Wednesday, June 30, 2010

wiring gremlin

Yesterday I had wiring problems, I thought. So I rewired my battery pack and tightened everything up, Again so I thought. Today I had the old stutter step on my second ride. One of the wires was still loose. I guess I need to really wind them down, then double nut them.

PLEASE: if you decide to buy any batteries from the hong kong merchants only buy one set, Do not buy more than the listed amount ie double or triple the order even though they offer it. These are the most incompetent dealers in the world. And that is saying something. Every time I buy multiple amounts, I get just one. It has happened twice and I have only tried three times. The last one hasn't arrived yet. I am not expecting much.

I have been trying to make a battery pack from the AA nimh batteries from ebay. It is very frustrating because I have no idea what the ah of the pack really is. I have already noticed that it is way way over rated by the sellers. It might be 50% of the listed rating or maybe even less. The other things is those batteries will only discharge 1/1 I think. In other words I will probably need 40ah worth of batteries to get a decent performance from them.

So not knowing how many ah I have and not knowing how many I need plus dealing with hong kong merchants is making me very crazy.

I rode to the mall this morning, parked the bike behind an air conditioning unit as usual. I went in and walked for about 45 minutes. When I came back a truck had parked blocking me in. Well not completely, I was able to maneuver the bike and trailer out of the space. I promise I will make a picture of the bike tomorrow.

I got the rear wheel and motor on ebay. They came from a guy who parted out several mongoose e trail bikes. The motor runs good at 36v even though it is a 24v 450 watt motor. It's a currie.

I have experimented with the frame so much now that I need to move it all to a different frame. I am hoping to run across a full suspension frame somewhere. It would be kinda nice to have one of those.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

I have decided to restart my journal here. I will try to make a post each day just to keep a record of the mistakes I make.

I have built a new ebike. It is a chain drive souped up ebike. Souped up not in that it is faster than lightning, just faster than it would be if stock. It has a 26" mountain bike frame, with 20" wheels and tires. The rear wheel has two sprockets with free wheels. One is for the pedal chain and the other is for the motor chain, I pull a trailer filled with batteries. I have a set of older 17ah sla batteries and piggy backed to them is a set of nimh batteries I am building. At the moment they have about 20 ah and appear to discharge on a one to one level. I will have to get to 30 am to get the bike to run even close to an sla battery pack. I am still working on that.

Today I found a radar trailer on a residential street, so I ran the bike up to it and found that it pulls at 19mph on level ground. That isn't a lot but it is enough for me.

I also ran the batteries flat later in the day and had to push the bike home. There was enough left in them so that the bike could pull it's own weight and the batteries just not my fat ass around. So now I am changing batteries and Hope I don't do that again.