Off-Road Dreamin'

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This is what I had to do to get to the top speed you want. Replace the controller with a $450 USD Kelly, the motor with a $420 USD QS MOTORS 5KW 12 inch hub, the battery with 10 Nissan Leaf modules totaling $1290 USD, and then there's the less expensive stuff like the the DC/DC, and all the power wiring plus other stuff like a contactor, fuses and relays which all had up to maybe an extra $500 USD. And all those prices don't include shipping cost or custom fees. You will need to have quite a few tools to help you modify and fabricate stuff to make everything fit.

The top speed you want will not happen with the controller and motor you have. I mean you might get to 75 km/h by adding more batteries and modifying that little controller but you can't ride more than ten seconds at that speed before your 500 W motor starts heating up very quickly. And that controller, no matter how much you modify it, it will not last. It is just not built to take a 200+ pound scooter to high speeds and give lots of torque to get there fast. The batteries from Motorino don't give the power you need, they are pretty weak and they will sag in voltage too much, no sense spending more money to get more of what will not work. If you want the performance of a small motorcycle then you will need to get small motorcycle components, electric ones that is.

Good luck.
Ray
 
Contact Vito Ho at QS MOTORS and tell him what you want and he will match a motor with a controller for you. You can buy what is already displayed on their online store without talking to anyone but talking to Vito first, he can have a motor specially wound just for you with a controller to match. As for the battery, get the best and most powerful that you can afford.

Have fun
Ray
 
mistercrash said:
The scooter has lots of limitations. Small space for batteries, small wheels and short wheelbase. 80 km/h is the top speed to be safe.


What do you think of starting with the 72V motorcycle ebikes, and modding from there? Apparently the motors are already 2K-3K peak watts, with speed limiters.
 
4LivesPerGallon said:
mistercrash said:
The scooter has lots of limitations. Small space for batteries, small wheels and short wheelbase. 80 km/h is the top speed to be safe.


What do you think of starting with the 72V motorcycle ebikes, and modding from there? Apparently the motors are already 2K-3K peak watts, with speed limiters.

Which ones are you talking about? Motorcycles and ebikes are two very different things.
 
mistercrash said:
4LivesPerGallon said:
mistercrash said:
The scooter has lots of limitations. Small space for batteries, small wheels and short wheelbase. 80 km/h is the top speed to be safe.


What do you think of starting with the 72V motorcycle ebikes, and modding from there? Apparently the motors are already 2K-3K peak watts, with speed limiters.

Which ones are you talking about? Motorcycles and ebikes are two very different things.


http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3000W-Electric-Bike-Lead-Acid-72V_60343342760.html
 
Thanks for the good laugh :lol: I'm really sorry about your bad luck but man! That post was halarious. Anyway, if you can buy a new controller from the dealer than do that. If you can bring the scooter to the dealer and let them install a new controller, even better. But right now, you should concentrate on your finals, like seriously dude. Get back in there and study! Or else you might end up being a bus driver like me :lol:
 
4LivesPerGallon said:
What do you think of starting with the 72V motorcycle ebikes, and modding from there? Apparently the motors are already 2K-3K peak watts, with speed limiters.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3000W-Electric-Bike-Lead-Acid-72V_60343342760.html

These look really cheap, and what wattage is it? 1500W or 3000W or 5000W? and standard speed of 50 km/h and top speed of 61 to 80? or is it 100? Because it's all mentioned in the description. :roll: Don't know man, can these even be licensed and insured in North America? I would rather start with an already licensed and insured scooter that is right here in my Country and has a well known brand like Yamaha, Honda, Symco, Genuine and so on.
 
I didn't know the Motorino controller was programmable. Mine wasn't five years ago :) It had a simple limiter plug to make it go 32 max. I read these forums for four years, and a few others also. I asked dozens of questions, before I decided I wanted to make my Motorino go much faster than stock. Then I spent months planning, measuring, talking with peeps on the phone and emails about many different products I researched, making plans and scale drawings, asking a few more dozen questions, going back to the drawing board, making mock up batteries and controllers, searching, comparing, asking more questions, questioning my questions, and paying the price for my mistakes. I went over all this three or four times before I pulled the plug on what I installed in the scooter. Did you read that mine is highly illegal now? How dumb is that of me, to build something so cool but I'm afraid to use it because I don't wish to get caught. I said it before and will say it again, if you want an EV that goes fast like a motorcycle, than start with a motorcycle. The Motorino e-bike will get you nowhere. Finally, I don't know where this is coming from: ''mistercrash, our resident expert hero''??? I hope the ES experts I have been badgering with questions for the past few years don't see that.

Good luck and get back to studying. :D
 
:shock:
Oooh... Brutal. That's some seriously cringeworthy disassembly/soldering. Sorry you had such bad luck taking your controller apart. An expensive mistake, though I suppose that's how you learn.

Noq said:
*looks at your thread*
Wait. With the Leaf batteries, your CA says "Amax 354.4". Is that... are you kidding me? Did you hit that? (Then again your Amin says negative 46.5, so who knows WTF.)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say yeah, that's probably correct. The negative amperage reading is probably because regen. That's complete and total overkill though, that's like 30kW peak output, which is probably enough for a small car. I've no doubt mistercrash could drive his new bike up a vertical wall with that much torque.

I ended up upgrading my motorino XPD with 4x leaf modules (60V) and a Kelly KEB72301X controller. The controller is rated up to 150A but I rarely set it above 60%, so 90A peak, and that's plenty enough torque for me. I can reach full speed within 5 seconds or so, and hills don't slow me down at all unless they're especially steep.

At a full charge of 67V, my max speed is around 55kmph, which is enough that if I went any faster I'd be really concerned about getting pulled over. I wouldn't want to up the voltage to 72v unless I had some way to register and insure it as a LSM.

The leaf modules *almost* fit in a motorino's battery box. I had to use a sawzall to remove the box and move it back an inch to get everything to fit, but in the end it was worth it. I LOVE these leaf cells. They keep really balanced, they have a small number of high capacity cells so you're not fiddling with soldering/spot welding hundreds of tabs. I've been using this battery without a BMS, just a bulk charger, for over a year now, and the most I've seen them out of balance was like ~0.05v

Anyway, one thing to point out is if you're going to replace your controller with anything but the motorino one, you'll lose your dashboard. I ended up welding a smartphone holder to my handlebars so I use an old cellphone for a speedometer, and a voltmeter to measure the battery. You'll have to come up with something similar and factor that into your costs as well.
 
The leaf battery modules contain 4 cells each. The cells are 3.7v LiMnO4 prismatic lipo cells with ~30AH of capacity. I believe they're manufactured for 33AH, but you can only buy them used. As they come, they're wired with pairs of two cells in series, so 7.4v per module, 60AH.

I've cut mine apart and rewired them in series so I'm getting 60V out of four modules. If I left them in their original configuration I'd need 8, but I'd prefer to have less weight, and space is limited on a XPd.

The cells rated for about 4-5C discharge, so like 120-150A if you wire the single cells in series, or 240-300A if you leave them in their 2S2P configuration, so there's that to think about. If you want higher amperage, because I guess you live on a planet with stronger gravity or maybe you just want to pop wheelies all the time, you'd need to go to a different battery chemistry or somehow stuff fifteen of these on your scooter and go through the hassle of cutting the modules apart to rewire them to 20S3P.
 
Yup, that's more or less all correct. Keep in mind though, the C rating of these batteries is sorta speculative. HAC's page says this:

According US Department of ENERGY study* these batteries can provide up to 240A continuous or over 540A short time on pulse (time is not specified).

And then in this video, EVTV tested dead shorting them and got 700A out of them for ten seconds (test starts at around 94 minutes): http://www.evtv.me.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/vidarch.html

So that's sorta the range of what they're capable of. Of course the higher C rating you use them at, the quicker they lose their lifespan.

Also, when you say:

Noq said:
In addition to doubling the maximum amperage output, doubling the amp-hour rating also increases the range, if I'm not mistaken, so 10 modules would give double the range of 5 modules. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I learned all this just now and am likely to have made mistakes.

Yeah that's correct, but of course the higher the amperage you draw, the faster you deplete the batteries. So, the controller you're getting is rated for 500A for up to a minute, and 200A continuous. Using 500A for a minute at 84V is 700Wh consumed right there.
 
inedible said:
That's complete and total overkill though, that's like 30kW peak output, which is probably enough for a small car. I've no doubt mistercrash could drive his new bike up a vertical wall with that much torque.

Overkill until you try it, then you think that you should've done this way sooner.

inedible said:
At a full charge of 67V, my max speed is around 55kmph, which is enough that if I went any faster I'd be really concerned about getting pulled over.

Anything over 32 km/h with these things and you're an outlaw. The guy going 55 is as much an outlaw as the one going 90.

Anywho! have any pics and documentation of your separating the Leaf modules? I pretty much figured out how the connections are made inside the modules, I'm just not sure how to go about keeping the nice beefy connections they have when you separate the cells.
 
mistercrash said:
Anywho! have any pics and documentation of your separating the Leaf modules? I pretty much figured out how the connections are made inside the modules, I'm just not sure how to go about keeping the nice beefy connections they have when you separate the cells.

Here's an album of me opening the modules and cutting the bus bars: http://imgur.com/a/ULQfj
Mine are the old style, but the principle should be the same.

I can't find any pics of the cell-to-cell connections, but I used thick-stranded 10sh? gauge copper wire, which I fanned out with pliers to make more even surface contact with the tabs, pre-tinned them so they were rigid, bent them into shape with pliers, tinned the tabs, preheated the wires, then soldered the wires to the tabs nice and quick with high heat while mushing the wire into the tabs with pliers .

I wasn't designing for the kind of power you guys want though. I was thinking about like 80A max when I was putting this together. I don't know about soldering such heavy gauges to these tabs. Could be messy, possibly damage tabs or melt the plastic of the pouches etc. You may want to look at drilling holes in the tabs and using crimped ring connectors.
 
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