Electrathon America Forum

Evan,
There are several good motors out there. In my opinion the best for the price is the orginal eTek but they are hard to find now days. I think Dave Cloud has some left to sell as of last year so you might contact him.

The second best for the price is the Etek-R but they weigh a couple of pounds more and there are two types--high torque and high RPM I think-- and I don't remember the one that seems to be best...maybe some one else will join in on this.

After that there are several others that are better than the eTek but the cost is more. Dave Cloud again has some various ones of of these. I don't remember what he is running on his cars but his cars are unbeatable. There are Lynch motors and a couple of others but since I bought 27 of the original eTek I have never looked into any of these. Another person to ask might be Kirk Swaney at Destiny Parts

Sorry I can not be of more help.
Mike

At Willamette we don't use any kit cars and build all of our cars from the ground up. Since we build up to 17 student cars and have over 70 kids in the program each year this is the only way we can afford it on our small ($3500) yearly budget. I also want my kids to design and build a car that is unique to their team of 3 to 6 kids and they totally design the type of frame, steering, body, etc. without any real directions or blueprints from me. They can look at a few of last years cars we have not cut up yet or the 3 adult cars we have and use that as a starting point or come up with their totally own ideas. We have a variety of cars this way and each team, I feel, learns so much more.

Most places will tell you the length of the shaft on eTeks if you look at the specks. You can alway call and check as well.

The nicest thing about the eTeks is that they have a fairly flat curve on efficiency vs. RPM so that you can have a larger range of speed and still be at a high efficiency. So if you gear to do 25 MPH you are still efficient from about 21 to 27 MPH. They are also designed to run at 24-48 volts and have a higher HP output so they do not burn out during a race. The Scott's always were pushed to the limit if you are using all of the power in your batteries. If you convert the Amp-hour in the batteries to HP it works out to about 1HP which the original Scott's were rated. In the NW we seemed to have at least one of those burn out at every race. You would smell the burning electrical and hope it was not one of your cars. Then they came out with the Scott 5 Star and it was rated for 1.5 HP and seemed to work better but the efficiency curve was so narrow and pointed that if you had to slow down for a tight corner or traffic you would use too much power to get back up to speed. When we started using the eTeks we started going another mile or two at every race. Now nearly every car makes it to the end of the race where it used to be less than half did without running out of power.

My Dad (the Dave Cloud that Mike mentioned) runs a Lynch motor in the short track car. But we do have eTeks and others that we could sell to you. Feel free to call my dad, Dave: 425-788-9293 (we are in Seattle for the time difference) anytime. He will likely be able to help you decided what motor would work best for you.