Tesla owner builds a working life-size Supercharger for his garage

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Model S owner and the Tesla community’s resident DIY expert, Erik Strait or otherwise known as DÆrik from his YouTube channel, is back at it with another impressive project: building a life-size Tesla Supercharger for his garage. One might recall that Erik previously showed us how to transform a home garage into a Tesla showroom, and fittingly, this time around giving us insight on how to install a personal Tesla Supercharger into oneÂ’s garage.

It’s first worth noting that this isn’t your standard Tesla DIY project given the project’s complexity and cost. Erik spent weeks planning for the project, first meticulously measuring every dimension including all radiuses of a real Tesla Supercharger, before researching types of materials to use for creating a mold of the actual unit. He eventually settled on hand-carving a life-size mold of the high-power charger out of large pieces of foam that were glued together. Erik then covered the entire mold with epoxy, followed by mold paste that he let cure over time. The end result was a perfect mold of a lifelike Tesla Supercharger.

Erik covered the mold with layers of fiberglass to form a life-size shell of a Supercharger. Once the fiberglass resins hardened, he then lifted the shell from the mold and painstakingly painted every section to match what TeslaÂ’s official Supercharger looks like.

“The time invested was ridiculous. Mainly because it was the first time I have ever done anything of this complexity and some things had to be done several times over from trial and error to produce an outcome I liked. I have 40-50 hours of video and I didn’t even record everything.” Erik tells Teslarati.

 

The Supercharger shell was then installed on top of a wall-mounted Tesla high power wall connector (HPWC), thus acting as the power source for the faux Supercharger. Eric went as far as molding TeslaÂ’s cable organizer into the unit that serves as a working mount for the charge handle.

The results are nothing short of amazing.

DONÂ’T MISS: Erik converts his garage into a Tesla showroom gallery

We’d guess that any Tesla owner would want a working replica of a Tesla Supercharger mounted in their home garage. When we asked Erik if there’s any advice he can provide to other Tesla DIY’ers that might be tackling a similar project, he tells us “Don’t be afraid to fail. I messed up several times. It was a first time doing this and I watched a ton of how to videos on mold making, fiberglass, etc and still made mistakes.”

Our conversation with him wouldn’t have been complete without asking the question everyone wants to know, can you make me one? Sadly, Erik isn’t looking to make any for others, but notes that the time-sink along was worth upwards of $8,000.

“Not looking to sell any, but if I did I’d likely be around $8,000-10,000 due to the time investment. Creating a mold was fairly easy creating a shell so you can hide the wiring behind it added another level of complexity.”

 

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