When you’re a YouTuber whose main mission in life is electric vehicles, and you have a habit of picking up random bits and pieces, it’s only natural to want to fit those pieces together. As Justin told you in July 2019, YouTuber Rich Rebuilds bought a wrecked Zero SR with plans to rebuild it. After all, he did have the technology, so what could possibly go wrong?
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Not much, as it turns out! In the initial purchase video, Rich discovered that the SR’s frame was cracked, and was basically unsalvageable. So, like you do, he removed the motor from the frame. After all, he’d already discovered that it ran just fine, so the effort was well worth it. At the end of that first video, Rich didn’t reveal his plans for that humble SR motor.
A couple of months, however, can change things significantly when you’re someone who likes to take stuff apart and reconfigure it into wildly different creations. That is, after all, what Rich does. Would you or I think that stuffing an SR motor into a rat rod you’d purchased off Craigslist was a great plan? Either way, we get to watch what happened when Rich did it.
Of course it took some fiddling and extensive use of a 3D metal printer to make everything fit correctly into place. After experimenting with a piece that put the clutch assembly from the car and the sprocket assembly from the motorcycle together with some scrap metal, the guys at Desktop Metal came up with a greatly simplified part to bring the motor shaft and transmission together. The end result is lighter, cleaner, and more streamlined—in other words, it seems ideal for this application.
Once Rich got the electro rod running, he had to tow it somewhere for testing. Plenty of people told Rich there’s no way that SR motor could power something like a car—and yet, as you can see in this video, it seems to work pretty darn well.
Once you start doing one thing on any mechanical project, it doesn’t take long to find something else that needs doing. That’s 100 percent the case here—but that just means there’s room for improvement. Overall, this build is a success with room to tweak and grow. What do you think of this electro-mod? Rich has another SR motor he plans to re-home inside another project, but no word yet on what the lucky vehicle might be.
Source: YouTube