Whey up internet! Now cast your minds back a year, and I hosted Shell Eco Marathon challenge called
Pitch the Future, where they got the brightest minds to solve real world challenges, and this
led to me creating the solar, wind powered clothes drying machine. Now, back again with a
new challenge called Future Rider where the Shell Eco Marathon team is going to be using TV Knight
Riders Kit, as inspiration to design the next car of the future, because you know, Kit has always
been seen as a very futuristic car, so the teams of stem students are going to have to come up with
virtual designs of what they believe is the next car of the future. Now, I'm going to be building
something, it's not going to be a car, I'm taking inspiration from the Shell Eco Marathon teams that
have built super, energy efficient vehicles and create a solar-powered machine of my own! And it
is a machine I have a particular affection with! Zee lawn
mower! Look at it! Lawn mowers, now you know I like lawn mowers. I got one to run off wood gas...
She's sort of environmentally friendly, but we need to do better!
This looks like a lot of fun! I like lawn mowing.
Now these are big ones. These are commercial ones obviously. Too big for my garden,
Don't worry about that at the moment. These are all pretty much, run off petrol. So what I'm
thinking, the lawn mower of the future is clearly going to be electric, but it's not just about the
lawnmower being electric, it's where the electric comes from. So this is my concept people...
We're going to convert this to electric. We're going to make it its own little shed, which is
its charging hub. It can go in at night, it can charge up over the next few weeks or whatever,
because let's face it, you know when you use a lawnmower you mow your lawn, you got to wait for
it to grow. While it's growing, it can be charging up ready for the next mow! oh! 2021 people!
Right we need to pull it apart. We need to work out what the rpms are,
how it all works underneath, because there's various levers and stuff. You know,
ones that control the blade, to control the mower speed, so let's get on with it people.
Now after a lot of stirring and head scratching, I have a plan; now how this thing works basically,
one engine, this thing set off into the crank, this belt goes off to the rear axle to drive
it forward, this belt goes off to the grass cutting thing and chops the grass. Now then,
we're going electric of course, I have one of these Lynch motors,
used one of these in the electric drift trike, more than enough power. Excellent. And there's
even a little disk thing that fits in there a treat. But I'm thinking we have some advantages
with electric power. We can have two motors, you know a lot of electric cars these days
are dual motor and that's what I'm going to do, so I'm going to have a motor at the front driving the
grass cutting, and the motor at the rear driving it forward. Right first thing we need to do,
mount this motor a little bit lower, which is going to mean we have to do a little bit of CAD
drawing, just like the teams, they're doing everything in the virtual world,
this is going to start in the virtual world, and then I'm going to bring it into reality!
Oh! Is that a Colin Furze, notepad and pencil kit you're using there?!
Front motor mounted, lovely job Colin of course, we need a rear motor, Fabricated and plasma cut
a lovely mounting plate, fits in an absolute treat, and then just to make it even better,
the plate that the motor bolts to, which can slide back and forth to tension the belt,
I've laser cut out a bit of felt, so it don't scratch it, oh you've done yourself proud now! A
bit more fabricating and bending later, seemingly every bender I've got. We've got a battery
mounted under the seat, that's the first one, but we need a lot more.
We're basically pretty much going to fill this whole bonnet area up with a load more batteries,
and then of course the esc controller for the front motor. That is the next job Colin!
Installation complete! oh! What a lovely job Mr Furze! Now, then we have got six batteries
in this thing, we've got two batteries which do the drive motor at the back and then we've got
four batteries which do the blades at the front. Each motor, because it's duel motors remember,
has it's own esc and if we plug the laptop in, we can actually program them so we can tell it
how many amps to draw, what voltage it's running on, and we can tell them as well if the voltage
drops too much, so once the battery starts to get bit low, it can cut it out and stop it running the
batteries completely dead, which of course is not going to do them any good. There's also throttle
maps and things like that you know, if this was like a racing mower you can you know, say how
sensitive the throttle is, how things speed up, how quickly the blades start and stop, all that
malarkey, so much control we don't actually need, but it's a fantastic system. Now then to control
all this we've got these little switches down here, which basically switch the whole thing on.
We've got big ampage uh battery switches in here so we can turn everything off, you know should we
have any issues, and then the blade speed is run by this wonderful little control knob up here.
Now everything appears to work just fine, motor works, let's put that back. The uh,
gear knob still does the forwards and reverse, which is pretty cool I don't have to reverse the
polarity or anything like that, and then the blade speed... oh no! That was my pad! I've
just chopped my pad up! Excellent, now of course we need to be able to charge this, well Colin,
we've got these two trailer adapters, you know the same things you get on the back of a car if
you're plugging a caravan in, there's seven pins in them. Six of those pins of course we're using,
each individual battery is powered and charged individually from these ports, but of course
Colin, we need a charging station! Somewhere that we can drive this into and the power of
the sun harnessed and charges this little bad boy in between grass cuts! Oh look what I've made...
So this is the charging station. Now I was just gonna buy a normal garden shed, but they're all
out of stock, so for wait a minute, this is a green project. The whole thing is made out
of recycled pallets, and I think it looks a hell of a lot better. Now of course the roof
is completely made of solar panels also makes a pretty fine looking roof if you ask me.
They're basically they're all connected to these electrical boxes. There's eight of them,
eight boxes and they all link up to these cables. This one is the positive and this one is the
negative. Of course, you drive your mower in, you pop these into little connections on the bonnet,
it charges up and then when it's completely fully charged, off you go, you cut your lawn. Oh! Why
hasn't this been done before! This is a brilliant idea, Right so I say we give it a charge and go
out and do some grass mowing and in between then, I think I want to give everything a name, hmmm,
OK, she's charged up and look I've given it a name, the Solar-Mowar!
yeah! and the charging shed is called the Solar-Mowar Chargar!! I know
I've come up with that myself. I'm pretty proud of that. Right it's gonna cut some grass,
Now changed the gearing at the back because it was painfully slow,
but it could deal with still going faster!
How long are the batteries gonna last?
Making a brilliant job of this.
It's so weird being on such a big lawn mower that doesn't make any noise.
Ok, obviously my garden is a bit too small for this mower, we need to test its range. Now the
batteries are 70 amp hours, I've got the motor set to draw 68 amps does that mean it's going to run
for an hour? I don't know. I've done all this, probably been doing this for about 15 minutes,
hard to tell because I keep switching the camera on and off. So I need to go and find some more
grass now, and just see how long it lasts. biggest problem now is it doesn't fit through my gate...
All right we've got ourselves a nice big lawn to cut.
Blade speed up, off we go!
Well it's cut all that, and it's still got battery, so i'm gonna do some more mowing!
The batteries have lasted so long, I'm fed up of mowing now!
It's still going.
It's done all this extra. It's still going, it has come down to a snail's pace,
but it is still going! You are doing a lot better than I thought you were going to!
I am generally impressed with this, I thought it was going to run for like 20 minutes
and then just stop, but it was going well over an hour. We've cut about 1500 square meters of grass,
i didn't think it would do that. Now then of course it needs to go faster, but I'm thinking
we can take some power away from the cutting, give it into the driving, it'll go a bit quicker,
it will last all the same, but you'll probably cover more area and cut even more grass. Also,
these are lead acid batteries, this is not the future of battery technology, we need
to be running this on lithium. So if there's any companies out there, that do like lithium battery
kits, so i can make a bespoke battery for this please get in touch. Now charging, it charges back
up again in about a day and a half two days, maybe even less, I can't really tell because ever since
I've stopped filming this it's just blooming been raining, but we've got eight panels
on top of the shed, charging six batteries, I got two spare.. I fitted some lights in the shed,
and to be fair we could probably charge this thing up on two panels over a longer period of time,
because no point charged up in two days, your grass wouldn't have grown! There is just so much
potential in this machine! Now then of course the Shell Eco-Marathon challenge, Future Rider,
check out what's going on, a link in the description and on screen. These STEM students
are basically coming up with car designs of the future, go and support them, because they are
going to be designing our future. All these people coming up doing this fantastic work,
it is all good! Right this is the SOLAR-MOWAR! Very impressed I'll see you in the next video...
Tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel....