Now let's see what y'all came up with.

P1030181 by jimw1960, on Flickr
Gotta love those pouch packs if they fit between your cranks.jimw1960 wrote:I thought I might start a thread so we can show off our innovative methods for housing a battery on an ebike. I'll start with the one I just finished. The blue box on this bike is the battery housing I just finished building out of 63 mil aluminum sheet stock. It mounts to the water bottle cage bolts and is quite sturdy. Inside is a Ping 48v 20Ah and crystalyte controller. Paint job is blue metallic rustoleum rattle-can special with three layers of clearcoat. The black rack trunk used to hold the battery and controller but it was too top heavy and broke a weld on my rack. Now it is completely empty and is used for hauling groceries, loads of mulch for the garden, etc. The bike handles much better with the lower center of gravity.
Now let's see what y'all came up with.
The panel on the side shown is riveted on, but on the other side I used 12 sheet metal screws. Charger connection and key switch are mounted on the panels so, hopefully, I won't need to open it very often. My battery is similar shape to yours, so it is in a similar configuration, but I put some side ribs that keep it from swaying.Vim wrote:Nice work, Jim. How do you open it? Any pics of the inside with everything in it?
Battery plus controller and wires probably add up to 25 lbs. Hit a few hard bumps with 70 psi tires and that 25 lbs right over the wheel becomes a hundred pounds or more for a second. Having the battery lower down and between the wheels alleviates a lot of the stess as it tends to pivot when you hit a bump rather than be forced rapidly upward. The bike handles much much better.broloch wrote:jim, how much weight did you put on the rack to break it?
Have you heard of this happening? I'm confident that it is very secure, four steel bolts into steel mounts can handle the weight. Gravity is doing most of the work to hold things in place and not enough clearance at the top to pull the mounts straight out. The biggest concern would be shear stress if impacted from the side, but if I get hit that hard on the side, I'll have other things to worry about than my battery box. Still, I'll be sure to inspect frequently to make sure things are holding.Zoot Katz wrote: Gotta love those pouch packs if they fit between your cranks.
Did you reconfigure it or did Ping build it to spec?
If the box is attached only at the bottle mounts, that's about 23 lbs more than I'd feel comfortable with them holding.
I strongly suggest adding a few clamps around the top tube to carry the weight. Use the bottle mounts primarily for stabilisation and security.
You have to sort your priorities damn quick while your batt box is sliding down the road and your down tube is collapsing after the mounts rip out.
I hope you don't mind if I borrow this idea for cargo area on my CrazyBike2 semi-recumbent <s>mess</s> bike.www.recumbents.com wrote:I'm building a mount for my 20Ah 48V split ping pack to mount the batteries up by the head tube.
If I am not putting heavy stuff in it, do you think it'll work using aluminum pop rivets? (that's all I have)I'm building it from aluminum strap that is pop riveted together with steel pop rivets.
If I had steel ones, I'd use them, but all I have is a donated HF rivet kit with most of them left in a few different sizes. On some things I've used washers on the rivets to ensure proper expansion/seating. I found a long time back that if you ensure the faces of two things being connected together are fully flush and touching, then use the connecting devices (rivets, bolts, whatever) simply to compress them together, the faces themselves bear all the weight/tension and the connecting devices don't have to do so much work, as long as they *are* fully and evenly tightened to distribute the stress around the whole faces evenly.dnmun wrote:steel pop rivets are better. i never use aluminum rivets myself. make sure you use the proper length so you get good expansion on the outside of the joined layers, and tight seating of the material together. JB Weld and epoxy helps. but you have to assemble fast if you set up with epoxy to supplement the pop rivets, but it is strong as welded then too.