Hello all,
Kicking off a thread on my project. A few years back I bought myself a 1965 Ford Mustang. Here it is the day after I bought it. You can still see the rope attached from where a friend very generously helped me tow it home. There was just a minor issue with the distributor.
I've had it running on and off. But there are issues that need attention - water leaking in and rusting things up. It needs a fair amount of restoration work. The cowls need to be replaced, there are a few small holes in the floorpan, and there is some bubbling paint on one of the doors.
The original plan was to rebuild the 200ci inline 6 cylinder engine it came with, but I've decided to turn it into an EV instead.
I've more or less stripped it back to the bare frame. I'm grinding off all of the paint right now. After that will come bodywork repairs.
Since it's a rear wheel drive car, the Lexus gs450h CVT seems like the obvious way to go. Lots of power in a very tidy package that will fit neatly in the transmission tunnel. The only concern I have here is the strength of the original rear end. These cars came with three different differential/axle setups depending on which engine they were fitted with. Either 7in, 8in or 9in. My car came with the smallest engine so has the smallest/weakest rear end - the 7in. I've not been able to find any hard data on what kind of abuse this will stand up to. The original i6 produces up to 258Nm of torque. The plan is to use the original rear end and if I melt it (not that I'll be driving it very hard) then I can swap it out with something heavier.
The engine bay is very spacious - lots of room for batteries. The frame rails are 800mm apart. It's narrower between the shock towers of course.
Lots of room in the boot as well. In particular, there's a space that's approx 400x300x1100mm behind the back seats. It's sort of dead space that doesn't really take away from the boot space. I have one of the BMW 'saddlebag' 9.5kWh packs on the way. The plan is to start out with this small pack and get everything working. All going well, I'll invest in a bigger pack.
I'd love to keep the original filler cap location and put the charge port there.
I'll also need to do something about the steering and brakes. Both are manual. But, most worrying of all is the way the steering works. It has one long 19mm diameter steel bar running from the steering box all the way up to steering wheel. Bit of a nightmare in a crash.
I just recently attended one of Damien/Kevin's EV conversion courses - so I'm all fired up and I've been doing a lot of shopping
The plan is to build out the EV parts on the bench in parallel while I'm working on the bodywork.
