Wow, who’d have thought — some folks are actually irritated that I haven’t updated in a while. I’ll interpret that as good news, that I’m not just typing this for myself; maybe I’ll now feel more pressure to update it more often, which can only be a good thing. While not going into too much detail, there has been a lot going on for me in recent months, not all of it good. My apologies for the lapse.

Fortunately, it hasn’t been for lack of events with the project. Despite my earlier hopes, these days I still have almost no time to work on the project during the week, but I’ve set aside every Saturday afternoon from 2 to 4, and so at least every week sees some work done. Currently, the only thing left on the truck to be disassembled is the dash, to replace the heater core with a ceramic PTC element (e.g. from a $20 Wal-Mart space heater). Everything besides that is stripped down; the interior is even stripped to the sheet metal. The engine is out, the fuel and exhaust components are out, and this past weekend I built a size-accurate mockup of the motor to help with figuring out how I’m going to mount it. Pictures of all of this are forthcoming; I’ll add to this post or follow it up when I’ve got them on the server.

I can’t finish without some pics however — these taken by the folks at Netgain of a motor nearly identical to mine, produced for another customer. This shot shows the motor next to the Impulse 8, which looks like a golf cart motor in comparison. Another shows the six terminals, to allow series/parallel switching of the split field. The wire coil is from the overtemp switch, which can be used to tell the controller that the motor is overheating. This picture shows the drive end fitted with a yoke for a 1350 U-joint. I’ve been told that the customer intends to weld this yoke in place and use a telescoping driveshaft from a 4×4 to deal with suspension travel. I have different plans.

And that brings me to my favorite pictures, of the custom-machined 8620 chrome-moly shaft from the awesome folks at Dutchman Motorsports. Like the motor it’s designed for, this thing is a beast — that’s a sixteen-inch ruler there folks. The real challenge in making a part like this is the hardening process. When you heat-treat steel to harden it, you find that afterward, it’s changed shape slightly. So the manufacturing process ends up having 3 phases — milling to spec, hardening, and then milling again. Except that the second time, you can’t really mill it with cutters anymore; you’d ruin your tools. So you have to grind it. Really challenging work, unless you’re an expert like the Dutchman. The dimensional tolerance on nearly all the dimensions of this part was 2 thousandths of an inch. The finished part is accurate to within 1 thousandth.

If the Warp13 is truly “Torque City” as reportedly exclaimed by an impressed Warfield engineer, this shaft will provide a nice 6-lane highway out of it.

In case you’re curious, the other shaft in the pictures is one that another customer had made for a smaller (but still huge) Warp11 motor; apparently he arrived at the same conclusion I did and went for a custom job. His shaft was made by Mark Williams — some pretty esteemed company for mine to have in these photos.