Friday, October 23, 2009

still pedaling



Here she is back together again, with the temporary fork while I fab the new springer to go on it. Seems to handle just about the same as with the old wheel setup and sure looks mean without all that pink and fenders and such.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Things seem to be coming together. Though my rickshaw job ended a bit earlier than I thought it would (thanks a bunch red sox) so I still don't have the money to buy the controller or the battery. At least as far as the battery goes that's a good thing as I don't think the golden motor pack is going to work well with their own motor. After picking some brains and the internet it seems that the motor I have is just too powerful and demands more than their 48v 20ah battery just wont cut it. I'm not dead set on it yet but I think I'll be using an alltrax controller, which is the one that is used for the ev-12 electric flat tracker so it obviously can perform.

As for the batteries, I'm thinking a123 systems has what I need but I'm going to have to learn to build my own pack. They also have developed a prismatic battery that is about a quarter inch thick by 12"X 8" with 3.3v and 20ah, but there's no way to buy them and the developers kits they sell are really expensive and they don't offer developers kits for the prismatic battery......but, I found out that their headquarters is about five miles from my apartment. So I took a little bike ride out there today to see what was up with a123. It turns out they are in the quite phaze of the ipo so they must have been pretty busy so there was no one in the office that could talk to me. I did though manage to flag down a supply guy though to talk to and though he didn't really have alot of technical knowlege he was very helpfull and said he would pass my email address to one of the engineers who has ev dreams of his own. I'm not holding my breath for the prismatics but I would do anything short of killing a man to get my hands on some...anything.

Well enough of my battery woes, I got alot of stripping down done with the frame and put that large marge wheel together and mounted it. Here's some pics