jonescg's NEW electric racebike BUILD thread!

[Nuts&Volts]

Oh I wanted to add one of thing about the Rinehart. This controller does not have a self-learning tool for the motor, so you have to send in your motor and controller to Rinehart to have them set it all up on a Dyno and determine the ideal settings on the controller. I have heard this is quite expensive as well

Just thought I would pass this information along

[jonescg]

Thanks guys,

Jay - the 3D model I downloaded claims to be a Gixxer1000, but I was really just playing around. Measure twice cut once, but model a thousand times cause it's cheap

Kyle - Yeah, I reached the same conclusion about paralleled cells. Failure is more definitive when you have a 1P pack, which is good and bad. I can't really commit to anything until I have the frame in hand and I can measure the available space. If there is less room than I first thought, I will go for LiPo - no choice really. But if there is enough room to do what I want with LiFePO4 then I can go for a 1p120s A123 arrangement. Smaller pack, but easier to manage.

UniTek got back to me about their BAMOCAR-D3-700-400-x controllers!

Dear Mr Jones,
Our drive will work with the EVO motor. We already have an application running with this motor. There are a few limitation up to now. We can use the motor only in a star-delta connection. There is no fieldweakening.
best regards
Thomas Labod

UniTek Industrie Elektronik GmbH
Hans-Paul-Kaysser-Str.1
71397 Nellmersbach
Germany

He attached the same AFM130 datasheet which I emailed you. I'm assuming star-delta format means I'd have to run the very high voltage system?

[jonescg]

So I visited my local Ye Olde Bearing Shoppe and they were rather helpful. Assuming 25 mm is a standard size for most output shafts, and if splined appropriately, the right size for a Gixxer front sprocket. They suggested a pair of 6305 bearings which take a 25 mm ID and 62 mm OD. They are 17 mm wide and are good for 11,000 rpm and take a high load. And at $17 each, they are the least of my expenses!

I have minimised any unnecessary turning of the shaft, so hopefully I can get it made up with Z-13 splines at either end easily enough. Sure, I could probably slide tube over it to give me inner support for the inner races, but then it wouldn't be able to take any kind of radial force without it being fixed to the shaft somehow.





The whole unit is now only 80 mm in diameter, which leaves enough room (9 mm worth) for welding the plates to the sides. Would this affect the tube diameter so much that I couldn't get the bearings pressed in and out? Should I have them welded then get the steps turned out? I can't work out how to draw a circlip groove in Sketchup... Anyway, hopefully I don't need to get this turned out of a solid rod of ally, but I'm sure heavy duty ally tube is available.

I also stopped in at the wreckers to see what they had. Not much, but there was a Megelli there in satisfactory condition. You could have a lot of fun with it with a small motor or couple of motors. I also measured up a '00 GSXR600 frame and it's not much smaller than the thousand. I still think the thou will be better- more room and all.

[jonescg]

Just a bit more playing with Sketchup:





This is a scale model of a 10 kWh battery pack positioned inside the model of a GSXR1000 (Again, much credit to whoever went to the effort of making this model!). It uses 540 of those individual LiPo cells from Turnigy, 5p108S. To my surprise, they appear to fit relatively well, even with an extra 12 mm worth of acetal plastic holding them together. I also did a model where my motor goes in there too and while it appeared to fit everything, this is purely a simulation.

Pretty cool huh?

Anyway, better just focus on Voltron's next race, and saving enough dough to pay for this little exercice

[jonescg]

Well for my birthday, the Lovely Katherine gave me a copy of TurboCAD 18! Holy crap is that one complicated bit of software! Not nearly as easy to use as Sketchup. Good thing is, I can draw stuff in Sketchup and open them in Turbo, then save them in a format that suits most CNC/ laser cutters.

[SplinterOz]

Well first off... Happy Birthday.

I also think this Katherine must be a keeper

[voicecoils]

Happy birthday Chris!

What a sweet gift

It's super convenient that a CAD model already exists for the GSXR1000 and enough lipo can fit in a sensible looking vertical stack.

Over at elmoto.net, teddillard is scheming up a battery mount idea where a group of lipo bricks can slide in and out of the big pack blade server style. I wonder if something like that could be incorporated into your stack?

If you could slide out a row of 6 bricks (or 12 for the top of the stack) as one tray, they could easily be balanced, serviced, bad packs removed etc. With some clever use of bullet connectors and busbars, you might be able to minmise wiring make each tray hot-swappable.

[jonescg]

It is so easy to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V $6000 worth of LiPo and stuff it into a bike

Yeah, there are pros and cons to having a pack that consists of smaller sub-packs. Pulling it apart to swap out dud cells would be a lot easier with smaller sub-units, but at the same time, that is a lot of connectors and tabs/pins to contend with. It also makes waterproofing a bit harder to maintain too.

I haven't drawn the acetal box for the cells yet, but I'd be getting ahead of myself if I did since I don't really know how much room I will have. An L shape is ideal because it makes use of all of the tank space and still allows a fair bit of weight to slide down into the bike, keeping the CoG a bit lower too. I can make a 120 cell A123 pack in the same manner and it would still fit, but not quite so easily as the LiPos.

Of course a pack of this size is going to weigh 65-75 kg, so you would need a winch to hoist it out of the bike. If I used A123s, I'd virtually never need to do that But if it was Hobbyking LiPo, then yeah, I'll probably be lumping it out quite a lot of the time. Even if the one-third of the pack was separate, it's still a 40-50 kg mass to haul out.

Gotta hand it to Google - they really made a sweet program with Sketch-up. TurboCAD is bloody clunky and counter-intuitive in comparison.

[voicecoils]

Yeah, lots of fun things to think about!

How about one of these (or fabricating your own) for next year:



At least you & Ripperton could both make use of it

[Nuts&Volts]

Happy Birthday Sir! and Go Fast

[jonescg]

Again, not much progress to report here, except that I have ordered 3 of those individual Turnigy 5000 mAh 40C LiPo cells. They aren't Nano-Tech, but 40C suggests they are pretty close. I really just want to get some idea of how they might fit together. 540 of these bad boys works out to be $6200 excluding delivery.

Alternatively, I can buy 55 of those 10S, 5000 mAh nano-tech packs and string them all up with Methy's boards and a shitload of busbars. This works out to be $8500 excluding delivery.

Delivery is the hard part - HobbyKing won't send me a 10 kWh order

Not that it matters right now - I don't have any money left after this year's racing, and even less after my wedding and then Christmas...

[voicecoils]

Again, not much progress to report here, except that I have ordered 3 of those individual Turnigy 5000 mAh 40C LiPo cells.

Nice. I did a quick calc on Ripperton's thread and found that even just 7.5 kWh of those Turnigy single cells would be capable of 300 kW continuous.

Perhaps you could get Hobby-King to sea freight your large order to their NSW warehouse and then courier them on to you when you are ready?

[jonescg]

Do they do that? Do they even have a phone number I can call them on? In NSW that is...

[voicecoils]

Do they do that? Do they even have a phone number I can call them on? In NSW that is...

I'm sure they would consider it!

HobbyKing Store Front
4/365 The Kingsway
Caringbah NSW 2229
Australia
Ph: 02 9525 7540
Sydney Store enquiries only.

[Philistine]

Hi Chris,

Below is the number for Hobbyking. Their storefront sells things at a noticable markup to the website, but it is the same business, so I am sure if you want to chat with them, you can call the storefront. Also, if you go to the HK website, you can chat online with them as well. I have done this in the past to work out Lipo returns. I would have thought if you are buying $6,000 worth of Lipo in one go you should negotiate a discount - i nearly tried this recently when I bought $1,000 worth, but figured it wasn't quite enough.


Hobbyking
(02) 9525 6852
U4/ 365 Kingsway
CaringbahNSW2229
Show map...

[jonescg]

Cheers guys! I'll call them in a while to see what can be done. I have a few ideas for a pack design, but I night need to change then in light of a good trackbike offer; $5k for a well set up 2004 CBR1000RR with all the goods. It's a little bit dated, but it is a Honda What I don't know is how much room there is for batteries - Gixxers are like wheelbarrows compared to the CBR.

[jonescg]

OK some noodling around on sketchup has resulted in this idea:


A CBR1000RR doesn't have as nearly as much room in it as the Gixxer, meaning 5s wide would be pushing it. So I thought I would come up with a battery mounting plate for a 5p 4s rack of LiPo. This means it is only 220 mm wide, and ~145 mm long with the cells terminated in place. Being so narrow, I can actually fit more of them lower down in the bike, so the pile can be up to 800 mm high. A second, shorter pile of maybe 10 of them can sit in front of the seat.

Now, the reason I only have one of these, and not a whole plate, is because I can Ctrl+C and Crtl+V a whole stack of them, depending on how high I want it. But it also made me think of an alternative means of pack building - individual 5p4s racks can be pulled out and put in as needed. More stuffing around, and a slightly weaker pack, but kind of convenient in other ways.



Oh, by the way, the units are 45 mm high, 220 mm wide and 10 mm deep, at the deepest point. The M4 holes would be threaded so you can tighten SS screws into aluminium bus bars that not only hold the paralleled tabs down, but also serve to join the neighbouring packs above or below in series.

The 10 mm wide strips on the outside would have M6 holes to thread into 10 or 12 mm side walls for the pack.

[jonescg]

OK, so I can make the stack out of 9 blocks of 1.1 kWh each. Plus the larger front cover has more strength now.



This means I can make a front stack 810 mm high (more like 840 mm with a bottom and top) and a back stack of 405 mm (435 mm including top and bottom) and have the L-shaped walls hold it all together.

I just doubt that the tabs will be sufficiently long enough to allow this method of clamping They would need to be at least 15 mm long... Maybe?

[jonescg]

DAMMIT! Who has $5000 I can borrow?

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/2008-Honda-C ... _500wt_950

I'm worried it might be hot

Otherwise there is this option:
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/SUZUKI-GSXR1 ... _500wt_950

However the 2004 Blade trackbike is probably the best deal going.

Damn I wish I weren't so broke right now

[voicecoils]

DAMMIT! Who has $5000 I can borrow?

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/2008-Honda-C ... _500wt_950

I'm worried it might be hot

Otherwise there is this option:
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/SUZUKI-GSXR1 ... _500wt_950

However the 2004 Blade trackbike is probably the best deal going.

Damn I wish I weren't so broke right now

Ha, there's a few on formula-extreme in that price bracket. I think it will cost quite a bit of money to take and sort of street bike and get it fully race ready. Much easier to just buy one already set up for the track and pull the oily bits out.

$4500, 2002 GSXR1000
http://www.formula-xtreme.com.au/xtremema.nsf/b5c953e8e1b65e94ca256a560030b8d6/b447bdee734e688dca25792700217a7b?OpenDocument
$5200, 2005 Honda CBR1000
http://www.formula-xtreme.com.au/xtremema.nsf/b5c953e8e1b65e94ca256a560030b8d6/13fb7b068ba690f7ca2578f80022e5d2?OpenDocument

[jonescg]

Hi All,
Not much to report, except I'm now a married man and I have no money. Sounds like a familiar story

But, my Turnigy 40C cells arrived!

And they are exactly as the sizes stated. However, the thing that will let me down are the tabs They are barely 9 mm long, so my mechanical termination idea just won't work. It looks like buying pre-soldered packs from HobbyKing and paralleling up the balance wires, making use of bus bars etc will be the easiest way to go, but I will try my hand at soldering these guys.





Interestingly, the positive terminal looks to have a copper tab spot welded to the ally tab, so maybe soldering isn't so bad

[jonescg]

As seen earlier, I have successfully soldered three of these cells in parallel.



This will be made much easier when there is a mounting plate to hold them all in place.



Now that I have the tab dimensions I can make some more accurate drawings. If I go for plates of two rows of paralleled cells, I can have the terminations between blocks in line, much like those on Voltron. However, being an even number, I will need to bump the final voltage up a tiny bit more to make the whole thing sit together. That is, 5P8S I will need a more convenient number to reach 112 cells (415 V fully charged at rest). I can stack these guys together to make a pack as high as I like, resulting in increasing the voltage by 14.8 V at a time.



6 MM holes in the 10 mm plastic will serve as mounting points for the side walls, and a floor will bolt into the side walls with an appropriate number of bolts.

I think it can work

[SplinterOz]

Looks like you might have a plan! I hope all went well last weekend.

[jonescg]

Thanks Tony, we had a blast Married life is good. Not sure why, but I'm loving it.

So a bit of an update from the other battery tech thread, I have been playing around with my Turnigy cells looking for a means to build a big-arse battery pack.

I have concluded that this is still a good way to go:



I spoke to a machinist here in Perth and he said they could easily come up with this exact battery front plate in acetal (POM). Now, acetal isn't good with heat, but I thought about putting some of that single sided copper, fiberglass PCB material (this stuff:


behind the tabs, then tighten down onto the tabs with a bit of 40x40x2 mm copper plate courtesy of 4 or 8 M4 screws and washers. This way there is good contact between the tabs and the front plate, conductive the whole way around, and yet the acetal plate is shielded from any excessive heating by the fibreglass backing. And it's repairable to boot! Only issue is that all this copper will add about 3.5 kg to the final weight of the pack, which is a lot but not too bad all up. I also have the option of putting some kind of protective cover on the final product to stop water, road grime and unsuspecting fingers from accessing 450 volts



I dread to think what machining 14 of these guys out will cost... I enquired about more superior plastics to acetal - for $4000 I can buy a single sheet of PAI I think this method will work...

[jonescg]

Holy CNC shitcakes. I had no idea this sort of thing would be so expensive! The machinist I spoke to quoted me $3000 to do this ONE unit! Let alone 14 of them!! (he charges $100 per hour).

I asked what the slow part was and he said machining all of the tiny slots. Apparently the feed rate is critical, and with acetal, it tends to be quite slow. I have since enquired about getting the board water-cut first, then getting him to machine all of the recesses afterwards. Might save me a few thousand bucks.

Otherwise would I be better off making a mould so I can fill it with HDPE or something? Apparently it doesn't take a thread well, so I could mount M4 nuts behind the front plate, but again, recessing all 32 nuts per plate would take a long time... More thinking required...