How to build an Electric Hummer? Step One – TEARDOWN!

[Music] welcome back to my military humvee electric conversion today we're going to take everything out of the humvee that we don't need like the combustion engine the gas tank the radiator there's a bunch of stuff in here that is completely irrelevant when we switch it over to electric my electric motor and inverter is over here and i'll show you that a little bit later it's actually pretty interesting the electric motor in this box is actually running on ac electricity so this is the motor controller and inverter here and these are the dc batteries so we're going to have to find a location for these batteries we have options where the gas tank is near the back a spot near the seats and of course underneath the hood in the front we'll get an idea of how much room we have to work with once everything is out of the truck let's get started great [Music] quick shot underneath the hood before everything comes out you can see that all of the space inside of here is actually you know pretty well filled and used up one interesting thing about the humvees is that this is the engine bay and then if we come over here this spot inside we can see the transmission as well as where it joins up to the motor and that's so the driver and the passenger can actually work on the vehicle from inside the cab if they ever need to gives more access to the stuff underneath the bonnet now the reason i'm a little skeptical about the batteries fitting in this area is because it's so tight you can see the wheel wells come up and there's not a lot of room you know in there even though the electric motor is actually really small i'm still just not sure that there's enough room for all those batteries so options two this area right here is the perfect size to fit six batteries on their sides and so i'm thinking if we fit six here six there then we only have four more left to figure out what to do with underneath the hood because i don't want to use the top side of the bed because i still want to be able to use the vehicle as a vehicle once it's all done and if i'm filling up the truck bed with batteries then it's unusable there also might be some room underneath where the gas tank is currently but uh we'll have to see [Music] now the hood is off this thing looks like a beast a combustion engine has so many moving parts inside like when we stick the electric motor in it's going to be so much simpler but one thing that needs to come out first is the radiator the problem is is that this radiator is full of a ton of liquid and that liquid is coming from the reservoir from the top of the engine it's all over the place and if we don't drain it it's gonna leak everywhere and we start removing parts luckily it's pretty easy down here next to the passenger side tire and spin that dial and let this neon green liquid drain out that's going to take a while pretty much every combustion engine has some kind of coolant inside and our electric machine is also going to have coolant but i'm probably going to swap out all these old components since this is a 1995 and put some newer more reliable radiators and pumps in well that's down there relieving itself i'm going to go ahead and start working on the air intake once again another variable for the combustion engine another one of the many fluids that we have to deal with with a combustion engine is transmission fluid this stuff is a red oil and sits inside of the transmission which i'll talk more about a little bit later we also have oil which is the black stuff sitting inside of the engine and the diesel fuel in the fuel tank which we'll take out later there's a lot of liquids inside of a combustion vehicle when i get my electric stuff installed it'll just have coolant much more simple fun fact when you're recycling these liquids the oil and transmission fluid can go together since they're both oil based but the brake fluid and coolant cannot be recycled in the same container so what's going on behind me might look like a very chaotic unorganized mess and that's because it is a lot of ice vehicles internal combustion engines have more than 2 000 moving parts to keep the vehicle running we have things like the injectors the pistons fuel pumps there's all kinds of working components that need to work in harmony for the whole thing to run or move forward where electric vehicles have as few as 20 parts to keep moving [Applause] there we have it radiators out now we can get a look at the brake rotors which are here next to the drive shaft instead of down near the tire which is kind of cool now the engine needs to come out so it'll look claustrophobic and confusing coming out of the vehicle but the new system we're putting in will be much more organized for example this internal combustion engine needs to have the correct amount of air coming in from the air intake we have a fuel line coming in from down at the bottom we have the alternator here we have the glow plugs on the side and then we've taken off the radiator which keeps all the liquids from the transmission there's 5 billion things that could go wrong with this hummer which they did and that's why it's bricked but when it's electric there will be less parts and less maintenance which i'm looking forward to let's get back to it [Music] [Music] so [Music] so this guy right here is a transmission jack it'll support the transmission while i remove the motor and this guy here [Music] is an engine hoist that i'm going to use to support the engine as i pull it out because uh it's pretty heavy so if we look really closely inside of this engine compartment the engines right here and right underneath it back there in the corner you can see this little rectangular box that's called the motor mount and we need to remove that there's one here and then there's one over here on the other side you can see it right down in there and once we get both of those out and remove the few bolts here between the bell housing and the motor then we should be able to free the motor from its captivity i mean it's kind of a cool design i can get my hand all the way inside of that motor mount and unscrew the bolts holding the motor in place and it's still supported because the motor mount is at an angle i like it once i do the other side we should be able to lift it up [Music] so i am working on getting the bolts out from the transmission and the motor but there's one final bolt way down in there and it's just flushing up with the surface that i can't get a good grip on it but a little trick is is that if you take a wrench stick it on the edge like this and then twist it gives you some more leverage now apparently another one of the things holding the motor to the transmission are these bolts right here going from this large gear to the torque converter so many moving parts you can see all the connections are covered with this red goop which allows everything to be water tight when it's doing that whole going underwater thing that i mentioned in the last video everything has that red rubber sealant on it so this whole unit right here is called the starter motor and this has a small gear here which turns this large gear here which gets the whole motor moving this is surprisingly heavy oh that's got to weigh 50 pounds nice free [Music] hmm [Music] so and the motor is out it is so heavy that it bent my two ton lift granted you know i was out in the half ton range because the closer you get to the lift the more it can hold anyway it broke my lift and that is huge and it looks like a massacre happened which i guess it kind of did there are bodily fluids everywhere some of them are even red because we have literally taken out the brains of this whole operation and it is sitting on the floor over there but we are not done with the humvee tear down just yet we still have the transmission underneath which we don't need for the ev conversion the transmission is what takes the power from the motor and makes it into usable energy for the tires and i'll explain more about torque and gear ratios as we get into the new electric motor but long story short we still have one more main component to take out and it's also pretty big so you might be thinking to yourself hey jerry why don't you just use your lift to jack up the humvee and get the transmission out with that and that's because once the humvee's up in the air i don't have a second lift high enough to support the transmission as it's coming out so i have to do all that work from the ground but hopefully i'll be able to use the lift at some other point during this project [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right come here for a second no no remember for everybody in here all right so this is where the motor used to be we can see the underside of the shifter so this is where we can go from like drive to park to reverse and it connects to the transmission right here and then the other one goes to the transfer case which handles the four-wheel drive and that's that guy right there so next we need to do is pull this long metal bar the support for the transmission out and then we can remove this drive shaft which hopefully should be relatively simple and then we can drop the transfer case and transmission at the same time a quick little thing i figured out so this drive shaft right here actually let me start with the transmission the transmission is pretty much what's driving both of the rear tires in order to drive the front tires we have this drive shaft right here and if we go underneath the vehicle we can see way back there where the drive shaft connects to the transfer case now i've released two of the bolts that i have access to but i need to rotate that drive shaft so i can get access to the two bolts on the other side so what i've done is i've jacked up one of the tires and as you can see as i rotate this tire that drive shaft spins and gives me access to the bolts i can't reach yet i'll go way more in depth on the drivetrain stuff when i have more of the electric components installed but i thought that was kind of cool now this thing right here we definitely don't want sliding off because there's a bunch of little rods little needle bearings inside of there and if that falls off it's going to be a real pain huh hmm well as we can see transmission is out but the bell housing is just barely too tall to come out from underneath i think it's time we jack up the truck a little bit [Applause] [Applause] and now we should have enough room to get the transmission out there we have it the transmission is now out i'll explain what all these components do towards the end of the video because it's actually pretty interesting how they all work together but first we have two more things to take off of the humvee the fuel tank as well as the exhaust i'm pretty glad we finally get to have this thing off of the ground coming underneath here this is where the transmission used to reside and now we have the fuel tank on this side the exhaust on this side and removing both of those will free up a lot of space so now that my transmission is out my uh high lift transmission jack finally arrived but that's all right because we can use it to lower the fuel tank so while i'm removing the fuel tank let me show you how it works i do want to leave this cap here so i can use it when i charge up the electric humvee but as we can see the diesel gets poured into there goes down this tube and then into this giant tank right here there's one remaining socket way up in there i should be able to reach it with this nailed it these diesel-powered humvees usually get about eight miles per gallon on the freeway and four miles per gallon around the city but since ours is going electric we don't have to worry about any of that it's unlimited miles per gallon and lastly we have to remove the exhaust [Music] so much more room so now all of the humvee's internals are externals which is exactly where we want them outside of the humvee so we can replace it with all new electric components so behind me i have the mostly empty humvee all that's left is some tubes and wires and stuff which i'll pull out in a second and over here we have everything that we've taken out now weight is super important when you're working with an electric vehicle along with aerodynamics but we're just not going to go there so i've calculated how much weight each of these components weighs so we can compare it to the hardware that we're putting in the diesel motor that we took out weighs 845 pounds then we have the radiator which holds the coolant that weighs 94. and the transmission and transfer case weighs 352. we might be putting the transfer case back in to use with the electric components but i haven't quite decided yet we also have the starter motor which weighs 48 pounds the fuel tank which holds 25 gallons worth of fuel and weighs about 200 pounds when full and then we also have the 65 pounds worth of metal exhaust coming out to the side and since we don't need any of these components anymore i'm going to walk you through briefly how a combustion vehicle works so we can understand that before we move into the electric stuff it's kind of easier to see everything now that we are outside the vehicle so to start with we have the fuel tank here which is where the diesel fuel goes into the tank from this spout then that diesel fuel runs through a bunch of rubber hoses here to the motor now this beast is a super complex finely tuned machine that requires a lot of different things in order to function and since it's not functioning right now it's super hard to get all those things dialed in but basically there needs to be explosions inside in order to propel the humvee forward you can see that as it's sucking in the air it goes into a bunch of different chambers and each of those chambers has these little glow plugs right here so as the pistons compress the air and these dinosaur droplets together they explode and each of those pistons turn a central crankshaft which is back here around the back side as all these explosions are happening the pistons are firing and rotating this central shaft once we get that motor spinning however it's still not enough to move this thing forward we need gears because this thing overall is not very efficient now this transmission is a four speed transmission which means it can take the rpms from the motor or the rotations per minute and get us up to about 75-80 miles an hour but it has to shift four times and if you've ever been in a tesla or an electric vehicle you know that electric vehicles don't have to shift at all so as this is shifting it goes straight through the transfer case to go to the back wheels and this transfer case has another little niblet on the front which takes it up to the front differential to power the front wheels and the differential is still in there because we need it for the electric part and then of course while there's a bunch of explosions happening in here we have to release those recycled dinosaurs out into the atmosphere with all of this tailpipe and muffler situation and that's basically how a combustion engine and a combustion vehicle works there's over 2 000 moving parts if you factor in all of this mess in the engine and an electric vehicle is much simpler i say that now but i actually haven't put the electric vehicle together yet so i might change my mind later so that's it for the humvee tear down i'm not sure what video is coming next it could be assembling the batteries or it could be what's inside this box right here which i'm pretty excited about [Music] this little hunk of metal right here is stronger than everything i just showed you over there i'm looking forward to what's coming next if you haven't subscribed already hit that subscribe button leave any questions you have down in the comments below and thanks a ton for watching i'll see you around

Channel: JerryRigEverything

Views: 969,118

Keywords: Electric hummer, hummer ev, electric truck, ev humvee, hummer conversion, ev conversion, electric hmmwv, jerryrig, jerryrigeverything, electric vehicle, tesla, rivian, hummer, GM, ford lightning, GMC hummer ev, cyber truck, cybertruck, hummer teardown, hummer engine removal

Id: QeZRjCnyYxA

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/screwthat4u]

Sounds like a cool project, I was thinking man, that would be nice to keep as is, then I heard the fuel efficiency plus no air conditioner, then was like nah lets go electric

[u/alrightbudgoodluck]

What is his component list?

[u/killshelter]

If the LS in my 91 Suburban ever dies, I would love to electrify it.

But then I found out how expensive it actually is.

Gonna watch this build for inspiration though.

[u/tobiascuypers]

Tech reviewer/teardown guy Zach is building an electric 95 HumVee. This is the 2nd part (1st tear down part) to his series on building this.