DIY Cheap 10HP ELECTRIC OUTBOARD - Sink or Swim 228

[Music] oh oh that is cool [Laughter] okay well i am absolutely sick of fixing that gas outboard it's running now everything's great however it's time that i take the next step along this evolution and go electric now you've seen me muck around with a one horsepower electric trolling motor before that's something you can buy right now easy peasy drop it on a dinghy and troll back and forth not a bad solution very simple but you know what if you want to go faster what if you want to plane on electric power well the first thing you need a motor this is turnigy's 100cc 8 800 watts electric bldc motor it's not the most efficient name of the game and it's not the most powerful continuous motor but what it does give you is huge chunks of surge energy with a tiny form factor powering that is a esc or electric speed controller this bad boy right here is rated for 250 amps and it's all controlled with this tiny little 5 volt lead on mechanical sides of things we have this donor motor this is a leg from a evinrude 99 two-stroke outboard this is everything except for the engine block which was heat fused and locked knocked loose and then zero compression and then so who cares toss the motor out time to put an electric in this bad boy it smells like i got myself a machining job and it's a good thing too because i love learning new things however i like learning them in less risky environments which reminds me today's episode is brought to you by skillshare if you're like me and you thirst for knowledge especially practical knowledge but you don't want to spend a fortune going to school studying things in depth and you just want to get your toes wet a little bit i'm sure you've heard of them before they offer thousands of courses across all kinds of mediums better lighting eh there we go all right well i'm continuing along the seo and learning how to do the back end of youtube because although i have a background photographer um this social media game is a lot more complicated 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skillshare for sponsoring this episode let's go learn how to machine [Music] all right well uh there we go pop the lid and as you can see we've got quite a lot of real estate to work with so ideally i would be able to use this as the main throttle which means i need to use these cables to control potentiometer i'd also love to be able to still use the gearbox that'd be cool and of course blocking up any tubing because that's not necessary anymore [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay i've never worked with esc's this big and uh in the long time it's taken me to this project i've lost my usb dongle to program it so i'm getting a 10 beep error code [Music] esc powers on i'm getting voltage to the uh servo controller but the servo controller is not putting out any test voltage so i gotta check into that i'm not sure why but here we go nothing all right ladies and gentlemen we are on my boat we're gonna do a dry fit just a test run of this esc i've flashed basic programming onto it but nothing more and we've disconnected the prop so hopefully [Music] it does not well more programming i guess all right so i'm running some really basic flyer esc programming uh stuff here i've got a usb dongle plugged into my four wire uh programming connection there doing it via the computer so that i can have more customized control of this because this is rc parts not really designed to be running an outboard so we're going to see what we can do there's a few quite a few settings i can change it here but i've just said something real basic and hopefully it fires up this time got some new um i got a new firmware on here and we'll see what happens different kind of beat for different firmware same error code error code number 10. all right let's figure it out okay so it's been a bit of a roller coaster first i thought maybe it was a calibration issue and i tried to enter the calibration mode that didn't do anything i've switched a few more of the settings using my little usb dongle here digging into that nothing seemed to change anything i thought maybe oh it's stuck in reverse or it's detect it wants a certain kind of voltage and i thought maybe you should just check if the servo tester is actually putting out a signal voltage that is uh you know appropriate to its wheeling back and forth and of course it's not at all so uh i'm gonna go change some of its poles around see if that makes a difference but let's crack out the solder i don't know what's going on but we're going to take it out of the outboard just to make sure that it's just the electric motor that's having an issue [Music] all right it works okay all right so the issue was two things one it had changed my firmware over back to default because i'd reset it and i tried a wrong firmware i got a different firmware on there that seemed to work the trick i also changed the boot up percentage to 30 and it like that but it's a little hard to handle so let's just switch it and set this back down to the programming side there we go throttle all the way down throttle acknowledged all right let's see nice much better never mind i take it back now it's stuck and it won't give any more okay 15 is not enough we gotta bump it up maybe 20 is the trick and this is why it's nice to bring it to the boat because you got the laptop and the coffee yeah boo you could change configuration start power 15 nah bro let's do 20 what okay unplug set to low voltage remove laptop plug in batteries should replace that with a switch battery confirmation throttle confirmation [Music] all right change start power 25 percent that is much happier [Music] wow that's a lot of power in a little nugget of a box all right let's go plug it in and see if we can make this actually work on the outboard now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] right [Music] all right so we got um the esc mounted in sturdy we've got battery packs now this is just the high discharge pack that sits in the actual cowling unit got it strapped down it's on just a bungee cord kind of scenario that holds it down and all of that i'm willing to accept however over here we have a bigger problem this guy right here do you see that that is my little servo tester and i was trying to use the old articulating arm for the throttle and it's just not working as an articulating arm on there so i'm going to have to cut that up some more and build something that actually works because i don't want to do a test in the water if i can't reliably control the throttle [Music] all right we're gonna do a quick test this is the first test of version one so i'm expecting stuff to go wrong that being said it's a lot lighter than the four stroke and it's a little bit smaller so actually at peak power has one more horsepower than this one but it's a light duty dingy motor and i can only with this current battery pack run at full tilt for 90 seconds not exactly a direct comparison but still really cool [Music] [Music] wow oh oh [Music] so oh that's the end of the juice it didn't last long i just have to beat 15 knots so let's see if i can do that [Music] wow [Music] wow [Music] look at that i don't know that i would call it a hundred percent a success uh but i'm still calling it a success yeah that was a victory it has not beaten my 9.8 tahatsu that thing with me in it and this dinghy in its current state is just short of 15 knots top speed and i just hit 12 there which is good 12 is good don't get me wrong on electric power that's amazing but there are some critical design features that i really need to change one these two little lithium packs are not enough for this motor alone the kind of torque that i want to put out on it is diminishing uh and the packs are warming up quite quickly so in order to get a full steam burn i'm going to buy two more of those packs and put them in parallel and then i'm also going to put a bms module on all of those packs so that i can charge it with an auxiliary pack that sits at the front of the boat and that will let me get more range out of it because right now as it stands i get about 90 seconds at full tilt i mean i just burned through most of that battery pack just doing that quick demonstration and uh also once i have the bms module and that extra lead that goes to the forward tank that'll let me also take the lead off plug it into my boat and charge it off of my solar array because yes that motor and those batteries are the same voltage as my entire system here on the boat so very very compatible i also need to finish the throttle assembly and i need to put a proper kill switch in there and i also need a proper battery like monitor screen that tells me how much juice i have left a lot of things i look forward to doing version two and cleaning this up but just as a proof of concept well we did it we planned on electric power success okay so that's version one and i'm really excited for version two uh i'm also really excited for this whole world of people much smarter than me doing really cool stuff like that because that whole setup cost me 674 dollars to build which is a lot less than what people are charging for electric outboards out there i'm gonna go pick on torquito right now they have a six kilowatt input power outboard uh which apparently only puts half of that down into the water but then also claims to be a 10 horsepower and also claims to be better than a 10 horsepower and claims it has the comparable petrol outboard thrust of 15 horsepower uh i'm gonna call bs total absolute bs and that is a five thousand dollar outboard i don't know what kind of mental gymnastics these companies are doing to convince themselves of these numbers but the truth the matter is you're gonna set sit down you're going to spend a lot of money on electric outboard you twist the throttle and realize you did not get what you paid for and in the end you're going to blame electric companies electric evs in general and as a result you're going to spend more money on gas more money on gas outboards in the future and all that's going to do is drive this whole industry backwards so companies stop lying stop pretending you're offering something you're not i know the marketing guys are real smart and they figured out you can only sell them if you lie but we all lose if you do this that being said i am a total novice and i built this thing for less than hundred dollars so i think you guys should head out and do the same and make cool stuff thanks see you guys for version two so you

Channel: Finding Simon

Views: 146,841

Keywords: Finding Simon, sailboat, Sailboat Build, Wharram Catamaran, Oro 47, Tiny House, British Columbia

Id: xOVEzXozgfE

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022