How hard would it be to build a half-scale version of the Cybertruck?
Welcome to the Cybertruck unveil.
Trucks have been the same for a very long time like 100 years.
Trucks have been basically the same, we want to try something different.
Ooooh you can put 3500 pounds in the back.
There we go. Can you see it? Yes.
I'm gonna press that button. Order now.
Due today.
That's $100 I'll never see again.
How hard would it be to build a half-scale version of the cyber truck?
You guys might remember an overpowered electric go-kart that we made a while ago in
partnership with my neighbors Stan and his company Accelerated Systems Inc.
Well we decided to give them a call and it turns out their CEO Bill Jaeger he's a big fan of Tesla.
Which means he was down to help us out again and provide
the electric motors and drive controls to build a half scale Cybertruck.
These are the three biggest speed controllers you guys make?
What are these rated to? 72 volts?
How much should we run these at?
Can they take 72 at 800 amps?
Cool, so it's a half-scale model so we want a zero to thirty number you know?
This test stand is basically what the front end of our Cybertruck will look like.
Excited? Oh yeah.
It's going to be so powerful and so fast!
Having those motors and drives, that gave us the green light to start designing. .
This time we're going for a three motor design instead of one.
To start we collected as much information about the real Cybertruck as we could.
Luckily Elon Musk left a few tidbits in his presentation including this slide
showing the overall dimensions of the truck.
So we didn't cheat in either width,
height, or length. We're able to achieve much greater capability in the
same dimensions, same weight.
Using just this image we're able to reverse-engineer the general shape of the truck.
Once we had the rough shape of the truck done in SolidWorks.
All we had to do was convert it to sheet metal.
Which is easier said than done. Luckily with only a few rage quits
Bogdan managed to get it all folded into sheet metal parts.
Alright so we've got a configuration for each individual sheet metal assembly that we're gonna use to
to create the Cybertruck.
So we have the truck bed as a single piece three folds.
Sorry five folds. Look at that! Beautiful.
When we're done we'll export everything as drawings and see how much space we're looking at.
Based on the designs it looks like we're gonna need over 300 square feet of 1/8 304 l
stainless steel sheet. So we're gonna get that an order from metal supermarkets in
the meantime let's start building the drive train.
So James where are we?
So we are in the middle of nowhere so this guy apparently sells golf cart parts and things.
So we need a rear axle and differential
and apparently Stan our neighbor says this guy can hook us up. Look there's a golf kart right there.
Alright so we're in luck we got the rear end off of a club car go kart.
And it fits in the back of my stinger just barely.
Also one concerning thing there's a small wasp nest underneath this.
Rear end of a club cadet golf kart.
Wasps! Oh God!
That's how you deal with wasps.
Alright so here we are picking up the golf karts.
You got one loaded in here, and the other one is in our trailer.
Now I don't really know if that's actually gonna work sticking out like that,
but we're absolutely going to try and it came with so much free dirt.
You wouldn't believe how much free dirt we got.
We just picked up a couple scrap Easy Goes and the nice thing with these is
they've got some working steering racks. So we should be able to pull those out.
That one should have a nice front axle, This one will have extra spare components.
Leaf springs, bolts, nuts and hopefully we can make one working front axle.
We've got the rear axle now, model that up follow that up, cut some stainless
and hopefully we'll have a working Cybertruck.
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Hey guys what time is it?
It's almost midnight!
All right so we've just about finalized the mainsheet metal design but now we
have to finalize part of the drivetrain and suspension system. Which means we need a
3D model all these parts so we can actually put them into SolidWorks
in order to actually figure out how all this will go together.
No problem. -Ok, but it also goes like this- That's fine.
That's the cheapest steel! -you know how much welding that's gonna be?!- It's the cheapest part of the project.
-And I've never even welded stainless steel before!- We're getting free motors, free speed control...
and we've already had the batteries.
Those are the three major things that cost money.
And where are the holes?
Everything you see.. everything is rusted, and there's crap all over it.
This is what you've been waiting for all day? -No, I want my steel!-
This is turning into like a really big project. - I've only spent like 200 hours this week on it...-
I think our stainless steel is here let's go pick it up!
All right, Plasma cutting time!
Ooooh
All right! All the big pieces are cut now we're going to get these off the bed,
clean them up, and then bending and welding them.
All right so we got all the stainless steel cut about two hundred square feet, yeah.
and we're ready to start folding so we're gonna see how that works
Look at that! It worked! There's the first bend how does it feel?
Oh man! That's gonna be exhausting we got a dozen more to go.
I don't know how we're going to bend it the rest of the way.
I didn't think it would be this hard!
We did it! I cannot believe we just made that.
All right so those were the easy bends.
Those are the only 90-degree bends, everything else is a random number from Solidworks.
Elon the actually design better not be random angles that you chose.
Oh look at that!
The front steering wheel will be like this so we need to bend this that way for the right side.
We're like eyeballing these on point!
103 degrees Chris, 103 degrees.
Pretty good, that is our front bumper so the fancy LED's go right here.
Does it fit? Does it fit?
Elon, Elon. It's so pretty.
So like this things gonna be like, that big!
You're gonna be sitting like this.
Dope. WAHOO!
Alright it's coming together! So basically the next goals are
we're gonna put that thing on flat across here just like the bottom one.
If we are finishing now this
will be the earliest I've gone home since Friday.
There ya go! I think we're adding a sunroof right?
You can completely lie down inside. It's a two-seater!
I can't believe we did this James!
We've got the final pieces of the Cybertruck cut we're going to make the
base plate and the roof of it and then we'll be all ready to mount the motors
When we welded it the frame is slightly twisted and we think it's just this one
side piece so what we're going to do is we're going to cut the welds, let it sit
flush again, and then hopefully re-weld it without the twist.
The problem is if we
leave this when we start welding more stuff we're gonna keep adding up the
stresses and the whole thing might twist even more which we definitely don't want.
We're off by like an inch right there Dave.
It's level!
I think I think the unlevel was literally our bed.
It's still a bit crooked but... This is actually the most people that we've
ever had working on one project while I've been here.
Dave you comfy? I am!
All right so this marks one week since we started this crazy project.
I think we've made some incredible progress in a single week it's been a lot of long nights.
We haven't like left past midnight
for the past like week. Yep! But we've got all the stainless steel
plasma cut as you can see it's all tack bolted together so we just need to seam
weld all this which is a ton of labor. That's probably, it's probably a solid week plus of welding.
Yeah we've got more people so hopefully we can get it moving quick.
but next up! And then we got to do the suspension, we got to do the
entire drivetrain, the batteries, the power system, and accessories, and a ATV.
We can't forget the ATV! So make sure you subscribe, hit that notification Bell! You're not going to want to
miss any videos from this series it's the half scale Cybertruck.
Lets build it!
Do it again, do it again! Just gun it!
It was at this moment that he knew he F*cked up.
Oh my god!