Electric Conversion Workshop: Lawnmower Project - Episode 11 

Yea! Liquid cooled lawnmower! I would love to see that.

My EGO mower works great, mows for an hour between charges, recharges in less than an hour, is self-propelled at a range of speeds, and adapts it's power to the amount of grass. Unlike my previous ICE powered mower, it instantly starts every time with no hassle. It might be fun to invent your own electric mower, but it's a lot easier to buy one that has been perfected.

Build your mower out of modems so you can download updates-almost like a Tesla.

Great series. I really enjoyed it.

Great job mr G, it's just like your class but AMPED UP!!! What a great learning experience!

You need a phone dock on the handle so you can listen or watch RU-vid while mowing. Or have an app which GPS tracks what you've mowed. There are plenty of PC cooling options you could employ to keep the battery pack cool but using aluminium spacers between the cell stacks and a radiator on the top would probably be enough.

14:20 drill down the shaft, reverse the thread and secure it with a bolt and red locktite or even just get a smaller adapter, port as needed with a rotary tool and then drill and tap across the two.

Your hand-made conversion had one feature better than my store-bought KOBALT mower. Your controls had a quick stop feature. Once released, your mower stopped immediately. The KOBALT mower takes about 3 or more seconds to stop turning. Your design is ** better ** for safety than my premade mower.

Great project and summary of the challenges and steps. The only thing I didn't hear was how to skip all that by buying an off-the-shelf electric mower. What should we look for if we're not going to be building for ourselves?

I would like to see you make a battery pack like a donut going around the electric motor and add more cells to keep it cool would be the simplest way to go.

Now the next evolution should also include adaptability, for example, having the battery and drive train reusable for other devices, kind of like battery power tools can...

Makes me want to find or make some kind of conversion kit.

Liquid cooling is a topic I think people would find interesting

If you had the fab guy make an adapter you would of needed instead of dropping the motor and make the other part for the blade the mounting of the motor would most likely been easier. I would have started there but every one does things different. But good job on it, great videos!

You are doing a nice job promoting batteryhookup.com. A lot of things are sold out there.

So... the next project will be a car conversion? =P (Please say yes! =D)

You can avoid the motor adapter by making a longer blade coupler.

11:30 I bet a 3D printer could build an acceptable adapter or you could even just measure steel strips, bend and drill in ports. I bet you could even make one out of wood if you were so inclined lol

You need a designer lawn to show off your mower

Both 60 Hz electric motors and Briggs & Stratton gasoline lawnmower engines run(or are governed) at 3600 RPM. I always wondered if this was from design. That that was maybe an engineering standard for manufacturing.

Take the blades an motor off and replace with spinning laser and outer mirrors

As for the different shaft sizes they do have shaft bushings some minor modification to it might be necessary like a key way and a set screws far less machining

You should probably increase the number of cells by ~50% to give a one hour life. That way you're getting a 1C discharge rate, and should give you >500 cycles. If you cut the grass about once a week on average that's ten year life. If you're doing more than 1C then you'll wear the batteries out much more quickly.

So when will you convert an ICE car to electric?

Next an ebike?! 🙏

My goodness I'm the first comment. Thanks for sharing guys

Guys, how about a list of links for where you purchased the different parts?

Wait , hold on, I have only used electric lawnmowers all my life .. couldn't they just use one of those ?

Been watching this series and finally got myself a donor lawnmower a neighbor was junking. Deck is in great shape, just blown motor, which is gonna be trashed anyway. Battery Q: Found the modem batteries from Battery Hookup - I have a larger lawn. Could I go 13 series, 4 Parallel and reduce the C factor and then it would last 25% longer? I think that's correct, no? Or am I missing something? Still watching the final episodes, but is there a link to the motor you used? Adding, found batteries, but also need plastic connectors, BMS, that on/off switch... any links?

If one needs to machine a custom adapter for a motor, it might be possible to design it and have www.emachineshop.com fabricate it for you. They are a bit pricey, but do excellent quality work.

tesla should actually build lawnmowers to introduce average joe to the technology :D a new gasoline lawnmower costs between 90 and 500 € a ride on lawnmower between 500 and 2.000 € pretty sure tesla could easily crank out a lawnmower in these price ranges. while just building a minifactory for that... like one or two football fields. i mean, they build ventilators with model 3 parts, a great value lawnmower should be a piece of cake.

Official battery day Sept 22 per website

I can see some real potential, how old is this channel?

put there a computer and make this thing go cut lawns without you, so you don't ever have to do it and spend your time on something more interesting )))

Those "modem batteries" are what the Tesla Model S and X are made with, 8256 of them.

I see the fun side in your project, but I feel it’s irresponsible to be encouraging less qualified/experienced people to have a crack at it. Rotary mower blades spin at high speed, so if a component in the drive train failed & something came adrift, it potentially becomes a very dangerous projectile. If you’re trying to promote green-ness, then you can’t go past a 100% human-powered reel/cylindrical push mower. They’re super lightweight, cheap, have very few moving parts & they’ve gone through the whole quality control/compliance process. True story: I was mowing our verge/nature-strip with our Flymo pushie, when an engineer stopped me to enquire about it. He’d assumed that it had a flywheel as he’d noticed that I was effortlessly pushing it. When I told him that it didn’t & in fact that it’s very light-weight (lifting it with1 finger), he was flabbergasted. I said if you’re not convinced, feel free to give it a go. The moment that he started pushing it he had a wide smile on his face & happily finished the section that I was doing, without me even asking. Here’s the thing, they’re so light that the wheels don’t dig in (making them harder to push), even in softer soil or longer grass. They don’t even make the ching ching ching noise that the ones in my youth made, due to the fact that that the spiral moving blades don’t make contact with the stationary linear blade. In summary, less noise, less effort & the blade sharpness is a given for a long time, plus you can cancel gym membership. : )

I never paid attention to these videos, or they aren’t recommended to me, I think because the title is too long! You got to make the title and thumbnail better!!!!

Get a real lawn?

What worked, what didn't work... Talk more about sizing the motor. If, for example you were to want to replace a 6.5 horsepower gas motor, what size dc motor would you use...