Right Drivetrain Fitting Work

Time to make the new drivetrain fit the existing foot shells and battery boxes.

Here is how the motor mount currently resides in the foot shells. Notice that it is resting directly on top of the foot shell ledge, so there isn't any room for the battery box to fit underneath. This isn't the biggest problem in the world, as a small section of the battery box could be cut out, although a very small section of the bottom of the motor and motor mount would theoretically be visible, to ground-based insects, at least.



I started off by Dremeling out as much material as I could without having a gap be visible, so that I could test-fit the battery box and see what kind of adjustments I could make in order to get the motor and motor mount to be completely concealed within it.



There is a little amount of headroom at the top of the inside of the battery box. I decided that I would recut a new motor mount, with holes drilled to raise it about 1/8" above the ledge of the foot shell.



I had a spare L channel piece to use, so it was time to cut it to size. Less yackin', more hackin'!



Before I could drill holes in the new piece, I needed a scrap piece of aluminum from which to make a template. I cut one to size, clamped the existing motor mount to it, and drilled through the holes on the existing motor mount, and into the scrap piece, thus forming the template pattern for the holes.

I measured where to drill the holes on the new motor mount, and clamped the template piece to it, and drilled the new holes.



The new motor mount does indeed clear the foot shell ledge by about 1/8", allowing the battery box to sneak underneath. I drilled some extra holes in the motor mount to reduce weight. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that I messed up and clamped the template piece in the wrong direction and had to drill twice! ;-)



I also had to file off a fair amount of material from the top of the NPC motor case.



Success! This took all afternoon and some of the evening, but I was able to get everything to fit.



Now I get to try the same thing on the right foot. I don't have any more L channel. I will either order some from discountsteel.com (where they can pre-cut it to size) or pick some up and the local Industrial Metal Supply, depending on how lazy I am.