Healey Sports Cars

I ran across the site by random surfing and identified with the 215 Buick swap thread. I wanted to do that same swap for 20 years. I bought my first bugeye in college 45 years ago and 5 years later I picked up a Buick with the aluminum 215, but after keeping it for 15 years, and selling that first bugeye after I got a second better driver, I decided against it for essentially the reasons listed here. I knew classmates in high school who had put a chevy small block in a bugeye, and broke his back when he flipped it on a country road in central CA. I had also test drove one in the Bay area during college that a guy had driven out from back east in, with no hood they had stuck headlights on sheet metal strips bolted to the inner fenders, had the chevy rear end sticking out 6" on each side, with a powerglide that he coasted down a SF hill to jump start w\ a dead battery. I was not impressed, even though I always thought the aluminum v-8 would solve some of the issues, I knew the structureal integrity would suffer. A rotary sprite I saw that a friend of my youngest's son's had done impressed me, but I never got revved up about it.
I kept that 2nd bugeye though, even when I stopped driving it regularly when it had an air leak, water leak, gas leak and oil leak, and decided 2 years ago before retiring that I'd do the swap project to something entirely different, but equally fun. I pulled the 948, radiator, fuel tank and am in the process of converting it to a poor man's Tesla. I have 67 hp, 115 lb. ft. rated AC electric motor running at 108V (which has 100% torque available at 0 rpm, by the way,) along with the necessary 600 amp controller, BMS, 5 KW charger and 300 lbs of LiFePO4 batteries. I'm hoping for a total weight of > 1,800 lbs and vette-like acceleration and handling, with a 100 mile range. A fun driving machine, with none of the typical mechanical issues to deal with.
I'd love to find someone who wants to part with one of the speedwell monza FG or CF hoods, with the tiny opening (I don't care about cooling with no radiator,) at a reasonable price? Is anyone out there looking to get rid of one?

Sounds like an interesting project, but I guess I'm just too set in my ways to want to replace the sound of my modded up 948cc in my bugeye. Those Speedwell bonnets are very cool looking, but don't know of anyone that's looking to dispose of one. Where are you located? I'll be happy to post a "wanted" inquiry on a couple of Sprite boards.

I wanna see progress picks. I think this is a trend we'll be seeing way more of.

I assume that AC motor is an AC-50 (or possibly an AC-30). I have been investigating electric cars for several years now and
have come to the conclusion that exorbitantly priced and relatively short lived and heavy li ion batteries are impractical,unless
you can live with the short driving range and don't mind maintaining two cars. The should work well as commuter cars but
are still quite expensive, almost entirely because of the battery costs. My estimate of the Tesla Model S with its 300 mile battery pack (which costs $45,000) which will not last 10 years and willlose a lot of its capacity and power long before then, is that per mile operating costs of that car are almost 50 cents per mile. That's absurd and the car's fatal flaw. I'm waiting for WSU super batteries
to come to market, which will reduce initial costs by 2/3rds and have a much longer lifespan and weigh 1/3rd as much. At that point I plan on electrifying a big Healey. Not before. Figure roughly 5 miles per kilowatthour, and since those batteries recharge very fast,
go for a smaller battery pack - perhaps 50 to 60 kilowatthours. Cost should be around $10K. Electrifying a car at this point I consider
not worth the effort, unless done with a small battery pack such that a larger one can be easily swapped in later.

The hybrid Supercapacitor/battery shows a lot of promise but is a little slow to market. Carbon fiber nanotubes can basically be grown from acetylene or natural gas, can be formed into capacitors of practically any shape, allowing them to double as body panels and structure, and have an infinite service life. Energy density is on par with lithium ion, recharge time is only limited by the current capacity of the connection, and solar cells can be laminated on top.

The biggest problem we have currently with using this technology is that the developers of it such as NASA and academia are fixated on purity and don't understand the concept of cheap bulk mass offsetting lower yield. So where their 99.9% pure product costs $10,000 per unit a mass produced 90% product produced for $50 per unit would make it instantly economical.

Add to this the fact that carbon is conductive whereas fiberglass is not and you instantly have the potential to embed all of the electrical circuitry of the car within the structure where it will remain protected from the elements, and embedded electronics is the obvious next step. Add "soft" energy absorbing components at the perimeter and now you have a vehicle that can largely be produced entirely with mass production molding processes at low cost. Combine that with inductive power transfer and you have a car that you pull into the garage just like normal, pull out the next day and drive, and never worry about fuel except on long trips.

All of this is current technology and there is no reason why we couldn't be doing it today.

Jim

Tesla had a store/display at a mall we were at this weekend. They had the new sedan body mounted about a foot above the chassis. I was really impressed with how simple it was. There were hardly any moving parts. I took several pics - I'll post them if anyone is interested.

Wow Jim, I'm amazed at all the things you are up on. I've never heard of carbon fiber nanotubes, but it does sound interesting. So far electric car technology is very lacking as to producing a vehicle that most of us would consider truely a viable replacement for our current IC powered vehicles. In may the SCCA races at Heartland Park Topeka had a Chevy Volt as the pace car. Did well enough at that job, but I thought is was pretty telling that the Chevy guys felt that they had to tow the car over from Kansas City, (70 miles) instead of driving it.

Bill I expect you've heard of "BuckyBalls" which were the form of carbon molecule developed by Buckminister Fuller a decade or two ago. Basically a hollow sphere of carbon atoms. Since then we've learned to grow the molecule as a hollow tube of essentially any length we want. I was helping injection mold 3 sided snap together blocks in the university ME lab back in the mid '70s but at that time I did not recognize the significance of their ability to be assembled as a flat plate, a sphere, or a tube. Regardless, the tube shape provides a much larger surface for electrons to attach, greatly increasing energy density. There is a lot I don't know about the manufacture, but the fact remains that you can go on ebay today and buy multi-Farad supercaps. And a Farad is an enormous quantity of electrical energy. At least one company has already marketed a supercap based electric screwdriver which has the ability to be instantly recharged.

One of the primary issues with automotive use is making the supercaps in custom shapes. Presently we are still stuck on conventional forms such as the cylinder. But that will change, and when it does supercap body panels will become feasible. THEN we will have our practical electric car.

Jim

Another fairly new development is a supercap/battery hybrid made in the form of a sheet like a sheet of paper. It can be stacked, folded, cut, etc.
Li-Ion is still ahead in terms of energy density so the supercap is used to provide instant power and to absorb power from dynamic braking while the battery is used for deep cycle storage. There is a hybrid carbon nanotube/plastic supercap that has exceeded the energy density of Li-Ion in the lab but needs to be scaled up. And there are other developments we don't know about. MIT claims to be 3-5 years from a mass produced carbon nanotube supercap.

But the energy density of the best batteries or supercaps is still much less than a tenth of that provided by gasoline, even after you factor in the inefficiencies of drivetrain and power production. So that is the biggest hurdle, and that is what makes a fuel cell such an attractive option. It can take advantage of the energy density of liquid fuels, convert that to electrical power with very good efficiency, and that power can be stored until needed. So the fuel cell provides the power for long trips while the supercap/battery handles short trips, acceleration, regen, and solar collection. The fact remains that the more work we do on the electric car even though it still can't compete yet, the sooner we will get something that can exceed what we have now.

Jim

Quote:

Wow Jim, I'm amazed at all the things you are up on. I've never heard of carbon fiber nanotubes, but it does sound interesting.

He's been watching Star Trek, again. ;)

I read some.

Jim

Lol...