Oatnet goes Vectrix!

oatnet said:
Just the strangest thing...

So this guy Steve Lam posts on visforvoltage\vectrix, that he is selling a Vectrix 30 miles away from me.

It isn't running, it's been dropped and scraped down the side (these bikes need service after being on their side), so it is a parts bike and he is offering it for $1,500. It would be a pain to store it, but its a reasonable price for a parts bike, so I email him. He replies that he'll send me a picture of the damage, but never does.

I forgot about it until I came across the email a week later, so I emailed him again, saying I figure he sold it since I didn't get a picture. He replies that he lost his phone, sends me pictures, and it looks pretty bad, but $1,500 is still an OK price for a parts bike. I tell him I'll take it at his asking price, and lay out some proposals for flat-bedding the dead bike to complete the exchange.

He writes back that "$1,500 is way too low of an offer" and if it doesn't sell, then he'll advertise it on a Vectrix forum where they appreciate the value of a parts bike (which is where I saw it in the first place).

Huh? Offer? I gave him his ask out of the gate! Now he wants a price that is only $200 less than I paid the Dealer for my Brand-New Vectrix.

I forward him his $1,500 post I responded to, and he says "Pointed JD. I will move on to other buyers."

Truly, Fully Bizzare. Sometimes, when you walk away from a deal, you realize that maybe you just dodged a bullet...

-JD
Click to expand...

There is a large city in Canada which I will not name, with a large ethnic population that are impossible to deal with. Their method of doing business is to advertise a part for sale and when you agree to the price, you will find it "has been sold." I was trying to help an Auzie purchase a hood (bonnet) for his Jag and by the time I got my son to go and see the hood, the price had gone up 3 times. When I expressed the frustration to my son, he told me of his experience trying to rent an apartment in this city. They never tell you the unit number and every time you agree to a price, it is rented, but they have one which is $200 more, but there is someone looking at it today, you will have to call tomorrow. When you call tomorrow, the price goes up again. He finally had to rent through an agency, which worked out well.
They have another scam with sealed bid auctions of corporate vehicles. 6 guys put in bids, each one $100 more than the other. When the auction closes and they call the phone number of the winner, the wife answers and says the guy is away for a week. The auctioneer then calls the next lowest bidder, and if it is one of the 6 he gets the same answer as there are 6 cell phones sitting on the same table. When the cell phones quit ringing because another bidder is in the middle of the bids, they quickly call back the auctioneer and accept the price. When I was told how this scam works, I made a deal with the auctioneer that I would take every vehicle I bid on, at my bid price, if they wanted it. First auction, I got a little surprise, 8 vehicles, cost me a little over $20K, total. The auctioneer made one call on each vehicle and when he got the "away for a week", it became mine. 8 full size 4 X 4 250-350 trucks under 5 years old.
It takes all kinds to make the world go round. :mrgreen:
 
oatnet said:
heathyoung said:
I'm in the process of building one up at the moment as well, getting parts for these is ... interesting.
Click to expand...

What parts are you looking for?

My V's battery is showing its age. It still does my commute fine, but I am seeing higher temps on my pack, which means a cell low/dead/reversed and is heating up, which means it is gonna mess up the cells around it and do the same to them. Normally my bike would sit at 24-26c, and heat up to 28-29c during the ride. Now it heats up to 30-31 (where the cooling system really kicks in), and while pre-charge cooling gets it under 30, after sitting in the cool garage all night it actually heats up a few degrees instead of dropping to 26-24c.

So I'm going to replace the pack. I wrote down the size of the battery enclosure when I did the fuse change, but I lost those numbers. My conservative measurements made me think I could not fit a headway pack in there, so I had been considering a123's.

However, on visforvoltage, I recently read a post that said "the case is 225mm wide rather than 230. The frame is just shy of 230. You do have a tad more lenght, i.e. 710mm and you could get by with 340mm in high". So, 225mm x 340mm x 710mm = 8.86" x 13.39" x 27.95".If those numbers are accurate, I actually can fit a 45a5p Headway 38120s pack into that space. The plan is to move the 8kw Headway pack from my VW bus conversion into the vectrix, and I'll store the vectrix pack in the VW Bus, which only gets moved for street cleaning anyhow. This way the upgrade is free!

My biggest concern was the length of the box - but it looks like 5 headway cells, end-to-end, is @27", so I have just enough room to spare. 5 row of these cells in parallel is 7.5", so I have 1.5" across the width to spare. Unfortunately, I only have space to stack (8) of the 5s5p layers, yielding 40s, instead of the 45s I want. However, if I use the 3-hole Headway blocks instead of the 2-hole, I make the pack wider (it should just barely fit) but I can easily fit 9 rows in the height.

The Vectrix controller will handle 155v, and the charger goes up to 152v. 45s cells @3.65v nominal =164.25v, so some folks might be seeing a problem. However, 155/45=3.44v/cell, and headways quickly drop to a resting voltage of @3.4v after the charge, so when I charge/balance externally it will drop back into the 155v range, or maybe I'll string up a discharge circuit to bleed off some of the fluff. Most of the time I'll use the onboard charger, which should charge to 152v/3.38v/cell. I am expecting an average 2c discharge, @3.1v/cell, or 139.5v under load. That is higher than the starting voltage of the saggy NiMh pack, which translates to a more energetic bike.

I'll re-use the copper paralleling strips/fuses from the Bus conversion. I'm about to order blocks/connecting bars from headway, just wanna feel comfortable about the size of the pack. I need to make a temperature-sensor harness so I don't have to strip the one from the old pack. Then, maybe on my next vacation, I'll tear the old pack down, re-build it, pull the pack from the V and put it in the bus, then install the new pack into the V. That will be a tough week, but worth it to double the effective capacity of the pack, and lighten it by 16% (31.25lbs)

Hey, if the battery tub is empty on your bike, can you measure the usable length for me, maybe shoot a few pics of the empty tub?

-JD
Click to expand...

By all means, its completly empty at the moment, waiting for some batteries, I was thinking of going the road less travelled with headways (on the V, they are all using thundersky batteries, while cheap, are pretty uninspiring in terms of C rate). I was thinking the 16A versions, probably 42S2P, its only a commuter bike so less weight is a good thing.

The charger at the moment I have id dead, I've been reverse engineering it to remove all of the stupid canbus communication stuff, and have discovered that the design is absolutely abyssmal.

How bad you ask? Well, the high side power supply for the chips is generated by an amplified zener shunt. So what you say... Well, there is a 50W (yes, really) 3.3K resistor bolted to the case for heatsinking purposes. Not a bootstrap supply in sight. The boards say Vectrix 1Kw5 carger - yes, carger, not charger.

It gets better. The 12V supply (named bias supply - runs the fans) is actually another SMPS, that takes the rectified mains from across the caps and runs off that. Urk.

There is another amplified zener shunt that is used temporarily to power the unit until the main (ugly 50W LINEAR monstrosity) comes on line. Get a brownout or surge, the main one never comes up, so the little one tries to dissipate 48W of heat through a 3W resistor. Not nice - this is how mine died.

I have figured out how to adjust the output voltage, and current limiting on these as well now.

Don't get me started on the MC card either - the original burnt the PCB to a crisp on the B and C terminals, I had to cut out a lot of PCB material to get this resolved. The IGBT has some seriously burnt plastic, but amazingly, seems OK. I need to figure out how to attach wires to it now though :eek:\
 
By all means, its completly empty at the moment, waiting for some batteries, I was thinking of going the road less travelled with headways (on the V, they are all using thundersky batteries, while cheap, are pretty uninspiring in terms of C rate). I was thinking the 16A versions, probably 42S2P, its only a commuter bike so less weight is a good thing.
Click to expand...

I considered doing 2p42s of the a123, cutting 115lb out if the 200lb pack, until I found out that too light could be bad. The hub motor and gear box represent a significant sprung mass which is offset by the weight of the bike. Going too light in the pack could impact ridability. I realized i can make the bike peppier just by increasing the voltage to 45s - and i don't want to ever have range anxiety again, so I am happy to fill it up. I could fit at least 80ah, maybe 100ah, of the a123 prisimatics in there - that would be 15kw.

Tsky is 3c continious, so the 16ah cells would be good for only 48a, on an emoto that needed to be upgraded from 125a fuses to 200a fuses. I even think the 40ah/120a cells they are using on V are at risk (especially with reverse-throttle Regen currents), but that is all that will fit. Another vendor on V is promoting 50ah/5c cells that will fit, I considered getting a sample to test. The Headways are "free" so once I saw how they could fit, done deal. 8)

Thanks for documenting the empty battery box for me, I look forward to it!

-JD
 
I'm a little confused on the TS discharge rating? Many suppliers rate them only 2C yet the published curve shows 5C;

And then I see you mention 3C. Is it a matter of real 3C vs BS 5C and conservative 2C?
I have 20 X 40Ah TS cells and my controller limits the max power to 100A. The BMS manufacturer also said it must be minimum 100A. So 2.5C for safe, no smoke operation?
Thanks;
 
Gordo said:
I'm a little confused on the TS discharge rating? Many suppliers rate them only 2C yet the published curve shows 5C

And then I see you mention 3C. Is it a matter of real 3C vs BS 5C and conservative 2C?
I have 20 X 40Ah TS cells and my controller limits the max power to 100A. The BMS manufacturer also said it must be minimum 100A. So 2.5C for safe, no smoke operation?
Thanks;
Click to expand...

First time I saw T-sky, they were 2c; last time I played with T-Sky, they were billed as 3c cells but had similar voltage drop. It is hard to tell with T-Sky, because there is a lot of variation from cell to cell. They are wierd cells, with a 4.2v peak charge, which as you can see from the chart expresses a large voltage drop. However, the low c rating works on large-format cells, because if you have an 800ah cell, a 400a load is 0.5c. C rating is not terribly useful on a non-exhibition EV, because by the time if you put in enough AH for 1 hour run-time, you will be running the pack at 1c anyhow. A pack discharged at 5c would be empty in 12 minutes, a very short commute.

The graph you included shows discharge rates which are helpful to show voltage and wh, but they don't describe the impact to cell life. The real key is, at a given c-rate, the #cycles you can get from the cells at 80% DOD, until they degrade to 80% capacity. Maybe the 5c is their burst rate, or maybe they are just making it up, but the curves below make me not want to run it at much more than 1c. Further, be it from avarice or ignorance, a lot of resellers publish bogus data on c-rates, so you never know.

At 5c the 16ah cells would provide 80a; the 40ah cells would supply 200a, which would probably be OK. I haven't put a CA on my V yet to get a feel for how much current it is using.

-JD
 
Hi JD,
oatnet said:
I considered doing 2p42s of the a123, cutting 115lb out if the 200lb pack, until I found out that too light could be bad. The hub motor and gear box represent a significant sprung mass which is offset by the weight of the bike. Going too light in the pack could impact rideability. I realized i can make the bike peppier just by increasing the voltage to 45s - and i don't want to ever have range anxiety again, so I am happy to fill it up. I could fit at least 80ah, maybe 100ah, of the a123 prisimatics in there - that would be 15kw.
-JD
Click to expand...
That might be a good reason not to spend money for lighter batteries but its not a good reason not to use lighter batteries. Very easy to add ballast, and thats probably better as you can tune it to what feels like the ideal weight. 80ah of 45s A123 prismatic's would make an awesome Vectrix!
 
MitchJi said:
That might be a good reason not to spend money for lighter batteries but its not a good reason not to use lighter batteries. Very easy to add ballast, and thats probably better as you can tune it to what feels like the ideal weight. 80ah of 45s A123 prismatic's would make an awesome Vectrix!
Click to expand...

Good idea about ballast...

However, as nice as 100ah of a123 would be, the cells would never see 2c discharge, so I don't need the 25c discharge they are capable of. I wouldn't sneeze at 100ah, but looking at my lifestyle, I don't see myself riding far enough to use that much battery - at least not on a regular basis. Compactness is the reason I would pay the 2x/3x premium for a123 cells, so that I could squeeze 100ah in there. If I didn't need the compactness, or the cell's discharge capability, I'd have trouble coughing up 2x-3x the cost to use a123's, when a cheaper/heavier cell meets the needs, so I can keep the ballast in my wallet instead.

Plus then I'd have to worry about someone stealing the bike with a $12,000 a123 pack. :shock: :oops: :lol:

I guess I might start with a small a123 pack if it was easy to parallel in more cells to get more range later, but that could be a challange with tabbed cells. Don't get me wrong, I love the a123's, but when weighing the design criteria for the upgrade, Headways were good enough - and free!

-JD
 
Antiscab is my new hero. He has developed a Lithium conversion kit for the vectrix that rocks. If I didn't already have cells, and had to buy them, I would use his kit in a heartbeat. However, my headways won't work with his kit... BUT his videos were still really helpful, I ruled out a few gotcha's that would have made things far more difficult. Here is his youtube channel with the vids in order:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CFDD8780E3FBEFD5
 
THANKS OATNET for posting the vectrix lower seat over at VISFORVOLTAGE, I bought one also. :D
 
You are welcome Bluestreak!

I finally got the battery out.

Went to Harbor Freight, bought a $130 electric winch ($95 after sale and 20% off coupon), a load leveler, and a great motorcycle stand (which my wife bought with a 20% coupon.) Went to Home Depot and bought a 1.5" square steel tube. Went to Ace hardware and bought a few m6 nuts/bolts/washers and 2 angle brackets. Wore my steel toes, but all went well and apparently safe. I'd never done a lift like this before so I've been nervous about it, in the end it was anticlimactic. Antiscab's video documentation was incredibly helpful in planning and execting the removal - Thanks!

-JD

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Hey, if you missed the last post, with (10) pictures showing the battery being removed from the bike, and the new headway cells being test-fit, go back to the last page!
A few more pics for good measure:

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b_IMG_6656.jpg
 
Nice...

I'm going the larger (16Ah) cells in 3P44S, just getting the funds together. Its getting filled with lead at the moment as a proof of concept, it definitly fits, but - it weighs a TON. (well, 120Kg, which is excessive).
 
The thing that complains about the battery temperature, voltage blah blah is the (rather crappy) charger.

If you get rid of it, you get no problems, and you have a voltage meter on the dash rather than the inaccurate 'AH' gauge.

I've had mine running all of the lights etc. off a pair of modded 48V meanwells in series (112V).
 
Hi,
heathyoung said:
The thing that complains about the battery temperature, voltage blah blah is the (rather crappy) charger.

If you get rid of it, you get no problems, and you have a voltage meter on the dash rather than the inaccurate 'AH' gauge.
Click to expand...
Or a Cycle Analyst :).
 
Out of interest - any more photos? Love to see the finished thing (and keep dreaming of lithium conversion, some financial setbacks will keep me from achieving this, at this rate anyway) :|
 
We had a lot of fun with this, I hope you do too. :D

-JD

[youtube]UXsPEp0gXqo[/youtube]
 
That is nice build video and music was a nice touch lol how many Ah does your have ?
When you get to ride it let us know the difference in the feel of it before and after.
 
darkshirikens said:
That is nice build video and music was a nice touch lol how many Ah does your have ?
When you get to ride it let us know the difference in the feel of it before and after.
Click to expand...

Thanks darkshirikens and Bluestreak! :D :D :D

The new 7.4kwh LiFePO4 pack is configured 45s5p, 50ah and 164v off the charger, roughly double the capacity of the 3.7kwh NiMh pack the bike came with. I travelled 46.5 aggressive miles on an '80% DOD test ride' that pulled 40ah/5700wh from the pack. Resting voltage only dropped to 144.7v, or 3.21v/cell, so there was enough juice left in the pack to accomodate an out-of-balance condition on future 80%DOD cycles. The range of 46.5 miles would be enough to do my work commute for (3) days (although I keep the battery topped up), or to do 30+ miles of errands after work. 8) Frankly, my old body was exhausted by the 46.5 mile test, so I think I will run out of energy long before the moto does. :oops:

The Vectrix 2.0 pulls low amps (40-50) on launch, increasing with speed to a maximum of about 220 amps. I noted cruising up a steep hill at 50mph only pulled 60a. The Old pack was only 136v after charging, and after a few miles easily sagged under load to <108v to trigger the 'reduced performance' mode. This means the old pack was getting 24kw peaks into the motor, but the new one gets about 32kw into it, 33% more power. 70mph comes up very very fast now. The moto pulls MUCH harder from 30mph to the 72mph speed-limiting cutoff, and it is pulling so strong at cutoff that my helmet bounced off the windscreen the first time it kicked in. :p

I've been riding it for a few weeks now, range anxiety is a thing of the past, and I still haven't gotten used to all the new power, so I am thrilled. With the upgrade, my Vectrix has become exactly the bike I fantisized it was before I bought it. :lol:

-JD
 
YES IT MUST BE NICE WHEN A DREAM COMES TRUE. I hope my vectrix trike project comes true like your battery swap, I hope to get back on it this winter. I spent all spring and summer working on my (1966 IMPALA SS SHOW CAR) and its almost finished (working on this car since 1974). I love my MERIDIAN TRIKES and will continue this ELECTRIC JOURNEY. OATNET we love your work keep it going. BLUESTREAK. :D :D :D :D :D
 
Its interesting how that happens with the LVC mode that drops the power to the MC - I would have loved to have gone headways for my build, but some thundersky cells came up at a price I couldn't refuse - $16 each for the 40AH units...

Looks like 44/45S is a good setup.
 
Thanks Bluestreak, good luck with your Impala, nice car!

Heath, $16 each is a worthy price. I am pretty sure that the T-Sky's are rated at 3c which would be 120a. I have seen the bike pull 220a, so I am curious whether you will get the full cycle life from them. At $16/pop, who cares! :lol: One thing is for sure - there is a good reason the piddly 125a fuse's these were built with kept blowing.

45s is pretty sweet, way more power than I am used to :lol: but I have no idea how it would compare to a gas bike. You've poked around the MC, what do you reckon the max voltage it will handle is?

-JD
 
That is great to have your dreams come true it always a good feeling of accomplishment !!!
oatnet said:
Frankly said:
"
:lol: At least you know you did a good job just don't let a women hear you say that the battery out lasted you Lmao...!

Keep up the good work !
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Wow very nice Oatnet ...good job and impressing improvement i am very happy for you.
can t wait to come back home and watch the video
 
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