ElectrathonParts.com grew out of my desire to help others get involved in Electrathon racing. In 2015 I built my first car and quickly noticed how difficult it was to source quality parts. As time passed I built cars for some friends, helped others build cars for themselves (including turning a 6 foot fiberglass hotdog-man into a car), and continued to build new cars for myself. During all this time, I was fielding questions about where people could find this or that part and the educators especially were disappointed when I told them it came from Ebay or some other non-P.O. accepting source.
In 2021 I undertook a project to see how cheaply I could build an Electrathon car. My motivation was to demonstrate that it did not necessarily require a lot of money or expensive tooling to construct a car yourself. The hope was that if the process of building a car could be demystified and shown to be relatively inexpensive, then more people and organizations might be persuaded to get involved. I built the whole car around a used $40 electric push mower motor and a new $38 e-bike controller. I also added the restriction that no welding could be done during the construction just to simplify it further for those who may not have access to such equipment. In the end, I bolted together just under $1300 worth of parts (including batteries and chargers) into a viable car that completed 127 competition miles in three days of racing. (You can check out that build series here: https://youtu.be/9K9XF5D23fc ) During this project, it was further reinforced in my mind that there needed to be an easier way for teams to acquire the components they needed to build and maintain their Electrathon racers.
In 2023 as we were all trying to get back to racing after the pandemic, it occurred to me that a complete, bolt-together kit car (minus batteries) might be the easiest way for many new teams to get into the sport. As no one else was offering one, I decided to do it myself. The concept was simple enough: provide simple and sturdy bolt-together kits that can be flat-pack shipped across the country all for a reasonable price while catering to the billing needs of educators in particular. “The Crate” is my attempt to check all those boxes. I’d like to think that it does just that. Keep checking in here for updates.
Thanks!
Steve Archer
