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.

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.

I haven't been keeping this up very well probably because I have a bike design that I am very very happy with. It is the same bike as before. The one with the scooter wheel running over the rear wheel driving it forward. The motor is the 600watt with the clutch built into the sprocket. It actually might be a free wheel I don't really know for sure.

I think the bike will do about 15 to 20 mph on a the flat surface which there is very little of here abouts. The battery pack right now is on a trailer I built. Actually it is about version 20 but this one is right. It has the same construction as a bicycle. The wheels are supported on both sides so that they are not in any stress. The weight of the SLA batteries is becoming an issue now that everything else seems to be working fine.

I have decided that I want to put a 36v 12ah battery pack on the bike. With sla that is unlikely to happen. The logistics are just too overwhelming. The lipo batteries are just too expensive for a DIY kind of guy. So what I am going to do is to build a nimh battery pack. If the cells ever arrive from china that is. I am building it from 150 aa cells. I could have built a 10ah pack from D cells. It would have been a bit more expensive that way. Once I get the cells attached and stabilized, it shouldn't make any difference which one I used.

I will try to update this after I get the pack built.

total and complete failure

The front wheel drive was a miserable failure, It was just too far out of balance. I rode it a few miles but in the end it was just too dangerous. I moved the motor back to the rear and now trying to get the thing more dependable.

The big issue now is trailer security. A flying trailer is not only likely to leave me stranded today, but also puts pressure on the wiring which left me stranded a day later. Not to mention it could easily have struck someone as it rolled along the road out of control. i think a cable tying it to the bike as a secondary safety measure is the answer. that is todays project.

goign to redo a bike

I have plans to redesign the front wheel drive bike I just finished. It is way out of balance. I can ride it but just barely. I don't mind the weight or the noise of the front drive but the motor hands off the side and that is truly dangerous.

the more things change

The more things change the more they regress. I am back to 36v battery packs because I don't like to strain to climb a hill. I don't mind assisting the bike, I just don't want to work at it.

I also stripped down the spare rhino bike, to reassemble the hub motor bike. It is a weird looking bike but I don't think it will kill me. At least not for a while maybe.

It has the 26" hub motor on the front and a 20" coaster wheel on the rear. I did install a front brake just to keep it a little safer. I'm not all that sure that the fork is safe enough. We shall see soon enough.

24v test

Today I rode the 24 bike a total of 7 miles. Two miles, then I recharged it, then five more miles. On the five mile ride I took note of something which I had noticed before. After about 2.5 miles the power curve changed dramatically. I had been running the bike at about half throttle the first 2.5 miles but had to run it wot the next 2.5 to get the help up the hills. Obviously the batteries put out more amps for a short period of them, then it goes downhill rapidly.

On that bike I am running a 24v battery pack, a 24v 500 watt controller, and a 600 watt motor. I took an hour to change out the controller on a test bike that is the same. It now has a 600 watt motor, a 24v 350 watt controller and a 24v battery. What I want to know is will that flatten out the power curve of the battery pack. If I have to run on half amps after two miles, I would just as soon run on it all the time. So I may have some definitive answers on how to handle that sort of thing.

I am going to make the same ride tomorrow with the smaller controller to see if the range is the same and the performance is more even.