hey people ! wheelchair motor gocarts anybody do one ?
They CAN be done. In Tyweed's question at the beginning, he wanted to increase the top speed. You'd have to know two things to get this all started:
1.) The wheelchair's original wheel diameter, and
2.) The wheelchair's original final drive ratio..... that is, the ratio between the output shaft of the motor vs. the wheel speed.
My friend's job of increasing top speed was easy on his bike project, because he went from a wheelchair with 11" diameter wheels to a bike with 26" diameter wheels.... he automatically had 2.4 times the top speed of the chair (6mph) just by switching to the bike wheels.(14mph). All he had to do was slightly tweak the final ratio to achieve his target of 20mph.
Using a typical lightweight gokart wheel diameter of 12"-ish, you can see that a person would have to overdrive the output shaft speed by about 3>1.
This brings up a couple of problems. For whatever reason (probably weight and rolling resistance) a bicycle does a LOT better than a typical kart on the same amount of power. (Healthy humans put out about 1/4 - 1/2 hp). If you load those motors down with the weight/resistance of a kart that you want to go 20mph, it'll heat up the motors pretty good.
I'd say the wheelchair motor does really well on a typical 10-speed. (My friend's bike was a kick to ride) but for a kart project, I'd go rechargeable lawnmower motor. They have sick amounts of power for a bike,(2-5hp) and they're about right for a kart.
There are really quick electric karts out there, but those motors cost a bunch!