Disassembly

Here is my engineering team for this project, having one last “ride” on the ATV before taking it apart:

From some of the photos below you can see they were gung-ho on taking it apart, but later on when it came time to do the more time consuming design and assembly it took more cajoling to get them to stick around.

The picture below shows the original continuously variable clutch drive between the engine crankshaft and transmission input shaft.  This is the same kind of drive commonly used in snowmobiles.  The previous picture above shows the clutch pulleys removed from the engine and transmission, and this makes it fairly clear that to convert it to electric, it was “simply” a matter of driving the input shaft of the transmission with the electric motor.  The two-speed gearbox used in this ATV was ideal since it would have a low speed for any maneuvering or pulling jobs, and a high speed for getting around on the road.  The transmission ratios between the input shaft and axle for Low, High and Reverse are about 26:1, 10.5:1, and 16.5:1.

I found out there is a good market for used parts for these ATVs, so all the parts we removed will be sold and useful to someone else.  Basically everything related to the engine including fuel tank, fuel system, exhaust, cooling system, air filter, etc. all came out.  The complete dis-assembly took the three of us about 3 hours.  We also took out some of the original electric system related to the engine ignition, but left in all wiring necessary for the electronic console that displays gear selector, odometer and also controls the on-demand front wheel drive.  The 12V battery was left in, which will be charged from the main traction battery pack as I will describe later below.  The total weight of all the removed components was about 100 lbs.