Recently I’ve had the pleasure of helping motor rebuilding expert Jim Husted of Hi-Torque Electric escape the dungeon of free web hosting, lending a hand to haul the furniture and do a little decorating for his move to a real web host. And I couldn’t be happier or more honored to do it.

Jim’s shown himself as a great knowledge resource since joining the EVDL a little over a year ago, freely giving advice in the time-honored EV community tradition of openness and information sharing. In the process of moving his old site’s content, a task that’s nearly complete (though there’s currently much that needs to be done on the site’s appearance) I had the opportunity to read through everything there, most of it related to pictures in his image gallery. Jim’s head is an open encyclopedia of street knowledge on the subject of large DC motors, and his high familiarity is evident in his descriptions both on his still small but growing website and in the frequent messages he posts to the EVDL. Even the few pictures he’s been allowed to put up on his old web host are very educational, as he zooms in on various essential parts and explains what can happen when things aren’t quite right.

But in addition to being a really knowledgeable guy, what sets Husted apart is that he’s a true motor hacker and isn’t afraid to keep right on learning with the rest of us. His first well-known contribution in this regard is the now famous “Siamese 8” motor, two 8″ Warp motors combined into a single motor on single common Dutchman custom shaft, to reduce spinning mass, vibration and complexity. As a result, we’ve learned that this configuration works quite well if properly executed; it’s literally been a perfect match for powering John Wayland’s White Zombie (currently the #1 car on DragTimes). His more recent masterwork is in his contributions to the beautiful 13″ Allis Chalmers motor that will soon be going into Wayland’s Purple Phaze project. His internal reworking of this motor is complemented by the skillful machine work of Don “Father Time” Crabtree.

Jim spends a great deal of time these days helping folks rebuild motors to improve them, adding features like adjustable brush rings, steel commutators, shorter lightweight cases, stronger shafts, and whatever the latest idea might be on how to make ‘em crank harder and go faster. He lives and breathes this stuff; his is the sort of spirit that drove the early garage tinkerers to build ever-faster desert lakebed-racing hot rods in the dawning years of drag racing after World War II, and I believe it’s folks like Jim who will continue to push the envelope helping electric motorsport emerge from its current infancy.

Having graduated from the pitiful disk quota limitations of his previous web host, Jim will now be free to continue to add more pictures and descriptions of his latest projects in the months to come, stuff we can all look forward to learning from — fellow ampheads and more traditional EV fans alike.