Many of my electric vehicle projects would benefit from a cheap electric motor source. I talked with some friends, and discovered that hybrid cars have extremely high quality electric motors for extremely low prices. Unfortunately, these motors are built into the transmission, so they cannot simply be unbolted. My friend Nick Kirkby removed a motor and built a custom enclosure several years ago, but I thought of a better way:

I unbolted and disassembled the transmission as far as I could, then mounted it to the mill, and began carving everything that wasn’t the motor. I used giant rough end mills to remove as much material as I could. In the end, I had a small motor!

This is my art project: Hybrids in a Pickle:

And these last images show the remaining motor next to the aluminum formerly known as transmission.