Ninja 250 "Clone" Made in China

[inirico]

awesooome..
cool DIY process.. hope everything goes well.

[Dui, ni shuo de dui]

Hi guys,

It's been a long while since the last update... Unfortunely not much happened on the build because I had some unexpected things to deal with (moving out to a new home).

Anyway, you are probably aware that in China the whole country has been shut down for a few weeks due to this virus everyone's been talking about. This, at least for me, has been a positive thing since I had plenty of time to catch up and continue moving forward on my build.

I started by finishing the battery box. That took a lot of work, sanding, coating with epoxy, sanding again, coating again, sanding... you get the idea.
Anyway, last time I coated it it looked like this:

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The battery will be air conditioned using Peltier modules and a water cooling system, still havent finished working on the programming part of the electronics but hopefully it should be done soon.
Since then I sanded the box once again, hopefully for the last time before I'll clear coat it, so that's why it won't look nice and shiny in the following pictures.

I've entirely removed the original steel battery box. I weighted it at a bit more than 6 kilograms. The new carbon box is a little bit above 1.5 kilograms so that's a nice weight reduction so far. I had a very hard time fitting the new box in the frame, but after a while it did came in eventually:

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After that, it was time to design and 3d print a box in order to protect my BMS:

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It worked pretty well. In the end, I plan to print another one and cover it with carbon fiber, for looks of course but also for better waterproofing. Just waiting for a vacuum pump to arrive in the mail so I could do it properly.\

Installed in the frame:

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Also designed some brackets to secure the box to the frame. Those are just some 3D printed temporary ones, I'll redesign them slightly and either make them out of carbon fiber, or cast them out of aluminum, I'm not decided yet.

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Also worked on integrating my Ant BMS screen into my dashboard. I had some useless gauges since this one was intended for a gas bike. The rev gauge and fuel gauges weren't used so I thought I'd just remove them and put the screen instead.
Wasn't really easy but it worked well in the end.

Started by removing the useless gauges and fitting the screen on the PCB:

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Cut the external cover:

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3D printed a part to better hide all that mess:

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Covered it in carbon fiber:

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Made a very ghetto vacuum bagging using a vacuum cleaner. Wasn't great at all, my bag was leaking and the vacuum cleaner didn't have a lot of succion power. I had to leave it like that for two hours which was insanely annoying:

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Spent almost a week of sanding, putting more epoxy, sanding again, etc...

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And finally it came out OK. Could have been better if I had a vacuum pump, but it's not too horrific. Hopefully next carbon fiber parts will be better with proper gear.

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Right now I'm riding the bike just like that, but that's a bit sketchy, I need to finish it quickly since its my daily driver.
Next steps to do
-build the battery box brackets,
- insulate the box with aerogel sheets (great fireproof material, extremely good insulation property to keep the temperature in the box as constant as possible)
- Make a lid to close the box
- finish the BMS enclosure

Once all of that will be done I plan to tackle an other composites challenge, copying the current gas tank from the current 5kg steel it's made out into a 1 or less Kg of nice carbon fiber. I also need to work on my battery air conditioning system before the hot days of summer arrive.

[MorbidlyObeseKoala]

Insulate with aerogel sheets? Where do you find those?

I had seen a video about a smaller company that started making and tweaking the final composition so I assumed it was getting a little more affordable but not to the point where you could put it in a motorcycle.

I'd love to put it in my walls at home to help my heating/cooling costs.

[john61ct]

crazy pricey, only for use where space is lacking

[Dui, ni shuo de dui]

Well I don't know about the prices where you live, but here in China it seems like I can find that for around 50 USD for one square meter in 10mm thickness.
That's not cheap but it's not completely insane, I'll probably need half of that.

[Dui, ni shuo de dui]

Hello everyone who follows my build!

This week a bit of progress on the bracket attachments for my battery box. I 3D printed all the 4 brackets, two of them on the top of the box and the two other ones on the bottom.

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I had to take out the battery again, so here is a picture of how it looks like for those who are interested. I took this opportunity to better protect the BMS wires, using some nylon sleeves.

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I reinforced one of the top brackets with some layers of carbon fiber. It's pretty strong now and I think it looks nice. I did entirely screw up the other bracket, I stupidly put it under an hallogen light for too long, so the plastic deformed and got all warped. I've already built another one and I'll probably install it this evening. Nothing has been clear coated yet so that's why the finishing looks quite rough, I prefer to have the whole thing completed before doing all the finishing work, because there's a good chance it'll be scratched while working on the other stuff:

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Bike now looks like that, not much changed but it's getting cleaner:

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I've ordered the aerogel and hopefully I should receive it before this weekend. Now the next step will be to start working on the lid to close the box, I'm still not sure yet how I will make it, that won't be as easy as it looks.

[Dui, ni shuo de dui]

A bit more work those past couple of days:

Made the second top bracket. It's a 3D printed part reinforced with several layers of fiber. Took a bit of time to sand smooth but it came pretty nice in the end:

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Also, I couldn't resist to try and see how the bike would look like with the clear coat, this will be temporary as I'll redo that properly once the build will be finished sice I was obviously unable to reach a few spots, but I wanted to have an idea of how it would look like. So I started by masking everything:

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Then put two layers of clear coat:

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And after it dried, here is how it looked like:

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I'm extremely happy of the result, I've spent a whole lot of time sanding the box very smooth to begin with and it seems like it really paid off.
Now I'll move to the next step: making the lid to finally close the box. I still don't know how I'll make it, I need it to be watertight, easy to manufacture and still look good. So far I haven't found any way that fully satisfies me so I guess I'll just have to start making it and figure it out along the way.

[SlowCo]

Beautiful work

Good luck and enjoy building. I'll be following your progress.

[Dui, ni shuo de dui]

Beautiful work

Good luck and enjoy building. I'll be following your progress.

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated!