CYBERTRUCK BUILD (Part 1/5: The Body)

How difficult would it be to

build

a half-scale version of the Cybertruck? Welcome to the Cybertruck presentation. Trucks have been the same for a long time, like 100 years. The trucks have been basically the same, we want to try something different. Ooooh, you can put 3500 pounds back. Here we go. You can see it? Yes. I'm going to press that button. Order now. For today. That's $100 I'll never see again. How difficult would it be to

build

a half-scale version of the cyber truck? You may remember a high-powered electric kart we built a while back in

part

nership with my neighbors Stan and his company Accelerated Systems Inc.

Well, we decided to call them and it turns out their CEO, Bill Jaeger, is a big fan. Tesla. Which means he was willing to help us again and provide us with the electric motors and transmission controls to build a half-scale Cybertruck. Are these the three largest speed controllers you make? What are they classified for? 72 volts? How much should we run them for? Can they take 72 to 800 amps? Great, it's a half-scale model, so we want a number from zero to thirty, you know? This test bench is basically what the front of our Cybertruck will look like. Enthusiastic?

Oh yeah. It will be so powerful and so fast! Having those motors and drives gave us the green light to start designing. . This time we opted for a three-motor design instead of one. To start, we gathered as much information as we could about the real Cybertruck. Luckily, Elon Musk left some details in his presentation, including this slide showing the overall dimensions of the truck. So we didn't cheat on width, height or length. We can achieve a much higher capacity in the same dimensions and the same weight. Using just this image we can reverse engineer the overall shape of the truck.

Once we made the rough shape of the truck in SolidWorks. All we had to do was turn it into sheet metal. Which is easier said than done. Fortunately, with just a few fits of rage, Bogdan managed to bend everything into pieces of sheet metal. Alright, we have a setup for each individual sheet metal assembly that we will use to create the Cybertruck. So we have the truck bed as a single piece with three folds. I'm sorry five times. Check it out! 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 will need over 300 square feet of 1/8L 304 stainless steel sheet. So we are going to receive an order from metal supermarkets. In the meantime, let's start building the powertrain. So James, where are we? We're in the middle of nowhere and this guy apparently sells golf cart

part

s and stuff. So we need a rear axle and differential and apparently Stan, our neighbor, says this guy can help us. Look, there's a golf kart right there. Alright, we're lucky we took the back off a club kart. And it barely fits on the back of my stinger.

Also worrying is that there is a small wasp nest underneath this. Rear end of a club cadet golf kart. Wasps! Oh God! This is how you deal with wasps. Alright, here we are picking up the golf karts. You have one loaded here and the other is in our trailer. Now I really don't know if that will actually work sticking out like that, but we're definitely going to try it and it came with so much dirt free. You wouldn't believe how much free land we have. We just picked up a couple of scrap Easy Goes and the nice thing about these is that they have some working steering racks.

Then we should be able to get them out. That should have a good front axle. This will have additional replacement components. Leaf springs, bolts, nuts and hopefully we can make a working front axle. Now we have the rear axle, the next model, we cut some stainless steel and hopefully we will have a working Cybertruck. And now a few words from our sponsor. Are you still using an old flexible leather wallet that probably causes back pain from sitting on it all day? The Crest is a minimalist front pocket wallet that is a much better way to carry cash and cards.

With over 30,000 five-star reviews and a lifetime warranty, you can't go wrong. Use my Hacksmith coupon code to save 10% and get free shipping worldwide. Hello guys, what time is it? It's almost midnight! Alright, we've almost finished the mainframe design, but now we need to finalize part of the drivetrain and suspension system. Which means we need a 3D model of all of these parts so we can put them into SolidWorks and figure out how this will all work together. No problem. -Ok, but it also says like that- Okay. That's the cheapest steel! -Do you know how much welding that is going to be?!- It is the cheapest part of the project. -And I had never welded stainless steel before!- We have free motors, free speed control... and we already have the batteries.

Those are the three main things that cost money. And where are the holes? Everything you see... everything is rusted and there is garbage everywhere. Is this what you've been waiting for all day? -No, I want my steel!- This is turning into a really big project. - I've only put about 200 hours into it this week... - I think our stainless steel is here, let's go pick it up! Alright, time to cut plasma! Ooooh Okay! All the big pieces are cut, now we will take them out of the bed, clean them and then bend and weld them.

Alright, we cut all the stainless steel into about two hundred square feet, yeah. and we're ready to start folding, so we'll see how it works. Check it out! It worked! There's the first corner, how does it feel? Oh man! It's going to be exhausting, we have a dozen more left. I don't know how we're going to fold it the rest of the way. I didn't think it would be so difficult! We did it! I can't believe we just did that. Alright, those were the easy curves. Those are the only 90 degree curves, everything else is a Solidworks random number.

Elon, it's actually better that the design isn't the random angles you chose. Check it out! The front steering wheel will be like this, so we need to fold it that way to the right side. We are as if they are eyeballing them! 103 degrees Chris, 103 degrees. Pretty cool, that's our front bumper, so those fancy LEDs go right here. Does it fit? Does it fit? Elon, Elon. He is so cute. So things will be this big! You will be sitting like this. Drug. WOW! Alright, it's coming together! Basically, the next goal is to place that thing here horizontally, like the one below.

If we finish now, this will be the first time I've been home since Friday. There you go! I think we're going to add a sunroof, right? You can lie completely inside. It's a two-seater! I can't believe we did this James! We now have the final pieces of the Cybertruck cut, we are going to make the base plate and the roof of it and then we will all be ready to assemble the engines. When we weld it the frame is slightly twisted and we think it's just this side piece, so what we're going to do is cut the welds, get it flush again and then hopefully weld it back together without the twist.

The problem is that if we leave this when we start soldering more things, we will continue to add stresses and everything could become even more twisted, which we definitely don't want. We're off about an inch right there, Dave. It's level! I think the gap was literally our bed. It's still a little wonky, but... This is actually the most people we've had working on a project while I've been here. Dave, are you comfortable? Am! Alright, this marks one week since we started this crazy project. I think we've made incredible progress in just one week, it's been a lot of late nights.

We haven't been out after midnight for the last week. Yeah! But we have all the plasma cut stainless steel, as you can see, it's all spot bolted, so we just need to weld all of this together, which is a ton of work. It's probably a full week of welding. Yes, we have more people, so I hope we can get it up and running quickly. but the next one! And then we had to do the suspension, we had to do the whole drivetrain, the batteries, the power system and accessories, and an ATV. We can't forget the ATV!

So make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell! You won't want to miss any videos in this series: it's the Cybertruck at half scale. Let's build it! Do it again, do it again! Just shoot! It was at that moment that he knew he was screwed. Oh Lord!