MAKE subscriber Frank from Ontario wrote in with this fantastic project: a dune buggy painstakingly converted to run on batteries.

This unit rolled (sort-of) into the yard in mid to late Aug 2009. I was hesitant to buy the damned thing largely because I had my hands full with another project that was already several months behind schedule.
Regardless, my rationale was that I could refurbish this machine and at minimum recoup the capital cost.

It took him about six months of tinkering to finish the conversion, with nearly every single component needing to be revamped. He had to extend the bars of the roll cage, though the biggest mod to the chassis involved building a platform on the back to hold a thousand bucks of lead-acid cells. He salvaged a gearbox from the carcass of a garden tractor buried in snow behind his foundry.

Follow Frank’s adventures here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. It’s fascinating stuff!