Luke's race bicycle of Doom 2.0

So, it's almost time for the Oct 22nd race. Since I've gotta leave Friday afternoon from work to get down there in time, I've got Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night left to get the bike running and dialed in, and setup to not burn-up in the first 5 minutes like my Perm132 bike did... lol

So, I figured some of you guys would want to see some build process pics. This is built on the Perm132 bike frame that I custom made from Cro-Mo tubing and TIG welded up together with my buddy Paul and Ryan helping me get it done in just a few days.

So, first things first, putting a brake on it that can slow down a 230lbs rider on a 100lbs bike safely for repeated high-speed braking. I've not yet found a bicycle brake that does a good job at this for me, though they seem to work well for lighter riders.












So, now that it stops, next is making the new motor fit the frame that was built to hold a Perm132.

Only 2 of the 5 bolt holes actually landed on the path of the mounting bars themself...


Here I am making some brackets to mount the motor: (notice sanding on the side of the wheel that shoots sparks in your face, it's an acquired taste)


I forgot to take pics of the finished brackets that hold the motor on with the other bolt holes for some reason, but it's mounted on there solidly now.

So, I also forgot to take any pics of making the sprocket adapter, which just used a big thick diskbrake that I drilled and bolted the sprocket on.

Then we made that hubmotor bike for my buddy Jamie. OMG, hubmotor bikes are seriously like the most simple thing to build on earth. Two badass custom 1/4" cro-mo plate torque arms, battery mounting, controller mounting, all took about an hour of easy relaxed pace work with minimal effort or thought.






Ok, back to the non-hub bike for straight-guys.

Luke are you using any king of fuse?
Or just hoping nothing goes wrong?

amazing. The halls are working out on the Joby? How is programming the Sevcon to work with it (that is a sevcon right?) What will be the final s/p of those beautiful nanotechs?

I like the pedo shirt and the dongs.. not in that order.

Andje said:

amazing. The halls are working out on the Joby? How is programming the Sevcon to work with it (that is a sevcon right?) What will be the final s/p of those beautiful nanotechs?

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This is a golden motor, not the Joby. We are still building a bike around the Joby that MIGHT be finished for this race, but it's really been difficult to work with, and a Sevcon can't run it, it's too high of electrical freq. The $1200 kelly with the fastest firmware could only run it to like 3000rpm (if i remember correctly).

ohzee said:

I like the pedo shirt and the dongs.. not in that order.

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Me too!
Thank you kindly for noticing.

I like the pedo shirt

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Q) Do you know why Pedophilia is so rampant in Australia?

A) Because Aussie children are really hot

Wow!! We REAAALLLLY need a drooling icon!!

Great work Luke!

Which GM are you using? This one?

http://www.goldenmotor.com/



Sure sounds like it's going to be the one to beat! 8)

gensem said:

Luke are you using any king of fuse?
Or just hoping nothing goes wrong?

Click to expand...

I missed your post somehow when I responded earlier.

No fuse on the pack, but the sevcon has a controller side fuse, but yes, if the wiring of the pack shorts, it will release the anger of the Nano-tech's into whatever is shorting until the Nano-Tech's win, because in every electrical confrontation, nano-tech's win.

Philistine said:

I like the pedo shirt

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Q) Do you know why Pedophilia is so rampant in Australia?

A) Because Aussie children are really hot

Click to expand...

I totally knew that. Abby Winters told me so.

LI-ghtcycle said:

Which GM are you using? This one?

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Yep, that's the one. I previously ran the 5kw version on my ebike, but found it to not be capable of 5kw for extended periods, and it would start smoking and smelling awful pretty quickly. lol

I sized this pack so small (20Ah 25s) because I'm only going to be running 11hp, and HOPEFULLY with this monster controller and decent sized motor, I will actually have a machine that can tug myself around the track with 11hp output for more than 5 minutes at a time before melting into plasma. We will see... Fingers crossed for no plasma!

liveforphysics said:

gensem said:

Luke are you using any king of fuse?
Or just hoping nothing goes wrong?

Click to expand...

I missed your post somehow when I responded earlier.

No fuse on the pack, but the sevcon has a controller side fuse, but yes, if the wiring of the pack shorts, it will release the anger of the Nano-tech's into whatever is shorting until the Nano-Tech's win, because in every electrical confrontation, nano-tech's win.

Philistine said:

I like the pedo shirt

Click to expand...

Q) Do you know why Pedophilia is so rampant in Australia?

A) Because Aussie children are really hot

Click to expand...

I totally knew that. Abby Winters told me so.

LI-ghtcycle said:

Which GM are you using? This one?

Click to expand...

Yep, that's the one. I previously ran the 5kw version on my ebike, but found it to not be capable of 5kw for extended periods, and it would start smoking and smelling awful pretty quickly. lol

I sized this pack so small (20Ah 25s) because I'm only going to be running 11hp, and HOPEFULLY with this monster controller and decent sized motor, I will actually have a machine that can tug myself around the track with 11hp output for more than 5 minutes at a time before melting into plasma. We will see... Fingers crossed for no plasma!

Click to expand...

Man, I am so wishing I could be there for the race!

That is one beast of a motor, and it even comes in a water cooled model!

You know, you could give "plasma boy" a run for his title! I still love that guy in Germany that thought that you hated batteries because you destroyed so many in videos!! :lol: :lol:

I'm thinking if anyone can make it work, it's you, keep it up!

Oh, and don't embarrass TOO many motorcycles with your E-Bikes while you're on the track, you still need people to race with!

LI-ghtcycle said:

Oh, and don't embarrass TOO many motorcycles with your E-Bikes while you're on the track, you still need people to race with!

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You know, we were putting something special together to run at the E-power event at Laguna Seca at the end of November, and then BAM! They canceled it out of the blue... LAME! :x :x :x Would have been an epic event. I loved this summers event there, we had like 20 Tesla Roadsters, 20 electric racing bikes, and like 20 DIY electric car conversions all charging from Laguna Seca's huge main power transformer, and it started billowing smoke, and then tripped the HV interrupter! lol It was pretty awesome. lol

I just worked tonight back-pedaling and chasing my tail a bit. Had a bad crimp connection (the wire fell 95% of out the connector and I didn't notice and crimped it with the hydraulic crimper on just the little tips of the wire, which fell out). Then I had to balance the pack, which is made of 100cells... (4p25s). Had to change out the 48v coil GigaVac contactor with a 72v coil GigaVac contactor because the Sevcon controller is the worlds biggest baby and alarms and faults out over ANYTHING not being exactly perfect for it...

If you were going to make a mass production EV, I could see using a Sevcon, the hardware is fantastic. For little 1-off projects, it's gotta be the most PITA firmware to setup on the planet. We built the hubmotor bike, put a Methods controller on it, and BAM! 5 minutes later, we are ripping around on the bike (until I smoked the motor on the dyno lol). Methods controller never had any faults, never cared about anything, it just worked, and worked killer. The stupid Sevcon has like 40 pages of settings to go through before it will even TRY to make a motor turn... and then it's going to fault for the next 2000 times you try to use it, until every little useless detail is adjusted to be perfect... It's just a retarded controller, I hate it, but it's what I've got, and it will do a good job once it's all setup right (hopefully).

There should be a webpage somewhere that people with Sevcon projects can go to and post their settings and hardware, once they get it working. It might help others with similar projects and motors get started, at least.

Call it something like http://FrakkingSevcons.com or something. :lol:

amberwolf said:

There should be a webpage somewhere that people with Sevcon projects can go to and post their settings and hardware, once they get it working. It might help others with similar projects and motors get started, at least.

Call it something like http://FrakkingSevcons.com or something. :lol:

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Yes, that would be a blessing if somebody made a sevcon / motor firmware settings collection page. Yet, get this, they change the firmware pretty regularly, and then all your previous files can't load onto them... And you can't roll-back firmware versions...

Well, maybe just screenshots of the pages, so you can at least manually reenter the settings.

gl with the sevcon; reminds me of that youtube vid where the rich girl cries about getting her birthday CAR at the "wrong" time. I'm imagining all the values that could be wrong when programming one... now i'm imagining troubleshooting it... now i'm going to go and kiss my infineon .

Can't believe i mistook the GM for the Joby; somewhere there is an engineer having terrible nightmares and he doesn't know why.

Good luck in the race. My friends could stand to watch more vids of you racing around with the motorcycles. "We're bored" they say. "Pay attention mortals; observe manifestation of the spirit of innovation. " i say back.

Also that bike looks pretty sick.. Good luck on the race.. Please get video if you can I really enjoyed the other videos of you racing that
were posted.. and if we have plasma get some of that on cam also ;0) hopefully that doesn't happen until after the race is won.

liveforphysics said:

Then we made that hubmotor bike for my buddy Jamie. OMG, hubmotor bikes are seriously like the most simple thing to build on earth.

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Funny, it sounds like a bad thing when you say it... :lol: to me simplicity promotes our hobby by making it accessible to a larger group of people.

Is that a front-mounted battery on this build? I can't tell from the pic how rigid the pack mount is, connected to the handlebars - if it has slop it will be a handling challange, but if it is rigid, I hope you got a chance to dive it into a few corners and feel how quickly, predictably, and manageably it will lean. Bolting a front battery box to the stanchions of a triple-crown fork will make it rigid.

-JD

Is Jamie's hub the old one that plasma'd up on the dyno rewound, or serial number 2 with the "special" side covers?

bigmoose said:

Is Jamie's hub the old one that plasma'd up on the dyno rewound, or serial number 2 with the "special" side covers?

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New stator. We started rewinding the last stator... and then decided to just put a new on in for time reasons.

It looks like I damaged the end-turn area with a screw driver when I was prying it open, and that's where the failure propagated from. We will throw a new stator in there, not knick it with a screw driver, and hopefully that bike will be done and ready to rock.

oatnet said:

Is that a front-mounted battery on this build? I can't tell from the pic how rigid the pack mount is, connected to the handlebars

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Being connected across the bars like that it should be just as rigid as across the fork, and it also cannot apply torque across the stem/steerer connection, potentially tearing that loose (leaving the bars flopping around unconnected to the wheel, or still connected but at the wrong angle--don't ask me how I know what might happen there....).

That said...are those exposed bus bars on the top of that thing? Cuz, like, I wouldn't wanna accidentally put my face on top of that battery in a tuck. :lol: BZZZZT HI! I AM VOLTAGE! FEEL ME NOW! :lol:

Will we get a teaser vid of the monster in action??!!

Stupid question, but how are you going to adjust tension on the chain? It looks like you just slide the axle back but what are the chances both chains are the same exact length, or did you just get lucky?

haha HV weapons prohibited in this race!

Are the sevcons the only controllers able to run this GM AF motor at a decent output?

Seems like evryone (well at least me) is searching for a 5kw peak motor in a managable form factor an with a heavier duty than RC stuff...

Cheers, can't wait to see this thing rip!

It lives.

It rips.

Motor still gets overheated in about 5mins.... kinda pissed about that, but after hours of professional Sevcon dyno tuning, it runs and doesn't fault out. The controller gets warm, the battery stays cool, the motor gets flesh-burning hot.

Here it is getting dyno tuned, and doing sustained 11hp testing (which it's not quite able to do, even with the big fan on it). It's hooked up with my small charger (only 9kw). That charger takes about 14minutes to charge the bike from empty to full. My fastest charge setup could do it in about half that time, but the damn dyno room has 3phase 440v and my fast charger needs 3 phase 220...

Now tune it back 10-30% more so it lasts in real world conditions!!!!!!

liveforphysics said:

It lives.

It rips.

Motor still gets overheated in about 5mins.... kinda pissed about that, but after hours of professional Sevcon dyno tuning, it runs and doesn't fault out. The controller gets warm, the battery stays cool, the motor gets flesh-burning hot.

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Maybe the gearing needs optimization. What rpm were you making peak power? Peak power and peak efficiency are almost never coincident. Maybe you need to be in another band.

Glad to read you guys finally got the sevcon dialed.