# Electric David Bradley



## k9 (Feb 6, 2008)

I am posting this as a follow on to the fence charger question. I have a David Bradley two wheel tractor that i have been thinking of trying to convert to electric. My thought is I could use it as a mule to pull my chicken tractors, possibly help cultivate the garden, be parked by my fence charger to power that, and in times of a grid failure i could park it in the garage to provide power for LED lights, and electronics in the house. It would in effect be a mobile battery pack, and light duty tractor. Any thoughts, what componets would you solar guru's use?


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## Harry Chickpea (Dec 19, 2008)

Considering that batteries hold the energy equivalent of less than a cup of gasoline, I would suspect the usefulness to be quite limited. On the plus side, DC traction motors are awesome converters of electrical energy to kinetic energy.


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## Dixie Bee Acres (Jul 22, 2013)

Interesting concept. Might work but would require very large batteries, and a very large solar array to charge them, but, that said, if you could engineer it right, it could end up being a very valuable piece of equipment to have.


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## wy_white_wolf (Oct 14, 2004)

If I was to try something like this I'd first learn all I could about electric golf carts. I feel you could build this using componets from one of them. Most of them are 36V so ot doesn't convert well to other solar projects as 36V charge controllers/inverters are hard to come by.

WWW


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## SpaceCadet12364 (Apr 27, 2003)

I would actually look at motorcycle parts for this. They use 48v, 72v, and 96v with 400 watt to 3kw and more per drive motor. And motorcycle batteries are some of the lightest around and smallest.


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## SolarGary (Sep 8, 2005)

k9 said:


> I am posting this as a follow on to the fence charger question. I have a David Bradley two wheel tractor that i have been thinking of trying to convert to electric. My thought is I could use it as a mule to pull my chicken tractors, possibly help cultivate the garden, be parked by my fence charger to power that, and in times of a grid failure i could park it in the garage to provide power for LED lights, and electronics in the house. It would in effect be a mobile battery pack, and light duty tractor. Any thoughts, what componets would you solar guru's use?


Hi,

There are some electric tractor conversions listed here:
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Vehicles/vhehicles.htm#Tractor


One of them is a walk behind, 2 wheel tractor -- don't know if its like the one you have.
The two wheel tractor conversion is in a old issue of Home Power -- if you have trouble getting access to the issue, PM me and will see if I can email it to you.

A couple of facts from the 2 wheel tractor conversion:
- It is a David Bradley
- Two batteries -- one fwd one aft -- Trojan T105 6V golf cart bats.
- motor is Bosch 50 amp -- OK, but a little weak for some things
- belt drive is unchanged
- up to 3 hours of mowing time on one charge.

Uses it mainly for sickle bar mowing, but also shows a picture of it plowing with a single plow.


The 2nd tractor listed at the link above is my ElecTrak, which works fine -- runs on a set of golf cart batteries.

Gary


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