36V motor on 48V reliability question

Johno7656

Hello all,

I have been doing quite a bit of searching and I have not really been able to find the answer I am looking for.

I am considering getting a 36 volt cart and changing it over to 48 volts (or a 48V cart and locating and installing a 36V motor, which ever I can find). My concern is not speed but reliability. Here is my application. We have a summer “camp” home up in the mountains and while most of the roads in the camp are reasonably level or only moderately hilly, there are a few places that run at a 10% grade for about 100 yards.

From what I have seen, the stock carts that people use up here seem to be handling this terrain OK without any mods needed. Now here is where modding comes into play. All of the roads are crushed rock or gravel and sometimes heavy rains cause ruts and excessive erosion, to the point where either the bottoms scrape the road or it makes for a VERY rough ride.

My thought is to add a long travel front suspension with larger tires to tame the ride on these roads to solve the comfort issue. Now, with the larger tires, I am putting additional stress and load on the motor (keeping the stock rear gears). So now I need a stronger motor to compensate for the taller tires while going up the 10% grade.

So would a 36 volt motor with a 400 amp, 48 volt controller with larger wires be an acceptable setup? Speed is not a big issue as the speed limit in the park is only 10 MPH and I do not foresee any usage more stressful than what I have already described.

In short, comfort and reliability are the primary concerns in my application, not wheelies or beating the other guy to the finish line. Thanks for any comments that might help out.

John

BGW

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villajoe

I'm interested in the responses. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be ok, but I just burned my motor out, although my setup was apparently not optimal.

I had a rewound 'highspeed' motor when i got my cart, then converted the cart to 48 volts, added a 400 amp controller, 4 gauge wires and put 25" tires. Plumquick told me the tires were too tall and put too much strain on the motor (made it pull too many amps). They (and others I talked to) said a stock 36V motor would work well with my 48 volt set up if i went down to a 23" tire, or re-geared my rear-end.

Johno7656

Well, we have been up at our “summer home” for a little over three weeks now and I am happy to report that the 36V motor is doing just fine. Our setup is as follows: Stock 36V GE 2HP series motor, Altrax 4844 controller, 2ga wiring, 4 Trojan T1260 batteries and 22” tires. It runs around the campground just fine, including the 10% grades. Every time I put my hand on the motor, it is always cool, so based on the performance so far, the 36V motor on 48V seems to be doing just fine. People are starting to ask me what I did to the cart and what can they do to improve their performance. Thanks for all of the input and responses here and on other post. John

Andy4639