A shroud of sorts is formed from metal here.  This will encompass the motor and form the supports for the pulley system on the secondary shaft.  This is going to be pretty neat looking.  Notice the can of WD-40 on the plate metal.  The name WD-40 came from when it was developed as an anti-rust agent.  WD stood for Water Displacement, 40 was the number of times it took to get the formula just right.  The other attempts were not exactly failures, I think WD-39 became butter flavored PAM.

    The motor is now fitted with the keyed drive interface.  This allows for the motor to drive the transmission directly.  We are a few hours away from spinning the motor!

    The milling machine produces the final assembly for the bell housing of the transmission.  If you don't have one of these machines you need to buy one, you can make really cool things with them!

    A lot of you EV'ers out there are looking at this picture and asking, what the heck is that, a shunt?  There are no leads or connections to it, and there won't be, so it can't be a meter shunt.  Is it just a copper extension?  Why would you want one?  The answer to the question is that it is a non resistive inductive element.  It will tell us the current out of the motor controller, another similar sensor will tell us the current in to the battery.  This allows us to gauge the range left in a battery pack and display it in a useful manner.

    The electric motor is swung in to position in the Ranger engine compartment.  This is a pretty heavy piece of equipment!

    The motor with transmission adaptor plate is checked for alignment and placement.  The fit is SWEET!  But we knew that already, this is not our first Ranger conversion.

    The motor assembly is in place along with the support surface for the pulley assembly.  Everything checks out so now the motor mounts and the bell housing can be put in place.

    The heavy gauge metal piece in the forefront is the support surface for the pulley assembly.  It must be rigid in order to keep the pulley system stable.  There will be six bearing surfaces driven by a single belt.  The drive pulley, the AC pulley, the alternator pulley, the power steering pulley, the idler pulley, and the tensioner pulley.  A belt driven system like this must be kept in line.  Its kind of like kids....keep them in line with a little gentle pressure and a firm foundation......or they start getting noisy and they smell bad.

    The sensor cables are shown leaving through a buss aperture.  The gray line will sample the packs in the back of the truck to monitor their health.  8 sampling points are taken along with two current samples.  The wad of colored wires are the lines that report the status of the vehicle to the driver, these are part of the old ICE package.  In the old days we did not have this many wires, we only had two, and we didn't need this much information.

    In the old days we had a red wire, which unless you were insane went on the + terminal of the battery, and a black wire which went on the - terminal of the battery unless you weren't planning on going anywhere.  In the engine compartment you had a fuel gauge, a temperature gauge, and a speedometer which you used to explain your situation to the nice young police officer who just pulled you over.  The only other indicators we had from inside the passenger compartment were smoke, heavy smoke, and things falling off of the vehicle.  That served us fine for more than 50 years.

    The battery boxes are back from being powder coated.  The coating is a rust inhibitor, and it looks nice.  The original clearance is maintained for the vehicle.  The cut outs in the boxes allows for them to fit snuggly up in to the vehicle frame.  These can be ordered as part of the conversion kit if you don't want to tackle that job yourself.

    The electric drive has been removed to be fitted with the final piece, the bell housing plate for the transmission.  The power cables from the aft battery pack await the control board.  The transmission face is a complicated piece of work.  There are insets, cut outs, obstructions, and all kinds of things to make it difficult to adapt anything but a Ford Ranger motor to the transmission.  It is common for multiple planes of mounting for any device or part in the Ranger.  An audit showed that the largest flat surface on a common plane in the Ford Ranger was the rear view mirror.

    The bell housing adaptor plate is ready to go for transmission bolt pattern drilling.  This plate closes the system up, returning the integrity of the transmissions seals.  It is the final mechanical attachement to the motor.

    The transmission side bolt pattern has been drilled, and the mounting holes for the motor surface connection.  The second piece shown in the upper right is the sister part to the shearing assembly for the motor transmission drive interface.      
    Vehicle range is determined by how efficient the energy is transmitted from the electric motor to the transmission.  You can have the best motor, the best transmission, and the best engine, but if your transfer of power is not efficient it is all wasted.  This set of adaptors assures a proper transfer of energy from the electric world to the physical world.

    All the pieces and parts come together to form the transmission interface.  The adaptor plate exactly matches the contours of the transmission housing.  The rails along either side will be used to secure the motor mount plates, and firm up the control board assembly plate.
    Most of this motor assembly will be obscured by the control board assembly which goes on next.

    The images that have been presented in this conversion are of events that happened concurrently during a conversion of the 2008 Ranger.  We have done our best to put them together in a flow that one might expect if a single individual were to do the conversion on his/her own.

    This vehicle is close to completion of the conversion.  We are issued a certificate of origin for every vehicle we receive to convert.  The CO is then converted to an original title for our end buyer.  The CO shown above is for the vehicle that has been featured in this conversion documentary.  End buyers are listed as the first owner of all vehicles.

    Continue on to see the finer details of the conversion by clicking HERE!