Currie Kick Scooter conversion

[ElectricGod]

Pictures to come later. I've cut a "D" shaped hole in the bottom of the battery box and made an aluminum plate that fits over it and seals with foam weather stripping. The pan head screws stick out a little, but the plate is almost exactly flush with the trim around the bottom of the box. I'll get some stainless counter sunk screws later to make it all sit flush. There are 6 threaded brass inserts in the plywood for closing up the access panel. I am now able to arrange everything inside the front section and get it into the space that's there. I discovered a small wiring mistake in the process. My main switch that turns on the controller and electronics draws batt+ through the motor controller rather than straight off of batt+. The problem is that the wire going to the controller and the connector that it is soldered to was not designed to handle more than an amp or so. with all the lights on and the horn, I'm pulling 4-8 amps. That wire won't hold up for long! It's a minor fix which I'll get to this week. I have a deans connector for the peripheral stuff that comes off the battery feeder lines that I will add a wire to that goes to the main switch. I'll just connect to this to fix the problem. Everything was working, so I didn't detect my mistake before now. It was only because I had removed the battery box and partly disconnected things that it became apparent. Despite my efforts to push everything into the front section, the Graphene pack and a Multistar green pack just wont fit in the length that exists. I need maybe another 1/2" to make it fit. I have an idea that may work. There's a 1x3/4x6" piece of pine just under the lid hinge for reinforcement. I may be able to remove it and make a much thinner version out of hardwood such as maple. This would allow the graphene pack to slide forward about an inch and give me the space to fit the Multistar pack in the bay. Otherwise, I have lots of older LIPO cells from my first battery build for the blue scooter that are just sitting around. Over the weekend I put together a 16S pack made out of them. It fits in the space easily, but they have limited capacity and life unlike the brand new Multistar batteries.

This is the access port in the bottom of the battery bay.

[ElectricGod]

I decided I would leave the new tires I just bought on the old spoke wheels and bought another set of them. LOL...those tires have zero miles on them. They were a huge hassle getting them on the rims and then I cut the tube twice on one wheel. It just seemed better to not bother pulling them off the old wheels and then to put them on the new wheels. cost vs hassle decided this for me. The hassle was huge getting two tires successfully mounted so $40 for a couple of new tires was lots less hassle.

I got the counter sunk 6-32 stainless screws yesterday and the countersinking bit will arrive Saturday or Monday. The bottom plate will be perfectly flush to the bottom of the battery box after that.

I've removed the internal support for the front deck sections. This piece of wood under the deck is now gone. Instead I made a thicker hinge spacer on top of the deck that does the same thing. Those same 6 screw holes are still used, but they go into the deck from the bottom side into the new hinge spacer. The opening in the bottom of the battery box was ideal for getting those screws in. The new hinge spacer is all painted, drilled and ready to get screwed down tomorrow. I will need to add a spacer strip around the bottom of the deck to level it back out. The front of the deck no longer touches the frame rails. The graphene pack is taller so the deck was needing to be raised a little anyway to make room for the battery wires which sit on top of the packs. The graphene pack can now slide under the front deck section by about 1". This will give me sufficient room to get the green pack in behind it. I needed about 1/2" and got about 1.25" so both packs fit with a little extra room. My intention was to make the two packs fit together and have their BMS lumps fill in the space where the other pack was flatter. Now I can do this. I've run into a minor inconvenience. The graphene pack is a perfect fit between the frame rails, but that means it is an uber tight fit inside the battery box for the battery and control wires to fit in that same width. I'll need to carve out a 1/4" deep channel in the wall of the wood box so the wires can fit in the channel. The devil is in the details to be sure!



The new wheels and sealed ceramic bearings are now in the USA. They will probably arrive middle of next week along with the new tires. One of the things I didn't like about the spoke wheels is the rotor on the front wheel is essentially glued on. I used a freewheel threaded to 6 bolt adapter and JB welded it to the hub. I've braked really hard multiple times and the JB weld shows no evidence of breaking, but lets face it, it will give out right when a car darts out in front of me. You can't really see it, but the adapter is held on by JB weld under it and inside of it's threads and on the wheel hub. It's not exactly my favorite way of doing things! Another issue is that despite the spokes being super tight, the walls on the hub where the spokes go through and so the hub twists a little when the brakes are applied. I expect that eventually the spokes will start breaking from the twisting motion. It makes the brakes feel spongy and kind of weird. The new wheels wont have any of these issues. Never mind eliminating the crappy cup bearings on the spoke wheels.



These wheels will thread the rotor adapter on directly and take sealed bearings. MUCH better! I think the rotor will be a little closer to the wheel too which means the less than 1/8" gap between the rotor and forks will be more like 3/8". It's never rubbed so far, but it sure gets close.

[ElectricGod]

A little work done today...

This is three 20 amp, 24 volt power supplies tied together in series. The outputs are isolated from the AC input so this works quite well. Each power supply is set to about 22 volts. The maximum charged voltage at 4.1 volts per cell at 16S is 65.6 volts which is what the output of the 3 power supplies is set to. The long bank of resistors is for current limiting. Since the power supplies can't deliver more than 20 amps, the resistors are there to keep the current loading to a manageable level. I've built several chargers this way. It works pretty well. When current draw drops low enough, I flip the rocker switch which shorts out the resistor bank and allows the power supply to deliver maximum current directly to the batteries. i need to get some more resistors. The resistance is still too high so it is limiting current to well below 20 amps and I want to be much closer than I am now. I used 100 ohm resistors and should have used something like 25 ohm ones instead. With more resistors, they heat up a lot less. The watt meter is limited to 20 amps so it's a good fit for this charger. I found the watt meter on ebay for $11.




The bottom access panel is complete and in place.



This is the notch for tucking in the wires.

[ElectricGod]

A bit more work done...

The battery box is back on the scooter again and the two packs are in the battery bay. My channel in the wall did the trick and all the wires fit in it nicely. The Graphene pack fit a little better and deeper in turned this direction rather than nestling the two packs together. It's all a perfect fit.

[ElectricGod]

My new wheels arrived! I think I'll paint them. I'll leave the rim alone and paint the spokes. They're already accented black so maybe do the rest of the spokes in black. I'm repainting them for a couple of reasons. You have to love the Chinese. They rarely do a finished job on things. The machining is fine and the wheels spin true, but they didn't bother to grind or file off the flashing at the joint of their casting. At the middle of everything are jagged edges from the casting overflow. GRRR! They will get filed off and then I'll need to repaint all the black parts. The wheels otherwise look pretty good. I bought ceramic bearings so the ones from the factory will get popped out and replaced. Tires haven't arrived yet...hopefully in the next day or so.

[ElectricGod]

A little work done last night. I filed off the rough edges on these wheels. Then I masked off the new wheels and spray painted them. They are much cleaner now. I'll post some pics tonight. The spokes are black, but the hub and rim are still chrome.

[Ianhill]

A little work done last night. I filed off the rough edges on these wheels. Then I masked off the new wheels and spray painted them. They are much cleaner now. I'll post some pics tonight. The spokes are black, but the hub and rim are still chrome.

Nice look that's what I'm going for on the A2B chrome outer with black spokes and hubs.
I'll have a read through your charger update see how you have been getting along.

[ElectricGod]

About a year ago, I built one made with 4 Meanwell 24 volt, 30 amp PSU's. It outputs 82 volts right now, but can go as high as 96 volts. I had to run a dedicated power circuit for it. 30 amps is 2X higher than typical household wiring and breakers in the USA. I couldn't run it at close to full power because I was always popping the breaker. This charger cost a good bit more due to the expensive PSU's used, but it does a great job charging my blue scooter and will do a great job on the moped too when I get back to completing that. The current limiting resistors on it are 100 watt, 3 ohms. They get quite hot! Enough to make you really regret touching them. If I did the current limiters again, I would go with 10 ohm 100 watt and parallel more of them for better current and heat dissipation. I think I have 10 resistors in parallel or .3 ohms.


Here's a rough schematic of how it is wired up. All the PSU's are identical isolated output units. If you can't get enough voltage from 3 PSU's, then run 4 or more in series until you get the voltage you need. Adjustable output PSU's almost always are rated for some voltage, but they will adjust up or down by quite a lot. These are 24 volts each, but they will go down to about 19 volts and up to 30 volts. This charger was built from $25 PSU's. Including the watt meter and resistors, I have less than $100 in a 20 amp charger. I have 19 100 ohm resistors in parallel or 5.26 ohms. I really need about 2 ohms total. More resistors are on the way. The problem with calculating this out is that the batteries and BMS's have resistance and I can't really measure that since I don't have a battery meter that can handle 16S to tell me the IR. I can calculate based on the current and voltage or 66/20 = 3.3 ohms. This isn't really what I need however as that will probably get me about 10 amps charge current at most. As a result, I have to add resistor banks in parallel until I get close to 20 amps. At 100 ohms, that will be probably 3 of these resistor banks.

Notes:
*****USE isolated output PSU's ONLY!!!****
1. The power supplies in series add their voltages together. That means 22v+22v+22v=66v.
2. Current is NOT additive. These are 20 amp PSU's in series. Current is still 20 amps max.
3. If you parallel the outputs, you get the additive current of all the PSU's in parallel. If you run them in series, you get the additive voltage of all the PSU's.
4. In my schematic I show a limited number of resistors. If you use lower resistance for each one, then you need fewer resistors, BUT you also need higher wattage resistors. More higher resistance resistors in parallel means the total amount of current they each needs to dissipate is less. That means each resistor gets less hot.

[ElectricGod]

The wheels are repainted. I taped them up last night and painted them. Tonight I pulled all the tape off. They look pretty nice.

[ElectricGod]

The tires and tubes arrived today...looking good!

[Ianhill]

Looking sweet, Come along way from stock is there anything left other than the frame that's been modified and handle bars, everything else is new ?

[ElectricGod]

Looking sweet, Come along way from stock is there anything left other than the frame that's been modified and handle bars, everything else is new ?

Yeah pretty much all this has been replaced.
forks
battery box
wheels, not installed yet
motor
electrical
brakes
controller
deck
switches
batteries

It's the frame and handlebars that are original.

Estimate of what I've spent...
original scooter...$90
batteries...$500
motor...$300
controller $150
forks...$60
wheels...$80
tires...$40
various meters...$40
connectors and wiring...$40
screws and misc materials...$40
Total...$1340...more than I thought, but that's been happening over 8 months time too.

[ElectricGod]

The battery box is done, the packs are in place, all wiring and modules are stuffed into the front area and then I stripped out the threads in one of the screw holes that hold the battery box in place. GRRR! Now I have to pull it all back out, remove the battery box and retap all the holes for a larger screw size. They were M5...now going to M6. GAH! Oh well, I have the long screws needed and the tap. It's not the end of the world, but still a pain. I want to get this thing closed up so I can ride it again. Delays...

[ElectricGod]

Well that wasn't too painful. It took just a few minutes to unscrew the battery box and then a few minutes to make the holes 6mm across and a few minutes more to retap the holes for M6. The new screws are counter sunk so they are almost flush with the bottom of the box now. The button head screws I was using before stuck out a good bit. I put a little calk under the head of each screw to seal them up, just in case water might penetrate under the screw heads.




What happens when stupidity happens and you get careless. 50 amps at 65 volts will destroy a connector! I should have disconnected one connector at a time and then taped it over first. Stupid me...I pulled both out at the same time and they accidentally touched.

[ElectricGod]

This isn't directly related to the Currie, but I had to do the same thing to the C80100 on the Currie.


I did this over the weekend on my 12090. Some time ago, I took it apart to add halls and wasn't going to put it back together until I had the shaft reinforced. I finally got around to it.

So the first step was to make a block that would bolt to the bell. The bell has these 6 screws through it that the prop adapter bolts to. I reused them to mount the block to the bell.




The reinforcement block has 6 threaded holes around it's flat face that mate to those 6 bolt holes in the bell. It also has 6 threaded holes around the outside diameter for mating to the shaft.





I neglected to take pictures of the shaft, but it has shallow holes around its end at the same positions as the 6 holes around the perimeter of the block. Set screws thread into the block and seat in the shallow holes in the shaft. One hole goes all the way through the shaft and 2 set screws touch in the middle of the shaft. Also the bell has 2 set screws that protrude into the shaft as well. Hopefully that many cross connect points will be enough to reliably transfer 18kw of power to the shaft. Now that it's all assembled, I'll cut off the extra length of the set screws so that they don't protrude beyond the block.




Now my shaft extends out the bottom of the motor so that I can eventually run a sprocket off of it. I'm not going to bother adapting the shaft yet until I'm much closer to mounting it on something. The motor is ready to go for power. This is essentially the same thing that I did for my C80100.