Love the experience on this forum. Have you been following the USS Zumwalt story? A few issues with the propulsion. It has some amazing power requirements.
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No I have not but your post caused me to look it up. That is an incredible machine. A definite leap forward for our navy if/when they get it fully and reliably functional.
I hope everything works out smoothly for you. Sounds like an incredible project to work on and like I said I am always fascinated by this kind of stuff. Most people do not realize that a train is actually electric and the diesel motor is only used to turn a generator to supply the power for the electric motors. I would love to see some pictures or have progress reports on your car if you donāt mind.
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Some of it was for economics - the motors and inverters are cheaper than DC. But theyāre also a bit simpler in vehicle uses in their ability to use regenerative braking without a lot of extra electronics and itās easier to balance losses (magnetic & conduction) with bigger motors so you get better performance than DC at the high end for a given efficiency level. Mating an AC motor to a standard car transmission is simple as pie and lets it be driven like a āreal carā 
It didnāt hurt that the EV-1 (I just loved that car - sad to see GM kill it 
) and the Tesla Roadster were AC propelled.
But, no arguing that almost every commercial car is now being built using DC.
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What kind of system are you using for acceleration? What size of inverter did you settle on? And did you purchase an electric car conversion kit or decide to go all original?
The Flex supplychain monitoring system
https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cen10_a.jpg?w=840&h=485&crop=1
In most businesses No news is not good news!
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Hereās a couple photos. I just started forming the body work so itās in rough state right now. The batteries are under the floor within the tub frame. Everything is carbon fiber including suspension arms. Iāve built all of it by hand. Uploadingā¦ Uploadingā¦
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Pictures never did load up on my screen
I think you posted a picture of that to the forum. Quite impressiveā¦something I wanted to do (three wheeler too), but I bought a GF instead. My wife breathed a sigh of relief, she had already been through one electric car build. Are you in California by any chance? - Rich
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That is some project! Pretty much exactly what I wanted to build. There are plenty of design challenges for an amateur like me. I have followed the progress of https://www.arcimoto.com/ They are building close to what I want but their design morphed into more of a motorcycle than I wanted. I guess I will live vicariously through you. 
- Rich
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LOL Rich. Initially my design was more of a motorcycle, maybe more like bicycle construction, actually with a target weight of 250-300lbsā¦ still 3 wheels but really barebones and crazy power/weight ratio. Then I ran across a good deal for much more motor than originally planned for, decided that would be too dangerous and needed more weight so now itās morphed into a car LOL As the build has gone on, itās received some niceties like adjustable air suspension, great stereo setup and LCD dashboard/gauges.
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lol @mpipes i used to live in kingman (we now live in oregon and plan on one day moving back to kingman)
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Well, when you eventually make the move, welcome back to warm temps and always blue skies!
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picture of units on assembly line or pallet product would be good proof.
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They canāt do that. The units are being manufactured at Flex, which has confidentiality restrictions:
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+1 this. My father was a music teacher, and itās striking how much harder it was for kids to learn on the horrible, cheap instruments that they have at first, and how much easier it was for kids to play on the better, but more expensive instruments that they ended up on when they showed that they were serious.
I think the Glowforge is like that. It looks to be very easy to use, and hopefully produces consistent output. While the really cheap laser cutters have horrible software and thus are extremely difficult to operate. Many people end up replacing the controller electronics completely, just to be able to make the device usable. Thatās too much to ask a noob. Iād say that itās better to start with a more expensive unit, with good software, and instructions written in coherent English, because they donāt have the experience required to hack around the problems with the cheap lasers. That can come laterā¦
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And even some of the expensive laser cutters ā at least those that are available at makerspaces and such ā can have seriously unintuitive software chains. (Of course, makerspaces tend to get stuff thatās being cast off by professionals, so itās outdated, but thatās still what people are going to see.)
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The Trotec software, JobControl, is pretty bad. And Trotec has the gall to charge hundreds of dollars for significant software updates/fixes (Iām pretty sure they do at least).
Not sure any of them are good 
Just varying degrees of painful.
Although Epilogās āprintā drivers from design software is the best approach Iāve seen from a smooth workflow standpoint. But that does combine CAD & CAM into the same software as a result vs. specialized CAD and CAM applications.
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