Electric SeaDoo Conversion!

now we can take our throttle and begin to go [Music] this is my 1995 Seadoo Xp and this is the gasoline engine that was powering the Sea-Doo emphasis on the was rusted water just started pouring out as I'm sure you guessed from the video title I'm going to replace that old gas engine with a new electric motor and we are going to find out if an electric powered Sea-Doo can compete with the power output of a gas-powered Sea-Doo now you may be wondering what made me decide to replace the engine well simply put the old engine was broken water had gotten where it wasn't supposed to be and I was going to try and fix this but as I took the engine apart more and more it became clear that the old girl was beyond saving so my next option was to buy a replacement engine and this was going to cost around a thousand dollars and at the time I wasn't ready to spend that much money on a replacement engine so I decided to wait and in the meantime I began to wonder with how far electric vehicles have come in the car industry with lithium battery prices coming down further and further if it was affordable for me to try and put an electric motor in the Sea Doo instead of a gas engine so with that question in mind I began my research to find out if anyone else has tried this yet and after searching YouTube I found a channel called engine informant where he makes a seven part video series converting his CD to Electric using an e-bike motor he bought from Amazon and some lawnmower lead acid batteries power's on uh we're in the water so far I don't see any water coming in we're still good there see what she does we're gonna take off for the first time well we got 4.5 I guess that's better than 4.4 still no Speed Demon so clearly we were going to need more than just a little e-bike motor if we wanted to go fast but at least this provided us a baseline to go off of this e-bike motor he had was rated for 2 000 watts of power and he could go about four and a half miles per hour the old gas engine had 80 horsepower and could go up to 45 miles an hour so now my next question was how many horsepower is 2 000 Watts you can figure this out by using the conversion rate of 745 watts to one horsepower which means the e-bike motor has the power of around 2.6 horses so to put that into perspective with the power of 80 horses of the old engine that's almost 30 times more than the e-bike motor so I continued searching on Amazon looking for electric motors that were more powerful but unfortunately I couldn't find anything rated over 5 kilowatts so I knew I needed to look elsewhere where were people getting powerful enough electric motors to put in their cars and then I found a website called Thunderstruck Motors they had all kinds of powerful electric motors and I found a kit with a motor with a maximum Peak power around 19 horses for eleven hundred dollars but I still wasn't sure if this would end up being enough power for my Sea-Doo to go fast so I ended up actually emailing the Thunderstruck Motors team to see if they had any other recommendations or better deals and they ended up recommending me an ac35 system which is a massive 83 pound three-phase induction motor capable of putting out a peak horse power of 82 horses you heard that right two more horses than the old gas engine there was only one catch the price coming in at over four and a half thousand dollars there was no way I was spending that much money on the motor so I did the only thing I could I begged and eventually Thunderstruck Motors crumbled coming all the way down to offering the motor system to me for 2600 which was still a lot more than I was wanting to spin but my God I mean after I'm done with the Sea-Doo project I could throw this motor into my car and have an electric car that would run for the next hundred years aside for replacing batteries anyways but all joking aside this was a deal I just couldn't refuse so that is what I did I bought the motor so now I was ready for the next piece of the puzzle the battery pack and I knew designing the battery pack was going to be the hardest part of this project to be able to fit so many batteries into such a small space to provide enough power for this Beast of a motor but at the same time I needed to make sure that the batteries I was putting in weren't adding too much weight making the jet ski too heavy either so my next step was to finish taking all of the old engine parts out of the Sea-Doo and then weigh all of them so that we can find out just how much weight we can put back into the Sea-Doo [Music] foreign [Music] after weighing all of those parts the total we came up with was around 144 pounds but that doesn't include the fuel weight that gas tank holds nine gallons of fuel when filled up all the way so after a quick Google I found out the gasoline weighs about six pounds per gallon that ends up being about 54 more pounds in fuel that we're no longer going to be carrying in the Sea-Doo in addition to that there's also about seven pounds give or take from a gallon of oil that we no longer have either so when you account for those as well the grand total we come up with of the weight being removed is around 205 pounds out of that total we already know we have 83 pounds going towards the new motor but what comes with the new motor is the new motor controller which is actually going to add about another 15 pounds or so so really what that leaves us with for the battery packed is about 105 pounds give or take a few now that we know that the next question is what type of batteries are we going to use the old tried and true lead acid battery comes in at an affordable eighty dollars plus core charge from Walmart's finest brand never start it would take eight of these lead acid 12 volt batteries connected in series to give us a desired voltage of 96 volts which would cost around six hundred and forty dollars there's just one catch the weight coming in at around 45 pounds per battery that would be over 360 pounds we had to the jet ski which is way over our limit foreign [Music] but seriously we were gonna need a better option for our batteries and that's where lithium comes in now I'm no doctor but from this chart I can tell that lithium batteries are going to be able to offer me the same amount of energy as the lead acid but the catches they're able to do it while being lighter and smaller than the lead acid batteries now this is the part of the project where the research got really big there is a lot of stuff so I'm just going to try to condense everything as simple as I can as fast as I can for you so to start I found this website called the 18650 battery store in 18650 is actually a size of battery that's just a little bit bigger than a double A battery on this store I searched and searched till I finally found the best bang for your buck battery that I could get the cheapest cell that was in 18650 size this one was the Bak brand and at the time it was actually a lot cheaper than what it's showing now even though it's currently sold out and one cool thing about this website was that it includes a link to the data sheet for the battery cells and inside the data sheet you can find all the Deep Nitty Gritty technical details and the thing I was most interested in is how many cycles is this battery going to last for and what this data sheet claims is that this battery cell will be able to be fully discharged 100 percent 500 times and then after that 500th time it'll still be able to hold 60 percent at least of the original energy capacity it had brand new which is pretty good for me I mean that's a lot of discharges so right about now you might be wondering sure the lithium battery is great at packing a large punch and a small package but that package looks pretty darn small to me aren't I going to need a lot of these and the answer to that yeah and we're about to get right into just how many we need if we go back to the chart showing the motor power we can see that it shows 144 volts and up to 500 amps of current draw now 144 volts is pretty high so I'm actually going to set my target maximum voltage for my battery pack around 100 volts instead and if we need more we can always add on later now the battery cells I'm looking at have a Max voltage of 4.2 volts we can divide 100 by 4.2 and that gives us around 23.8 we can just go ahead and round that up to 24 so that's how many of the batteries we need to have in series even though putting the 24 batteries together in series gets us up to 100 volts the amps of current that we're able to Output is still only as much as one of those batteries can supply and if we look back at the spec chart for the batteries we can see that they're only rated up to 30 amps to be conservative for our calculations we're just going to use 20 amps instead this means that to supply the maximum current of 500 amps that the motor controller is rated for we'll need at least 25 batteries in parallel with 24 batteries in series and 25 batteries in parallel this can be abbreviated as 24s 25p and this means we'll have a total of 24 times 25 batteries to give us a grand total of 600 batteries in our pack and at a price of two dollars per battery that means it'll be around 1 200 just for the batteries not to mention wiring and everything else that'll go along with it but how much will it weigh at 47 grams per battery we get about 10 batteries per pound of weight which means for 600 batteries they would only weigh around 60 pounds which is well under our 100 pound battery weight allotment I decided to dip my toes in the water by buying only a hundred batteries to build a prototype battery pack first and I found these plastic battery cell holders on Amazon and used these so that way I didn't have to worry about gluing the batteries together putting the cells together I'm using nickel strips and because the pack is just a prototype I'm using magnets to hold down the nickel strips instead of soldering or welding them on I'm also using blue masking tape and paper dividers to help prevent me from short circuiting cells since I'm connecting them together in series in a zigzag pattern to charge all of the batteries I used an opus BTC 3100 battery charger the Prototype battery pack ended up having 24 batteries in series and only three in parallel finally after several more hours I was ready to test the motor using the Prototype battery oh did you feel that wind oh [Music] my God foreign it was safe to say that the Prototype battery and motor test was a success it was crazy how much it blew me away literally how much noise that cooling fan makes from inside the motor now with the first test complete we're ready to begin mounting the motor into the Sea Doo so I don't think we're going to be able to use the old engine mount that was in here we're going to need to get pretty close to the bottom of the bilge in the jet ski so what I've gone ahead and done is I've created some new FDA approved engine mounts we're going to slap in here that'll do the trick just fine for us so we're just gonna pick it up and put it in there thank you oh that's my finger and now reposition it District get that label facing straight up as you can see our FDA engine mounts are uh holding it nice and steady in here she ain't going nowhere now that we have the motor secured in the Sea-Doo with our new engine mounts we just need a way to attach the motor shaft to the jet pump drive shaft and to do that it's a little tricky because the motor shaft is a keyed shaft and the Jet pump drive shaft is an 18 spline shaft so to attach them together we need to use a coupler and the type of coupler I'm using is called a spider jaw coupler where I have an 18 spline side for the drive shaft side and the keyed side for the motor side and in the middle the Jaws come together with a rubber spider that goes inside the tube and can have some Flex now it took some searching but eventually I found the right size couplers that would fit together used on eBay with the shaft coupler installed now I can install the motor back into the Sea-Doo for real this time the foam and bubble wrap engine mounts I had put in the Sea-Doo before were trying their best but I think it's time I gave them some reinforcements now even though I can't use the old mounting plate for the engine I can use the hockey pucks that it mounted to in an attempt to figure out how in the world my pee brain was going to make the engine mounts I drew up a design in CAD using a free online application called tinkercad and this was a nice option for me because I didn't have to download any software to use it and it was simple to use now my cad design definitely is not drawn to scale but it gets the idea across of how I want to mount the motor by using angle bars bolted to the hockey pucks in parallel I then add a base to mount everything else on top of and the front face of the motor has bolt holes that were able to use to bolt on more angle bar pieces diagonally too then finally on the back of the motor we can use flat bar to wrap around the top of the motor and the bottom to hold it in place now with this flawless design we can go ahead and begin the build montage [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you once I got to the back of the motor I realized wrapping the flat aluminum bar over the top and bottom was actually a terrible idea because yes it held it from going up and down but it allowed it to have a lot of side to side motion it's like Elon always says the best part is no part delete delete now what I should have done to begin with was just use one of the angle pieces and go straight across the back because as it turns out it actually had bolt holes I could use to bolt too once I had that fixed the motor was mounted and good to go the only thing I had to figure out now was how to mount the motor controller somewhere by the motor and I decided to try and mount it right on top of the motor actually reusing one of those flat metal bar pieces and then also cut out two additional angle aluminum pieces to use as vertical posts for corners of the motor controller and the controller actually fit into place really well so at this point we were ready to do another motor test this time powering the jet pump and the Sea-Doo all right everybody so we've got the motor and controller finally mounted in the jet ski and I've got the rest of the components sort of hooked up on the table here and uh boy I can explain to you how all it is but just trust me it's hooked up we've got the 12 volt battery we got the 100 volt battery we got the contactor the relay the on off switch the throttle it's all there it's time to test it now we can take our throttle and begin to go [Music] oh man all we have left to do now is build the full sized battery and then we'll finally be able to take the Sea-Doo to the lake to try it out now because our battery is going to be huge I know I'm gonna need to divide it up into multiple modules that'll connect together instead of just having one giant singular pack piece so I went on Amazon and I think I found just the thing this is a Field Box AKA and ammo box and if you look inside you can see I have the scaffolding of how many batteries I'm going to be putting in here each one of these white boxes will hold 80 of these pink battery cells now you might be wondering well how many of these white boxes is it going to take as you can see right here we're going to be taking a total of 12 of these white boxes and for you mathematicians at home that's going to be 960 pink battery cells which is going to be a pretty good chunk of change for all that now as you might be looking at this big pile of these boxes now that will soon be my batteries you might be wondering Zach those look like they're taking an awful lot of space how do you think you're going to fit them all in the jet ski and I'm glad you asked now I can go ahead and show you exactly how I'm gonna fit them in there it was a lucky coincidence but we had just enough space in the front of the Sea-Doo where the gas tank used to be for all 12 of the battery boxes now I just needed one more thing before I could build the battery boxes and that's a spot welder and I could have bought one on Amazon for 200 bucks but instead I got my own home baked solution for y'all so first we got to get in the boat and get the big old battery out of it that's gonna come into play real soon all right now for the fun part getting to it down here that's a good thing the guy who designed this made it easy to access um laughs oh this thing's heavier than I remember to make my DIY spot welder I used some pointed solid copper wires that were duct taped to a piece of wood activated by a foot pedal switch hooked up to a timing relay and then contactor solenoid up to the battery and basically it works by short circuiting the battery long enough to melt the nickel strips that point zero six seconds instead of 0.1 very easy oh my God maybe Sparks just went everywhere you're gonna get your couch on fire shots oh my God [Music] foreign [Music] thank you thank you I stress tested the first two battery packs to make sure the wires didn't melt and that the batteries didn't explode I did this by connecting a 12 volt power inverter to a space heater which pulled over a hundred amps of current from the batteries and I left it running for 10 straight minutes to find any hot spots of heat buildup is that safe of course oh come on it's important to have the right tool for the job just left right through got our metal cable a positive side look at that there we go battery complete now we add just a little more of our packing Bubble Shoot that so now it's all that packing tape well you can still hear it jingle a little bit this is the real way it's going to Jingle because when you're hitting waves it'll be going like that all right this one's good to go I think it's had to make 11 . even though this took me over a month in real life it'll just take you one quick I finished off each battery box making it child safe with a 600 amp fuse then I used two gauge wire to connect all the battery boxes together and then I installed all the boxes into the Sea-Doo and this Rat's Nest of red wire you see are actually the balancing wires for each cell going to a battery balancer I bought this was a pretty handy tool because it has Bluetooth to your phone to see the voltage of every single cell in the battery to charge all the batteries now that they're in the Sea-Doo I came up with my own DIY solution I bought two 0 to 50 volt 10 amp DC power supplies together in series they have a combined voltage of 0 to 100 volts so I hooked them up to the battery pack and I turned them up slowly with the knobs and as it goes up I have a gauge that tells me the amps going into it now there's just a few finishing touches left on the Sea-Doo capping off the old exhaust hole so the Sea-Doo doesn't sink and then just hooking up the kill switch and the throttle now we were finally ready for that Lake test foreign [Music] [Music] was this close to planing out it was right on the cusp it just needed a little more flake test unsatisfied wanting to know what was holding us back from planing out and the answer torque using a Bluetooth OBD2 scanner hooked up to my motor controller I was able to see that we were only getting up to around 4000 RPMs and to plane out I knew I needed probably around 6000 RPMs remember when I said 144 volts was pretty high and that 100 volts should be fine well that was wrong there was actually a huge difference in the torque curve from 144 volts to 96 volts at 144 volts the torque line holds constant all the way up to around 5000 RPMs but at 96 volts it drops off drastically after 3000 RPMs so I did the only thing I could I built one last battery that would rule them all with 8 series and 20 parallel this final battery pack boosted the overall voltage an additional 32 volts I also added a water cooling plate for the motor controller because that puppy was getting pretty hot I was able to reuse the existing hoses that the jet pump used for circulation to the old engine now because the expansion battery was too big to fit in an ammo box I wrapped it in bubble wrap so it was super safe and with these last upgrades we are ready for one final test foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] a few minutes of continuous use checking on the uh wires to see how hot they are the two gauge wires connecting the battery modules are warm and then back here on our other ones yeah so that's warm not super hot our add-on module is also just warm and our little rubber spider piece for our drive shaft coupler I don't know if you can hear it it's uh starting to come apart there and here's a little piece of it here but it's been in there for a year but maybe I didn't get one rated High Enough all in all she's able to rip I was a lot happier with how the Sea-Doo did after this second Lake test much better than the first test and hindsight's always 20 20 and if I could go back I would make that voltage as high as I possibly could to the max the motor controller could take but in conclusion is electric better than gas for watercraft not for the price but all in all this was a fun project and I learned a lot and I'm excited to try out that powerful motor on lots of other projects in the future but thank you for watching and I want to give a huge thanks for 10 000 subscribers and if you want to see all my future videos don't forget to subscribe and stay tuned for the next video because we got more projects coming your way let me get the stuff hear that Luna he's gonna go get the stuff

Channel: Zachs Garage

Views: 1,366,488

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Id: v6kvaiXqgTQ

Length: 35min 47sec (2147 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022