able to get it shipped to my shop with a second lightly-damaged frame. I cared very much during this project to not take a good car out of the market and instead breathe life into something already lost.

I started about four months ago and I've gone through some various design choices. The first decision I made was using a Tesla Model 3 Performance motor. For those unawares, this motor is an induction motor and the car it came out of weighs 1,847kg. The performance of this motor boasts a 3.3s 0-100km/h acceleration 471lb/fts of torque, and 450hp with a 11.5s quarter mile. That's with two motors on the base car, and on this car I am just using the rear motor but expecting about half the curb weight.

The BMS is an Orion 2 with 96 cell taps at 3.7v for 355.2v nominal 403.2v peak. This is where the design gets a little weird. I chose low density lipoly pouches because I..
A. Believe Sulfer or Graphene Ion batteries are around the corner which will turn the market upside down.
B. Would like to spend as little as possible if the market is about to change.
C. Don't care about range at this time.
D. Just want to get this moving.

So this battery pack is 96s2p for a nominal capacity of 32A with a peak discharge of 1,000A. That works out to a little under 13kwh. Abysmal for a battery pack. I will probably get about 30 miles of range out of it. Maybe more. Maybe less. But on the other hand it will charge in about one or two hours to full. For reference, Tesla packs usually range from 70-100kwh. But it met my design goals, with the idea that when new battery tech drops I will swap it out. There's plenty of things to work on until then.

Speaking of that, so formed the todo list:
1. Separate the body and chassis.
2. Rebuild the frame / patch any rust.
3. Mount the motor.
4. Hot-Dip Galvanize the frame, and powdercoat it.
5. Replace things as necessary.

Incredibly ambitious and it took me a while... Pictures incoming.

[bitMuse]

Here she was the day she arrived to me. It was super sunny out and I had never actually seen a DeLorean before. Let alone any type of exotic car. I immediately fell in love. It didn't matter the doors didn't work, or that it smells like old and mold and death inside.


While I had her in my garage and started tearing down the interior to see what the damage was. Rust was really bad near the driver side window pillar. The roof is black epoxied (I don't know if this is factory or not but I suspect it's like this because the roof was leaking for the previous owner and the roof box is perhaps rusty. Just a guess.)

The floor was still damp, the headliners were dropping. Common problems for an old car and I was just going to do it all again from scratch anyways.

In this time I got new lifts for all the hoods and doors for the car so they'd stay up on their own. Easy ten minute fix.




The frame was toast, the driver side wheel was barely attached. I had to come up with a plan.

[bitMuse]

Buy lots of stuff of course...




I started with purchasing the motor and the Delorean Industries spec suspension. New seals. Stainless steel trailing arms. And started counting up the many, many problem items on this car. Missing dust caps on the spindles, the parking brake bracket was rusted through, etc etc etc.

All the meanwhile I worked on separating the frame from the car which proved.. obnoxious. The front two bolts had epoxy poured into the holes (courtesy of a previous owner?) so to get them out I had to use a hole drill to clear away the epoxy before I could get a wrench on them.

It took me maybe an embarrassingly long amount of time but the satisfaction of splitting the frame for the first time was SO worth it.


The shop only gets messier from here.

Around this time I started working on disassembling the car to strip everything that was good while I worked on designing how this motor was going to fit in this frame.

[bitMuse]

Speaking of the donor frame, here she was. Normally covered with a tarp. Naked for the photoshoot.



I got her into the shop and started doing test fits. On the Model 3 the engine fits with the driveshaft behind the two mickey mouse ears. This wasn't going to fit on the DeLorean so it needed to be mounted backwards.



Bonk! I didn't have enough room to get the CV axles in about the same spot as they were on the DeLorean chassis factory. There's some play here but I didn't want to get crazy. There was no way this was going to fit without modifying the crossmember.



Speaking of, I'm not doing this entirely alone. I have a buddy with me Whom Shallnt Be Named who is at least a solid sounding board for my insanity. We spoke about cutting into the crossmember, or replacing it. And so on. There was a lot of talking and thinking about this. Way too much. But at the end of the day the crossmember wasn't in great shape, so I impulsively decided to go with what my gut told me.




Overt your eyes folks of weak stomaches...



I cut it off. I was going to dedicate myself to fabbing a new suspension and engine crossmember. Oh boy. Was this way more work than I figured.

I started with the old school CAD. Get some dimensions and get a feel for the angles.




The original plan being to use some good old 2x4 box steel to bridge the gap. But as I puzzled out the various dimensions a pattern emerged and I switched to digi-cad.



Until I came up with this. The same orientation for the suspension link, but with grooves cut to make this thing a reality and fit with the engine. I had to drop the lettering though eventually because it was too thin for the laser to cut. Oops!

[bitMuse]

There is something pure and wonderful in this world about receiving a package of laser-cut 1/4" mild steel panels in the mail. It's a little magical. Like being a kid at christmas. And then when it tacks together and everything just fits.. Hard to compare.

I matched the advance angles of the original frame and started putting things roughly where they'd need to be. New fill in plates would need to be designed as necessary to bridge the gap to the frame. And we did that.

Step by step.



Around this time I also replaced the front frame extension.



And then started cutting out more plates to fit to the frame...






Until we reached this week, where we FINALLY have the motor attached to the new frame and supporting itself. It's been a huge road to get this far in just a few months.

[DL4567]

Holy cow... What a post! Amazing project.

[SupercoolBill]

Cool write up. Condition of your car seems very similar to mine (see me restoration thread)
My blasting cabinet bites me pretty good too but only when I hold parts in midair while blasting. As long as I make sure they are touching the cabinet no lightening strikes. I've had it jump to my nose before...it hurts.

Sent from my SM-F926U1 using Tapatalk

[Ron]

Cool write up. Condition of your car seems very similar to mine (see me restoration thread)
My blasting cabinet bites me pretty good too but only when I hold parts in midair while blasting. As long as I make sure they are touching the cabinet no lightening strikes. I've had it jump to my nose before...it hurts.

Sent from my SM-F926U1 using Tapatalk

Ground the nozzle...

[bitMuse]

Can confirm grounding the nozzle when I did my upgrade did fix the shocking problem. Also I grounded the whole box (it was not grounded.)

Pretty big status update so far. We've recorded the first part of the youtube video regarding re-engineering the tesla motor. As well as some juicy timelapses and glimpses into the motor itself. I've added a special picture at the end of the stream of today's photos ...



Thanks to Mike's help at Delorean Midwest (and his encouragement) I was able to disassemble my brake calipers. They were all this bad and badly seized. I was on the verge of giving up, even at one point having welded a bolt to the piston in order to try and get it out. For anyone struggling like me, Mike's advice to "wiggle it back and forth by prying it up and then smashing it back down" was the piece I was missing.

This community is awesome, especially Delorean Industries, Delorean Midwest, and Delorean Texas for answering all my inane questions.

Emery cloth and steel wool was not sufficient to remove the grime from these pistons, so I had to use a wire wheel and brake clean. That finally got them clean. Another picture of the carnage left behind:



Following that was a couple shop days. We got all the bushings pressed out. The split washers out of the hub carrier. Then disaster struck.



The aluminum hub carrier snapped and a piece broke off. We're trying to TIG weld it back on and salvage that carrier, but it's tough. This was totally my bad and was the only casualty, but it sucks none-the-less.

Following that we were able to remove the doors, I spent half a day cleaning the interior (prepping to powerwash and ionize it to kill any must, mold, or germs).



















[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/7RfTBUT.png[IMG]

When I took off the roof access panel, there was quite a bit of pollution up there. May be past its prime, but not sure yet.



Using plenty of anti-seize and torque spec +5% I assembled the front end suspension. Josh at Delorean Industries sent me the instructions again (because I lost them. Oops.) But I did have all the parts which is the important part. It looks SO GOOD coming back together.





I also took the opportunity to take more shots of the stripped down exterior...











And finally the image you've all been waiting for .. The image that makes going backwards possible, Marty. Made from CAD and imported into the real world as a prototype PLA part while I check fitment... The reverse polarizer.



More deets to come soon. I just started a new job next week so I may be a bit slow going forward. But this project is still going alive and well.

[bitMuse]

I am long overdue for an update. Sorry guys! As aforementioned I got a job, and then .. my daily's engine exploded when I threw a crankshaft bearing so I was out of commish for even longer. Unable to catch a break, I now am moving across the entire country which means I need to get this thing together and FAST.



So after we slapdashed some wheels onto the frame and wheeled it outside we gave the car a nice simple green bath and powerwashing to remove the remaining cruft and began reassembly.

Priorities became in order:

1. Prep the body
2. Get Wheels On
3. Add Parking Brake
4. Mount Engine
5. Mount Body

While waiting for some parts to arrive and while my buddy was reassembling the rear suspension I took the time to clean up some of the mounting holes and hardware from the body of the car.


First came the mounting brackets for the heat shield of the engine bay. I'm not convinced I need that anymore when I have a water-cooled electric motor so I drilled out the rivets and tossed them.


Unsurprisingly the 26 rivnuts by the kick panels on the sides were just trashed. Every single one of them seized and rusted or spinning in the frame. I took the easy way out and cut them all off with an angle grinder, die ground them down, and punched them into the body. They'll be replaced soon with stainless steel or aluminum rivnuts to never become a problem again hopefully.


The supposedly aluminum flanges for the seat pass-thru bolts were corroded and the metal that used to be my parking brake was effectively gone.


I made an attempt to clean up the flanges for the seats but two of them were so corroded they literally split in half and fell out of the car. So I designed new flanges and have had them sent off to a fabricator to be made out of 316 stainless.


Here's that DXF if anyone ever needs to fabricate one.

The old bolts for the parking brake were cut loose and the metal removed.


Thanks to everyone at DMC Midwest they sent me a spare parking brake caliper which I generously took pictures of the inside of before wirewheeling and cleaning up all the corroded parts.


Not all of the parts were readily available to rebuild the parking brake assembly. Some of them like this spring bolt needed to be fabricated from what was on hand and I did my best with an angle grinder and hand drill.


The parking brake is pretty terrible on the Delorean. Overcomplicated and confusing, but I managed to cobble two pairs together from the 2.5 pairs' worth of parts I had laying around. One day I will have to unify the paint and detailing of all these parts but that day is not today.

However before the parking brake can be mounted the trailing arm has to be tightened to spec and that presented a problem. The Delorean Industries trailing arm doesn't perfectly fit with the carrier hubs I have. The bolt length is closer to 120 or 130mm rather than the stock 110mm, and as such, there's also a small gap between the hub and the arm...



So some fabrication work needed to be done. I stick welded two washers together, ground them down a little, and whacked them into place on both sides. I couldn't find ANYWHERE where I could get the right bolt size for a 10.9, and definitely not for a 1.5 pitch. I did however find a partially threaded 150mm bolt 10.9 with fine threads at a local fastener specialist...

So I cut all four of them short using an angle grinder and bolted everything up to spec.



With that I was able to more or less get the parking brake mounted sans rear caliper pads.

Since the last update we also added the control arms for the rear and .. surprise! The wheel pitch is correct and it did fit together with my lower crossbeam. Which is a relief. .... Because I never test fitted anything and never double checked my angles.



Now with the rear suspension and parking brakes more or less ready we finishing reassembling the motor and brought it over to the forklift. With some fancy lifting work we brought it over to the body and ...



Mounted it! With the wheels now firmly attached to the body we could let the car sit on its own weight with the new engine.



Tadaaa! This could not have gone better design-wise. The engine fits perfectly in the frame and uses space incredibly efficiently. I am so pleased with it.

Finally we were able to lower the body onto the frame for a test fit. The first time the frame was returning to the body in a long, long, long time.



There's still a lot to do to get this ready to be moved. The back lip has to be resealed with glue and riveted as the seam has come apart. Some of the rivnuts need to be replaced. The front and rear fascias need to be sanded and repainted. The door seals need to be scraped clean and resealed. And of course all the body panels and doors need to be reinstalled.

But for the first time in a while it's starting to look like a car again.