Hi everyone, I’m Barnaby from Electric Car Converts, and today we’re going to give you a full workshop tour. We haven’t done a workshop tour in the past, so you may as well see where we work every day. The reason we’re doing this is because it’s super tidy; we just had Jerome from Out of Spec here doing a full YouTube video of an in-depth discussion of what we do. I think that’s going to be 45 minutes to an hour long, so this is a sneak preview of that.
Come in! First things first, this is Treacle. She’s the workshop dog; she’s here every day. We’ve got Chilli as well, but he’s not in today. They hang out with us.
The first thing you’ll get to is this: this is actually a full Defender drivetrain from a Puma that we’ve got around the corner, which I’ll show you in a minute. It’s a 2011 2.2L diesel, 120 horsepower or something like that, with a massive gearbox—I think that’s a six-speed. This is about to be shipped to Kenya, where it’s going in a Defender, I guess, where the engine’s been blown up. So that shows you what comes out, and I’ll show you what goes in.
Here’s an 80s Range Rover, that came to us red. We sent it away; it’s been away from us for almost a year getting a full mechanical restoration—new axles, new diffs, new suspension, new brakes, new literally everything. Then it got a respray to yellow. We’ve had it back for what, a month, six weeks or so? We fitted our kit in it, and then it will go back to the client where he’ll do the interior and a couple of little bits.
Fellten Universal Battery Pack in the front—55 kWh. That’s good to get this car probably over 150 miles. We haven’t properly range tested it yet, but the blue four-door we did before that was doing 150+ in the warm, you know, not driving it crazy. So we’ll see what this does. It fast charges in 25 to 30 minutes; it’s got power steering, it’s got cooling through two separate rad packs in the front.
Nothing really else to mention in the front here. If you come inside, we’ve got the original key. As soon as high voltage goes present, we’ve got nice gauges showing battery level, battery temperature, amps, and speed. You select the gear there, original heater matrix and everything there, so you can turn the blower on, etc. We’ve also got heated screen and, yeah, power steering, things like that. So all pretty good. The charge socket looks pretty cool too; that’s a bit of Toby’s genius.
That’s the one that’s leaving us. Now you can see them in various stages of their build. We’ve also got two Defenders in now—well, two Puma green Defenders. They’re a pair; they’re going to the same client, who we purchased them for. The client’s taking them up to the Midlands, where they’re going to be on an estate. One is the crew vehicle for taking, I don’t know, animals around the estate, workers, whatever. Then one is the client vehicle for people in the back just viewing, I guess, the land and the buildings or whatever. I think they’re also becoming a hotel soon, so I guess they’re the hotel vehicles.
This one has had the fabrication completed on it, which is this big pile here. This big pile here includes the battery box mount, battery box crossmember, and the front of the motor, a couple of motor mounts down there, radiator packs, radiator mounts. These are the gauges, so that will sit where the gauges are in the original housing. I’ll show you them in a moment; pretty nice little kit there.
This is our empty demo one; that’s not 320 kilos; you wouldn’t even be able to move it. So that’s what the battery pack looks like when it’s not in a car. You can see it’s pretty deep; it’s fairly big, but we can fit it in the front of Range Defenders and hopefully series. So that’s those two green ones.
This is an older one—a 1996. Not the most immaculate Defender that I’ll show you behind you in a minute, but it is still very much a Defender and still something we’ll do kits on. I think maybe that’s a little bit unique for us that we will do, you know, a battered old farm vehicle and still put our fantastic, you know, Tesla Model 3 system in it and, you know, not restore it. We don’t do any restorations, so this has come to us with, you know, the old bit of rust or whatever, and it will go back like that. You know, not anything to do with us—kit fits there, so that’s about to go to powder coat as well.
You can probably see that we sort of try to get a big load together, and then we’ll send it all off at once. That’s the original rad surround; we’ll send that off a powder coat as well, make it look nice again. But, very similar kit to the one on the floor over there. Toby starts fab on this kit next week, which is a Puma exactly the same as the other two in there. So very quick for us because it’s just a universal system; we build the same mounts every time.
Fabrication—this is our fabrication room where Toby and his welders live. The most important thing in here is our CNC plasma cutter. Now what that means is Toby can draw intricate shapes, parts, mounts, Tesla mounts that are crazy in dimension. Obviously, because Tesla Motor isn’t designed for a Land Rover, we’ve got to make it fit somehow. So then comes over here, cuts it out of 5 mm steel in this. Okay, so that’s mega strong, and it cuts through it like butter.
You can see the blanks; they look like that—just sort of shows all those parts, see on the floor, cut out by this and then welded up over here by Toby or by a contract welder that we’ll bring in. What you’ll see is that we’re trying to keep our core team quite small, and then we have contractors in. We have a mechanic come take engines out, we have a welder come and weld things up when we’ve got a big pile of stuff here. Electric electrical people, you know, out of the workshop, building it online for us and, you know, helping us with that kind of stuff.
We’ve got vending machines, power tools, drills, all that kind of stuff in here, material there. You’ll notice that material is very common sizes, so that’s just a standard box section size that we use; it’s standard 5 mm thick steel that we use most of the time. Maybe a bit of thinner alley sometimes when we’re building a rad pack or something. So we’re not reinventing the wheel by using crazy material that we don’t need to, and that’s how we can keep costs down, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
Rather than CNC machining and a beautiful aluminum billet, we just take, you know, three or four pieces of 5 mm steel, weld them together, powder coat it, it looks the same, it does the same job; it’s not quite as fancy, but it’s significantly cheaper.
Through here, we’ve got—this is my favorite building at the minute. It’s a Nean Overland big pop-top Defender, so this is going to go off-road, like camp in the middle of nowhere kind of thing. It’s got a standard UBP in the front—well, it will have a standard UBP in the front, 55 kWh—but it’s getting a new Felton product, which is a seat box. So the entire seat box, which is this box here where the front and well the front seats sit on, that will be one big 55 kWh pack, making the total capacity 110 kWh in this thing.
This is good for—we’re estimating 300 miles of range with the 300 horsepower Tesla Model 3 motor. This is going to be an absolute weapon. It also does V2L, so you can plug in, well, another car. This could charge another car; this could power your house; this could power your toaster when you’re in the middle of nowhere. You could even watch TV at a festival—I could go on about that for ages!
This concludes our workshop tour. Thank you for joining me, and I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing where we create our electric conversions!