not a happy mac motor - help needed

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Apr 30, 2011
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410
Location
Bradford, UK
wired up this mac motor just like my other working mac motor and this happened....

[youtube]vFFoBOqNNQo[/youtube]

The motor is brand new and is wired up to a Lyen 12fet with the same wires / colour combos as my other mac 8T which is of the earlier, none disc design.

I tried going out for a ride and it just wasn't having any of it unless I got above 5mph then the motor started to work a bit smoother, but pulling almost 2KW (CA limit) whilst giving out rubbish performance, phase bullet connectors getting notably warm so something electrical is a miss.

anyone seen this before and can identify whats causing it ?
 
It's always possible that either the controller or more likely the motor has a pair of wires that is not soldered in the same color order on the inside that the working motor/controller does.


Alternately, a poor connection on a hall wire can cause stuff like that sometimes.
 
Halls, wrong phase, or wrong timing degree ( should always be set to 'compatible' )..
Isn't your other MAC motor an old puma? it may actually be different.

A motor with an incorrect hall/phase connection will more than often spin up just fine at no load, then do something entirely different with a load.

You've gone through all the phase / hall combinations by now?
 
Well I do not own a mac motor yet but yours looks to have some internal slippage.
Maybe a shot one way clutch or the outer ring gear is slipping in the case???
 
I believe the clutch tends to fail permanently connected.
 
Neptronix, thanks for replying, I was really hoping you would weigh in on this one, my other 8T i copied the wiring from is indeed an old Puma motor which even has a different sized axle entirely so It's not far fetched to imagine the phases might be in a different order, next time I will have to work on it will be Tuesday, I'll swap the blue and yellow phase and halls around, when I tried swapping the phase on the puma motor I knew it was wrong because I got a loud buzzing noise as it tried to eat itself. I'm guessing that was caused my a mismatch between hall and phase, swapping the two over might make a difference in this case. You said it was most likely to be a blue/yellow reversal didn't you?
 
I can confirm that when the clutch fails, it results in the motor not being able to freewheel, that isn't the case here. It looks more like an electrical issue, but that doesnt explain how the motor *appears* to be spinning free inside the casing, unless!!!!!! it was spinning backwards due to a phase reversal....
 
yup... blue / yellow reversal.. make sure you swap the halls as well.

All my cellman controllers ( i own 4 of them total now ) have heatshrink indicating to the user that the yellow is the blue, and the blue is the yellow. I suppose that is easier than resoldering the wires on the infineon controller.. :lol:

Coincidentally, all 4 controllers have been plug and play with the MAC, MXUS/9C DD, MXUS geared, and Magic pie.
I have never had to play phase wire 'magical chairs', so if that doesn't work, i don't know what to tell you.. other than.. get the lyen ebike tester :(
 
What is the current draw when you lift the rear wheel and run the motor?

There is a mechanical problem inside that motor case.
Motor runs and the wheel will not rotate = mechanical problem.
Maybe the clutch assembly is loose on the shaft.....
 
swapped blue and yellow phase and hall and wahey, we are off!!!! that's more like it, smooth and quiet, a LOT quieter than my other mac motor, or more likely, frame. The schwinn has a really fat tubular frame, most of the sound seems to come out of the front so I think the resonance is transmitted through the frame acting like a big pipe organ. Anyway, I'm off topic.


The bike is now behaving itself (almost) when under load the motor will cut out and come back on 2 or 3 times a second, at first I thought it was the CA current limiting kicking in but I unplugged it and it still does the same. If you accelerate really slowly it doesn't but give it a sharp load and the motor ju-ju-ju-judders, it also seems to be using a lot of amps for the performance it's putting out. The wheel freewheels just fine and there is very little rolling resistance on those slick tires, no brake drag, and yet it's pulling 1.8kw and behaving more like a 1kw bike... possibly cause?
 
Thought so.
OK, now are you using a speed limit switch? is the juddering just at higher speeds, IE near the max loaded speed?

Pretty much the only controller i know of that controls these well is cell_man's units.. and maybe a newer Lyen controller might do the job too ( sans jitters ), but not as well ( throttle acts basically like an on-off switch ).
 
The juddering only happens at high load, regardless of speed, worse at takeoff due to naturally higher loading. No speed switch, doesn't even have a plug for one. Throttle is an eBikes.ca one I changed the plug on to fit the lyen. The speed limit on the CA is 99mph. This is a strange bug indeed, once its off and running there is no judder, it's like it's stalling or overloading and cutting out then trying again, several times a second. hmmm. Not hitting LVC either or anything.
 
Sounds exactly how biohazardman's BMC performs with a lyen controller, also a 12FET i think.
These motors are odd due to their super high RPM versus DD hubs, and low resistance.

Can't be helped, unfortunately.
 
so why does my puma motor, which is almost identical, behave perfectly with the lyen 12fet?!
 
Good question.

People seem to have very mixed results. Some people say that the lyen controllers are awful with BMC/MAC.
Some say that they have no problems other than a twitchy throttle.

I had the juddering effect with a lyen controller on my 8T.
 
You have got the timing advanced, check to see what no load amps the motor is pulling, should be no more than 3A or so, I would bet its pulling a lot more, you have advanced it, it will run faster but pull a lot more current, I have been messing with these motors for a long time, the growling in your vid isnt mechanical you had the phases round the wrong way.

When you have problems like this dont hammer the motor when testing, stop immediately if its not right, you can damage the motor and or controller if you dont, any motor hall combo testing is best done using a current limiting power supply, if you havent got one fit a fast blow fuse 5A semiconductor type.

I have also seen this problem when hall effect sensors are playing up too, when the one way bearing goes they will also make that grinding noise, the sun gear spinning will also do it as well.

Play around with the hall phase combos until you get the no load amps to about 3A and the direction right and you should be good to go, the best controller to use on the BMC or MAC is the old type analogue xlyte controllers, the newer digital ones will not work well with the BMC/MACS, Jozzer had a box load of digital ones and none of them worked with them.

Check this thread I recently helped a fella diagnose a similar problem

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=38094

Anyway good luck
 
Looks, and sounds to me like the one-way clutch is spinning inside the hub. However i do not own one of these motors, good luck with your testing.
 
As I say earlier in the thread, I've swapped the phase and hall combo which now results in a smooth running motor, I havn't checked the no load amps but it might still be too high. Under no load it behaves perfectly but under load it does that constant cutting out thing 2 or 3 times a second. The same controller, with the same wiring combo used on a puma motor works just fine, albeit with a twitchy throttle, but no juddering. How do you tweak the timing on the controllers?

What it sort of feels like is the controller exceeding its maximum load like stalling and cutting out, then trying again, over and over again. If it's still eating amps with low performance could it still be incorrect phase / halls combo even though the motor appears to be running perfectly under no load?
 
I have the same problem, my mac wants to go stupid fast but cuts out after 1 to 1.5 secs and you have to blip the throttle to get it to go again.

Its probably the phase and hall wires, will look at it tonit. I don't have the controller cable to program the controller....maybe it's not too hard to wire up.

Amazing motors though.
 
Spacey seems like your problem is different, when I had the phase wires wrong it wanted to spin WAY faster but was pulling way too many amps and had no power. now I have the phase wires "correct" the motor is smooth and spinning in the right direction but still having the juddering problem, perhaps it could still be incorrect phase I don't know... I'll get there one day...
 
Another interesting observation for all mac fans out there... noise

The 8T mac was notably quieter than the 10T mac on my commuter, and then it dawned on me, it's not the motor that's noisy, it's the frame...

On my commuter the downtube is a really thick tubular round aluminium pipe, and it's where most of the sound is coming out from, the vibration from the gears is resonating through the frame and making the whole frame hum and whirr, the Kona frame the 8T mac is on is much more mountain bike like and the sound seems to only come out of the hub as a quiet whirr rather than turning the frame into a giant pipe organ.

Just a funny little observation...
 
I was about to post a problem with my ezee motor and a Lyen controller, that appears to be the same thing. Before I swapped the blue/yellow hall and phase wires, the motor would spin freely under load and then stutter under a load. After switching, the motor spins inside of the case whether there's a load on the tire or not. At first I thought the clutch went bad. Is it possible that the hall/phase wires are still off? I'd hate for it to be a bad clutch, as the motor was running solid before I switched from an ezee controller to a Lyen controller. Now, when I matched the hall/phase wires to what the ezee controller said they should be, the motor just free spins inside the hub and never engages the wheel, load or not. Could this be the same kind of thing?
 
what you've got there, is a motor working in reverse, think about the way the clutch works, the motor is just spinning backwards which it can do freely, nothing wrong with your clutch. Keep trying phase combos, for me it was blue and yellow reversed but now im left with the juddering under load. I'll drop Lyen a line and see if he can shed any light.
 
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