Today's ride...uneventful on the way to work, but after that....
Uh, near-disaster today. While I was cashiering, someone knocked the bike over trying to move it in the warehouse (where I have to park it) to get access to stuff I had to block with it (as we had a load in there and there was nowhere else to put it). Somehow they broke the brake-handle end of the cable off, the little cast-metal thingy that lets the handle pull on the cable.
So I would have had no brakes for the way home. That would be bad.
While I was at my half-hour lunch, I reconfigured for 48V, since 60V is pointless with no brakes. I also rewired the horn button (the only usable momentary control I have on the bars) to engage the ebrake line on the generic 12FET controller, in the hopes that it would have regen, but it doesn't. It just turns off the controller when pressed.
I tried connecting the mysterious pair of wires on it, and that doesnt' change it's behavior, and it also doesn't limit speed, so I have no idea what that wire loop is for. :?
Anyway, having failed at that attempt to give me *some* braking,
I spent about 45 minutes after work tying a knot in the handle-end of the cable in order to "replace" the cast-bit-of-metal that normally allows the handle to pull it. After about a bajillion steel porcupine quills thru my fingertips (which are all throbbing right now, almost three hours later), I managed to get a double knot in it big enough that it CAN'T be pulled back thru that little hole.
Can't see the knot very well in this pic, but it's the best angle I could get:
Woulda used a washer down-cable from the knot, but I didn't have one small enough to fit in the handle that could be taken off of anything on the bike (or in my toolbag).
I squeezed it as hard as I could, until I could hear the brake pads squeegeeing against the rim, and it didn't move or compress anymore, and it held the wheel pretty solid, as much so as before this happened.
I was just lucky that I had an extra three inches of cable (at the brake end) that I had never trimmed off, or I could not have done this.
Another wierd thing is that the CA, which had been fine on the to-work trip, suddenly had weird readings for everything. It's not powered on unless the breaker is flipped *and* the andersons for it's shunt reconnected (which I leave unplugged whenever I leave the bike unattended), so it makes no sense that it would change anything from falling over. Maybe it happened at power up when I was doing the testing? Or at power down after I arrived at work?
Anyway, it corrupted the total Ah and total miles, to the tune of several tens of thousands. :lol: The per-trip stuff for everything, including voltage and whatnot, were also corrupted, in similar ways. So all the data from the trip home-to-work is gone today. All the settings were still correct, so it's not some global eeprom trashing.
So the readings for my trip home, generally at 15MPH or less (just in case the brake cable *did* fail, after having worked fine in the empty parking lot for some hard braking from up to 17MPH)
14m 34s trip time
2.86miles
17.1mph max
11.7mph avg
17.4Wh/mile
1.050Ah
49.9Wh
44.76Amax
52.3Vstart
51.1Vrest
41.3Vmin
Mostly uneventful, though going so much slower than usual (often only about 10MPH, and coasting to a stop from a long way away whenever possible rather than depending on braking at the last moment) didn't make me any friends with the few cars passing me.
IT's all recharging right now, reconfigured back to 60V. I gotta dig thru my stuff and find those long brake cables AussieJester sent me, and replace this one (but I'll keep this or another one in the pod on the bike just in case of a future problem).
I guess this is just one more warning to me to get the danged rear brake installed, and get a regen-capable controller going on this thing.
Oh, FWIW, the frayed look of the end of the cable where it had been inside the little cast metal bit gives me the impression that it may have been failing for a while, and whatever stress was placed on it was just the last straw. For all I know, it would have failed on my way home tonite, trying to brake from 20MPH just behind the cars at the left turn from Peoria to 31st.
THAT would've SUCKED.
BTW, pic of the charging setup as it is now:
And a pic of the horn (currently disconnected from my experiment above):

Also, another dollar find at Goodwill from Saturday, which appears to work fine so far, as tested on a few of my SLA (in various states):
