In April 2024, I was brought into the development of an in-house designed electric motor with the ultimate goal of implementation into production outboards. Designed to output 150kW and 300Nm of torque, my role in the project was to retain the rotor magnet assembly using carbon fiber wrapping. While carbon rotor wrapping is standard practice in the industry, the $200,000 price tag of commercial wrapping machines made them infeasible for prototype manufacturing. Starting with a Grizzly manual lathe, I designed and built a carbon fiber wrapping machine for a fraction of the cost.

The first iteration fed carbon fiber tow from a hand-wound spool through a series of tension rollers onto the rotor, which was mounted in the lathe chuck. The lathe's auto-feed provided x-axis travel, and tow tension was controlled by a spring-loaded idler pulley. While the design successfully produced the first prototype build, it lacked fine control and was highly labor intensive.

The V2 wrapper introduced a fully redesigned dispensing mechanism with custom-machined mounting brackets, rollers, and a disc-brake tensioning system. This allowed the tow to feed directly from a full-size carbon spool through the mechanism and onto the spinning rotor without manual intervention. To achieve greater control over speeds and feeds, I retrofitted the lathe with a three-phase motor and VFD in place of the original drive, and added a servo motor on the lead screw to bypass the lathe's fixed gearing. Together these changes significantly improved process consistency and final product quality.