Restoring my dead Mini Cooper with a $200 electric motor

hey guys richard rich rebuilds here and today we're back with my electric mini cooper build if you haven't been following i bought a mini cooper for 1500 bucks and the goal is to make it electric for 5 000 including the price of the car in the first episode i removed the engine and transmission at my shop the electrified garage that services and repairs electric vehicles and in the second episode i broke down how i was able to get a motor and controller for cheap for the build and you know what people complain in the last video i made a statement that many coopers weren't very reliable and the seven people that exist that haven't had anything go wrong with the mini coopers chimed in to say how great they oh wait hold on now it's six people one of them broke down now i wanted to apologize to all six of you personally i admit i've never actually owned a modern mini before i just really like my old school one and i was just going by the warning signs from jd power associates consumer reports the comments section of many forums friends family media mechanics and facebook marketplace where you can get one for between zero and two thousand dollars or the fact that minis are worth three percent of their original price after four months of ownership including the adjustment for inflation i wanted to apologize and tell you guys it's not that serious i have a corvette and if i had a dollar for everyone that asked me if i was gonna drive 55 in the fast lane because i'm a 73 year old white man on viagra i would have enough to buy three lifetimes of viagra i also own a military spec humvee and i get ragged on all the time with people saying it's the largest piece of garbage one could ever own and everyone that owns one should be round up tarted feathered or placed in a brazen bowl and don't even get me started on why people laugh at me for driving a bmw i8 i hear these things and i laugh because i am not emotionally fragile as many of you are so if you want to overcome your emotional fragility hit that subscribe button right this instant watch all the upcoming videos and maybe after a couple months you'll be able to work on that maybe one day you'll stand up to your girlfriend and tell her you know what hon i don't like olive garden i've never liked olive garden the last thing is i got an email about the previous video with linda in it and of course linda is a very controversial topic i've been making videos for years i have over 200 videos and i've had linda in about four of them for a total of five minutes and people have lost their minds so much so that i got an email saying rich i can no longer stand your cheap clickbait content by having that woman on your channel you can do better i'm going to unsubscribe okay i understand that many of you guys don't think cars and women mix but this person must have completely glazed over the fact that in the video i documented how i'm converting a car from gas to electric step by step did literally hours worth of work in the build on the cheap for used parts he must have missed that and was too focused on the parts of linda i looked at his profile picture and his avatar is a picture of him and his girlfriend of course it is this man can't even take a photo by himself and she likely wrote this email for him so this is to you mystery woman congrats on finding a lesser stag and i hope your boyfriend finds the courage to write me himself and if you did write that email yourself young beta male remember i can watch videos with girls in them whenever i want i don't have to find a hideout place like you so today we're gonna pick up where we left off last episode i got the motor and controller and at the end i made it the motor to the transmission today we're going to do some cleaning and installation of the motor and don't forget some much needed testing let's see if this 200 motor even works he likes it super clean he's gonna do a white glove test you know what a white glove test he's not gonna do that he might no never i feel like he surprised me we don't even have white gloves we've never had white gloves not here hey how did this get dirty now you gotta do it with a smile on your face yeah all right first things first we want to have steven here he's gonna be spraying oven cleaner on this because it's lemon flavored it's good for getting off hard uh food stains it smells amazing so we could just pretend that this is like chili that we dropped all over the uh the engine bay so we're gonna spray that get it nice and clean and then we're gonna use some uh various other products to uh to get that nice and uh nice and tidy up you know let's just see let's see where we're at right now see it's gonna be for a few seconds let's try it oh let's come look at that coming right off man it smells look at that this is why you need a power washer seriously those are a lot of money though power washers i don't know how that's the budget i have a few this is the budget it's for free i will hand it to you i should have brought it i feel like an ass no because it's like this no okay so now we're in the cleaning process so we'll be doing this this entire episode will be based on just cleaning can you mix those two products where's linda like the spray she quit like five minutes into it it all yeah us posts on instagram now well it's been fun linda richard what's this i was wondering why i was getting lighter yeah like wow am i getting stronger that wasn't the case at all there's a hole in your bucket eliza oh god damn well we still could use that no we'll get it we'll get another we'll get another one look at that you gotta go walk at 12 miles to go get the water let's do it man let's go steve on ah this is how we do it with no pressure washer this is the ghetto power wash this is due to budgeting issues we can't we can't really swing a power washer right now so we just dump a five gallon bucket of home depot water ta-da so we use we use some green works we use some easy off uh this is not sponsored by them so there you go we used some generic uh oven cleaner and we also used some generic parts brake parts cleaner yeah instantly wow and then yeah i mean look at this even took the paint off too who needs paint now we could use the other pressure washer we need the whey protein pressure washer stephen the wii okay actually you have more pressure washing than uh than i do tying two chickens together doesn't give you an eagle [Laughter] yeah now look at that there you go look at that nice boxes thank you so now today we're actually going to put the motor in um so we're going to mount the motor i have the previous motor mount right here this goes about right here i have the bushings on the ground next to the black ice air freshener oh wow yeah there it is that's where uh the mother's gonna mount to i'm not sure what to do about this side as yet uh i'm probably gonna have to make a bracket because there's no way that this motor matches up in terms of placement you know what we should do steven what's up let's weigh it i have an industrial scale i haven't used that in a while let's weigh the car right you know all that money for the scale not to use it i've used it like once so we should wait we should weigh this what do you think it weighs as is yeah 1300 maybe yeah i'm gonna say definitely i'd say under 1500 yeah i'd say so too we'll see i see i say 14 13. 13.50 good moment of truth and dead i'm going to myself if i didn't turn these on yeah guess who's guess who didn't turn the scales on stephen stephen i'll tell you who knew that you had to turn the scales on oh they're not animated what a sham figure for the price it would just say oh something's on me i'll turn on now okay ready where we at baby whoa i said 13.50 all right that's the same 14. once we add the front crash bar and bumper it's a 1500 pound car okay what can you really do all right now we have 14.79 and now these scales will stay here for the rest of the project for the whole project i'm not going to move these skills no not until we're done we'll even let them die yeah i'm going to leave this on okay please definitely thanks so the thing is a lot of people been really confused about how i made that drawing on the tradition adapter plate on the pizza box really really simple right you know there's a hole in the middle you close your eyes visualize it right my eyes are not open right now see look not open right i made a circle not bad huh a little off center but who cares you know there's four surrounding circles there one two three four right you know that exists now you know there's a backing plate too you start this process right here you know there's a little hole where the axle goes you make that loop you go all the way around right then you go up to the top you know there's a little curve here too a little bump out make sure you have the bump out again eyes closed you not available all seriousness this is what i would actually do for it and i explained it in the rat rod video but mostly didn't watch that anyway so it's fine what you do is this pretend this is a piece of steel so you go to like you know whatever a a metal shop ask for a large piece of very thick aluminum what you'd want to do is you'd want to measure the diameter of this hole and put that really anywhere on the paper so you could have them cut a hole in this diameter anywhere in the paper the reason why we want a a piece of aluminum or whatever metal you choose bigger than the transmission bell housing is because that gives us room for play so once they make this hole right in the center what you can do is this you can and what i did for the rat rod i actually put in the threaded screws here one two three and four colored the tip with the sharpie put it down so it actually marked off the points so once you marker those in one two three four put it down in the center and you mark off the points so you'll see what looks like four little circles that's when you can go ahead and say okay shop go ahead and drill these out or we have a drill press at home you could drill them out yourself make sure that you're testing it every step of the way after you make this you take the entire sheet after this hole is all set and these holes are all set too you take the entire sheet and you put it on top of the motor to make sure everything lines up because you want to make sure this center shaft is right in the center of the circle and you want to make sure these screw holes also line up as well now the next step is uh you want to bolt this aluminum or steel plate to the top of the motor right and once it's bolted in place you have the four screws in and you have this sticking up the middle is that what is it diarrhea where is it where it's in the kitchen you can clean up the diarrhea it's your turn it's definitely his turn yeah it's your turn buddy no it's not we just cleaned up the pee you didn't open it you put the wrong side on it so it didn't absorb anything yeah you gotta put the white part down so it just spread the pee everywhere how much is it a lot or a little is it a lot or a little time out god it's like gravy ah there we go what are you getting grossed out you're not even doing anything and we're back where were we okay so as i was saying just to start over again you drill a hole in the middle right and a large piece of aluminum um you have your mounting point so then you drill the holes accordingly all right you take the entire metal sheet put it on top of the motor itself and make sure those holes still line up that's when you take the transmission bell housing right you make sure this center part is right in the center of the transmission output shaft if you have a love joy here or whatever connector you might use make sure those are lined up nice spin the motor you know apply 12 24 48 volts to it to make sure that it spins there's no vibration after you confirm if there's no vibration that's when you draw an outline on here so pretend this is on here that's when you start drawing the outline to the exact point of the transmission now when i draw an outline i don't make it exact what i usually do is i i'm probably off by maybe like a quarter of an inch all the way around that gives me room for play so once i actually measure that point out and i say okay this is good the hardware is already in there that's when i draw a line about around it and that's what i have cut out in the template so after that you're going to have a how bellhousing adapter plate with probably a quarter inch of play all the way around but what all that will do is that'll give you some more options in terms of okay there's a little vibration maybe it's a little off but that quarter inch does it actually helps you you could shift it up or down uh to make sure that you're not you're in a good place but that's what i did with the rat rod the rat one was fine that's how i'll do it with this one and it should be okay too it's not an exact science it just works all right so in the last episode i made this really nice uh adapter plate where i had a machine shop making it looks pretty pretty good it got very dirty uh granted this was supposed to be a very cheap uh powder coat color and it was but um and the rock a smashing rock and it was but the problem is is that having any other color besides black in here really isn't a good choice because you can see the a lot of the grease stains uh built up on it but at the end this is the budget bill this is a five thousand dollar build there's a lot of people complaining in the comment section before about well you know well you took it to a shop took the motor out and like that was like labor and stuff and you have to buy all these tools that a machine shop would have to do it guys shut up just i mean we could have done this you could have done that and that's the thing is that like it's i'm trying to do something that like anyone else can do and you can do this too you can you i'm no special than anyone else you could literally bring it to a machine shop or you can do it yourself in the episode i also said you can get a big square steel plate and put it on yourself but you didn't hear that because you're you know too used to hearing your own cries oh i don't have a flat head screwdriver so i can't do that this is really more than 5 000 all right hold on no it's not turning it man it's not enough not even a hiccup no that's weird make sure i don't die now we have three batteries i have this here god give me something guys 35 not even a hiccup not even okay well this is awkward i realized i didn't do something i actually never tested the motor to make sure it even worked this was a super cheap motor and for 200 bucks you have to expect that things may or may not work it's normally like an 1100 u motor used so i'm just gonna we actually separated the transmission from the motor again and i'm just going to test that to make sure that it even spins in the first place this is an absolute nightmare if it doesn't use the old school jumper cable method uh not very scientific but it works this has already jumped from the truth baby what are you thinking yeah baby yeah baby look at that perfect crazy what you gotta do you gotta praise the man our lord and savior praise our lord and savior let's go praise him okay look at this yes the shrine baby the king himself people will say this is fake that's photoshop but that's what the haters do yeah that's jealous no you were having a good hair day you're jealous yeah i know for sure good lord it was good you didn't realize how tall he is in real life he is quite he's a very tall very striking tall man truly very intimidating man he's a force and uh i have this poster here too and i have a poster of him uh i have a candle of me uh i had a candle of him but that broke ah i wonder why that's what that's that's like some something something came up yeah and it broke but this is the real thing i wanna talk about yet this is awesome this is full steal i hear this was actually his finest moment you know finest moment look at this get whatever i want i'll steal baby oh wow this is great isn't it i guess i'd actually smell it i like the uh six percent and the to let you know how the stock dropped the next day after you know he was smoking i like this too what a poster man this is great metal hot how do you how are you doing ready magnetic watch wow thanks this plate i'm gonna get more of these too i want to get more they have a cyber truck one that i want we should really just grow a giant shrine i want to do that i want to grow like everything really the tesla right here the the company i owe so much to so much so much of my success literally if it weren't for tesla i'd be a no one and the company you've given so much to to which they've given so little so little yeah yeah truly so thank you [Laughter] but really yeah display yeah really yeah check them out playing a tree yeah if you had a treat for everyone you buy right yeah your carbon footprint look at you go look at you go look at me buying diesel trucks planting trees can't wait to see that diesel truck yeah i'm excited to see it too it's been hidden you'll go see it now yeah go see it all right all right foreign so okay there's a there's a problem here so as you can see we have a little problem as to why the motor wasn't spinning stephen can you tell us why this motor is not spinning we've got a little resistance of rub here in the back and we're actually grinding metal yeah so that's the reason why you hear that grinding noise and the the more tighten we had on these bolts the more pressed in this metal was so it was actually pushing the lug joy connector the grip directly against the spline and it wasn't able to spin so if you look here there's three bolts here and i can actually take the spacer off once i take that off i could probably remove a little material just so there's more backfill on here but that grinding noise you heard look at all these metal shavings coming out of it that is this was grinding off the back of this as well as grinding off the back of the lovejoy and that's quite a bit of material there too look at that stephen that's a lot that thing was growing up a lot i don't have this kind of time stephen where's the hand too the damn hand tool man come on dude you know what your princess bicycle helmet look at that since we already have a full that's what it was doing it was grinding against this off right there yeah well look at that look at the color it's the skull that was going so bad i mean we were running it for a minute well here's the thing is that i don't have any precision tools enough to grind that off exactly that amount right this is my problem with not having the right tools with stuff well you're on the budget i'm going to budget man people saying oh i don't have a flooded screwdriver to do that i don't have a 10 millimeter what am i gonna do you know um shoot get one out of a cracker jack box call it actually yeah okay call your dad call your dad call your father call your mother while you're at it there you go yeah a lathe is ideal here a lathe will take that material off beautifully i grind that down man but i don't have a lathe dude yeah i mean you just made one right here i literally seriously 12 volt battery a stc motor seriously i'm really great literally [Laughter] let's reseed it and see where we're at that sounds infinitely better do you hear how smooth that was that's something that was spoken from god himself absolutely wonderful keep it coming yes yes is that it oh my god it's okay so now we're just going to go down a zch where's the where's the bolt just so we can just slam it in when we're ready [Music] hey that's it and this is how you mount a and we figure out actually well yeah we gotta leave that under place first we need a third mount right a second mount whatever this another one yeah well yeah so this is good news this is great news all right all right is right all right all right all right all right matthew mcconaughey all right all right all right all right all right so we got to do now we need to make a mount down here yep so the mount we have to make is right about here because there's another motor mount down there exactly well no there's not because the way the previous motor was mounted it was this part right here and it was kind of hooked here and hooked there so now we have to create a custom mount down here that's what was mounted there bumper nothing this is just a frame rail another rail was here for the front for the front bumper yeah should have the bumper okay yeah but it was a front bumper extension but there was nothing actually there so we can make a mount like this like a hook that starts down and goes down in here yep or we can make an l bracket for the frame rail right bracket frame rail that's it and then we'll put like a bushing for like you know put when it vibrates you know what we should do test the motor again hey i think that's a great idea the technical clamps i like those better please okay do the honors yeah go nuts kid would you look at that hey oh you uh what dropped here hey i'll take that revolver yeah all right only ridge not bad huh i respect it i got no cash but this is what it is got these receipts well you know fiber got rid of my george costanzo wallet look at this keeps it nice and slim that's sexy man it's nice it's very nice so if you want one click on the link in the description box below i'm going to just take this yeah i had no nuts no money in those accounts anyway i didn't think so joke's on you all you get is practice doing that thing that's right the thing is now we have to get this to the garage to do some welding stuff i mean i can do it myself too but there's a lot that needs to be done still on this we have to get the batteries yep i don't know what barry is going to go with yet but we probably need a decent amount of them it's going to weigh this thing down significantly in order to get really good deals on stuff you have to like travel different places uh you have to go to vocational schools you have to go to like colleges like universities and stuff that may have these things for sale i need something to carry it man and uh the tacoma is not cutting it anymore if i have to carry the car on the trailer on a 2000 pound trailer uh this car weighs about 1500 pounds which isn't that bad that's 3500 plus 280 we're talking about potentially going up with batteries it's more and more weight man so you know what that means stephen we need a bigger truck you know what that means it's time i think so it's time i think i think it is i think it's time to get a big boy truck don't say i didn't warn you but a big boy truck is coming just think the way all your pretty little teslas get delivered on big boy trucks i have to start haunting some eb projects around what do you mean don't don't the tesla semis bring like three or four teslas you know i was waiting i waited outside the dedham service center and i didn't see one tesla semi deliver a single tesla car you know i've had four delivered thus far every one of them yeah yeah four cars delivered how many how many were on the back of um they're all peterbilt peter built really what are those going on what do you mean hopes and dreams well no way what do they run on what fuel do they run out are they electric diesel it's time boys i'm trying to warn you it's coming yep give it a hell yeah brother hell yeah brother it's coming baby it's coming so yeah i'm gonna get a uh a bro dozer because uh i have more like the freaking with the hummer right real harm will be working on pretty soon and by soon i mean i don't really know when people have been dying for hummer content we can't give you hummer content if we need the hummer so we needed another truck exactly so if i need to bring the hummer somewhere let's just say i have to bring the hummer to get some things fabricated or even bring the hummer home once that honking piece of metal no longer runs it has to be towed places and the tacoma cannot tell the hummer it just can't so cyberclub can cyborg yeah cyberquad could but we can't do that on a rainy day exactly or on public roads so uh so yeah so i'm starting to learn my lesson about cars in public roads yeah what do you mean yeah yeah that case is still pending but we'll um yeah i need a dozer i need something powerful that's gonna be able to haul stuff around so expect it it's gonna be a big ass truck so it's coming all right moment of truth uh then shout out to steven for helping me get the motor in the car which is awesome i hooked up the axle to the motor and uh put the axle shaft into the wheel to make sure it could spin what i want to do is i want to keep testing this and making sure that it's actually going to do stuff let's get this hooked up get on that side and then let's get this here and this last one pray for me baby it's not doing anything oh wrong cable there you go it's this one i need okay yeah wheel spinning baby you got it awesome awesome awesome the wheel officially spins that is great but one thing i want to go over real quick is that you can actually have a manual transmission ev you don't need to use the clutch and remember i did this same thing in the rat rod when i built the rat rod last year i kept the uh the manual transmission was phenomenal because it gave me extra range as well because i could actually select what gear i want to be in and not tax the motor as much the reason why a lot of i guess more popular and more modern eb's don't do this is because it adds complexity you really don't need to be able to select what gear you're in most of the the motors nowadays are so strong you pick one gear and you just go for it there's a couple cars that do have that feature one's a porsche tycon which is the reason why it's trap speed is a lot higher in the quarter mile than tesla model s because it actually selects a second gear uh to gives it more power over a certain mile an hour another car does it is my i8 my i8 does it as well but when the rat rod did it it was great because i could select where gear is in again and i could get more efficiency out of it because when i put it in fifth gear and i was just cruising around i got excellent range out of it but again the reason why i'm keeping this manual transmission is because a i could select what gear i'm in uh i could get more torque if i want to or i could just keep it in a specific gear and kind of cruise around like that the ability to actually shift gears uh in an ev is an awesome concept to me i really he's gonna do a white glove test we don't even have white gloves we've never had white gloves not here you

Channel: Rich Rebuilds

Views: 1,036,350

Keywords: tesla, cars, teardown, mechanical, salvage, rebuild, how, to, fix, whats, inside, ev, repair, electric, vehicle, how to fix a tesla, salvage repair, mini, cooper, mini cooper, blue

Id: SClEJjP9wk8

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020