More pics from above:
bike and trailer just beofre leaving at end of day
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bike and trailer just beofre leaving at end of day
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2WD Semi-Recumbent Recycled-Parts Cargo eBike: "CrazyBike2"
- Thread starter amberwolf
- Start date
"Fairing" is now replaced with the coroplast stuff; the sheet plastic by itself was just tearing apart and cracking everywhere it was even slightly folded. Need to use ABS instead of thin styrene if I'm gonna use sheet plastic, but I only did use it cuz it was handy as signage being tossed out at work.
I did still use bits of the signs taped over the coroplast to "hide" the political messages on the coroplast, though. Looks fugly but it's not like *I* care. :lol: But while doing it I did wish that I had a printer I could print out pics of all the dogs, past and present, on plastic sheet instead of paper, with waterproof (or at least resistant) ink, and put *those* on there instead.
View attachment 2
As an aero-fairing it fails miserably, cuz I think it is using *more* power than it did before (though not as much as with the trailer, where it came out to over 40Wh/mile whenever I looked at it last night, even though I was only going about 12-15MPH so as not to jolt Tiny too much). Today, I got around 32Wh/mile, at 17-18MPH cruising, on the way to Landis Cyclery to pick up the spare spokes I accidentally left there last time, and to buy some thick tubes and new thicker tires for the trailer (ringworm, 20", 1.95 was the widest they had; I'd love to have gotten something more like 3" wide but I don't think they'd work on the rims the trailer has).
That was a lot of stops and starts so it might not be unusual; have to see what power usage is on a normal ride to work (Monday when I go back). Tuypically it's mroe like 28-30Wh/mile at most, with 18-20MPH cruising speeds.
I think the next stage of "aero" for the fairing is to make a clear "nosecone" over the "funnel" I presently have for the headlight/turn signals. Then put some wedges in front of and/or behind the big cargo boxes, which are probalby my worst aero losses.
In other news, the frame is MUCH stiffer now, both laterally and up and down, just from adding those four little 1/2" square tubes. I can still feel wiggle from bumps but it feels like it' sonly the cargo pods. Once I can fix up the pod rails, that should go away, too. After I have then "proven" this revision of the design, I can see about building a "new" frame based on it to replace it with.
I also rewired the tail and brake lights so that the MC LED tail/brake unit now operates as it should, with tail always on and brake only engaged during braking. Then because I wanted more taillight area I turned the brakelight bar above it always on, as that still leaves the brake light more than twice as bright as the taillights combined, and doesn't blind anybody.
I did this mostly because I wanted to eliminate the second voltage to the trailer, and use a simple 3-pin connector (or 5 pin if I put turn signals on it) for the trailer brake/tail unit at only 12V. SInce both the MC LED units on trailer and bike work with Ground, Brake+ and Tail+, but my separate brake light was +12V and Brake-, rewiring was necessary to make them work together. So now they do.
Temporarily I am using a "tamiya" 3-pin "throttle" connector off of something (I forget what, probably a dead controller?) as the trailer lighting connector, but at some point I want to change that to an XLR or an old 5-pin AT-style keyboard connector (which is what I used for all my previous trailers on DayGlo Avenger, etc).
.
I did still use bits of the signs taped over the coroplast to "hide" the political messages on the coroplast, though. Looks fugly but it's not like *I* care. :lol: But while doing it I did wish that I had a printer I could print out pics of all the dogs, past and present, on plastic sheet instead of paper, with waterproof (or at least resistant) ink, and put *those* on there instead.
View attachment 2
As an aero-fairing it fails miserably, cuz I think it is using *more* power than it did before (though not as much as with the trailer, where it came out to over 40Wh/mile whenever I looked at it last night, even though I was only going about 12-15MPH so as not to jolt Tiny too much). Today, I got around 32Wh/mile, at 17-18MPH cruising, on the way to Landis Cyclery to pick up the spare spokes I accidentally left there last time, and to buy some thick tubes and new thicker tires for the trailer (ringworm, 20", 1.95 was the widest they had; I'd love to have gotten something more like 3" wide but I don't think they'd work on the rims the trailer has).
That was a lot of stops and starts so it might not be unusual; have to see what power usage is on a normal ride to work (Monday when I go back). Tuypically it's mroe like 28-30Wh/mile at most, with 18-20MPH cruising speeds.
I think the next stage of "aero" for the fairing is to make a clear "nosecone" over the "funnel" I presently have for the headlight/turn signals. Then put some wedges in front of and/or behind the big cargo boxes, which are probalby my worst aero losses.
In other news, the frame is MUCH stiffer now, both laterally and up and down, just from adding those four little 1/2" square tubes. I can still feel wiggle from bumps but it feels like it' sonly the cargo pods. Once I can fix up the pod rails, that should go away, too. After I have then "proven" this revision of the design, I can see about building a "new" frame based on it to replace it with.
I also rewired the tail and brake lights so that the MC LED tail/brake unit now operates as it should, with tail always on and brake only engaged during braking. Then because I wanted more taillight area I turned the brakelight bar above it always on, as that still leaves the brake light more than twice as bright as the taillights combined, and doesn't blind anybody.
I did this mostly because I wanted to eliminate the second voltage to the trailer, and use a simple 3-pin connector (or 5 pin if I put turn signals on it) for the trailer brake/tail unit at only 12V. SInce both the MC LED units on trailer and bike work with Ground, Brake+ and Tail+, but my separate brake light was +12V and Brake-, rewiring was necessary to make them work together. So now they do.
Temporarily I am using a "tamiya" 3-pin "throttle" connector off of something (I forget what, probably a dead controller?) as the trailer lighting connector, but at some point I want to change that to an XLR or an old 5-pin AT-style keyboard connector (which is what I used for all my previous trailers on DayGlo Avenger, etc).
.
Yesterday I took the kennel trailer to work (empty) cuz I needed to get litter for Tiny's indoor doggy potty tray, and wanted to get at least 3 loads of it (90lbs) which I dind't want to carry on the bike itself, as there are already two broken spokes on that rear wheel now. (one more broke last week, I think it was on the way to the house with Tiny to do the repairs, but I'm not sure; I noticed it while there, though).
I'd changed out the tires for the new Maxxis Ringworms, and the thick tubes (Sunlite?) I got with them at Landis Cyclery. (I still feel strange buying new tires/parts for the bike, but really all of you here at ES that donated after the house fire bought them for me...and I appreciate it more than I know how to say). Aired them up to 40PSI; that was very bouncy while empty so I had to take them down to about 20PSI for the trip to work with the empty trailer. Added more drag but at least every bump didn't threaten to tip the trailer over. Aired them back up to 40PSI for the trip home, loaded with about 120lbs of stuff (groceries and litter).
Empty, on the way to work, sticking to around 18-19MPH as much a spossible, it was about 40Wh/mile. I'm sure a great deal of that was the big front hole in the trailer for it's door, catching the wind and making a big parachute out of it.
Full, on the way home, I had to stay down to about 12-15MPH, mostly down at the 12MPH speed, becuase of the weight in the trailer causing it to wiggle up and down and sometimes back and forth, on all the little bumps. I experimented a little with air pressure but found that anything higher than 40PSI seems to make it too bouncy--hard on the wheels and axles, I imagine, when loaded--and anything under 30PSI is too draggy. So I put it back to about 40PSI after a couple miles of experimenting and left it that way for the other 8 miles or so.
Even at the low speeds, it was still 36WH/mile by the time I got back to the apartment, between the load in the trailer and the aero drag of it.
Today I won't have the trailer, so I can see what my Wh/mile is with just the "fairing" changes on the bike. I'm sure it's going to be different than it was with the exposed frame/etc., which was typically 26-30Wh/mile at 18-20MPH cruise, probably 14-15MPH average, over the total 10-mile-one-1-way commute.
One thing for sure--the biek is a LOT stiffer and less wiggly when pulling the heavy loaded trailer, which is something I couldn't really judge well with Tiny in the trailer on the way home after doing those repairs, cuz SHE would wiggle around and make the trailer wiggle lots, which made the bike wiggle aorund, and not easy to tell what wiggles were from what source. :lol:
Normally, before I reinforced that middle frame last week, the bike would twist end-to-end and flex up and down mroe than enough to derail the pedal chain even when I wasn't pedalling, when going over evne little bumps/holes, with the trailer on there cuz the trailer's load would often be pushed onto or off of the hitch tube, which is on the lower left cargo pod rail.
Unfortunately even now it is still enough to cause the chain to derail when going over big bumps or holes if I am pedalling at the time--but if I stop pedalling long enough to clear the bumpy areas it is fine.
What is really wrong of course is that the pedal chainline isn't straight, by any means--it's about as bad as the typical granny gear in front to highest gear (smallest cog) in back, only reversed, for the diagonal displacement. Also, that since I still have the Shimano BioPace ovoid chainrings on there, I can't actually tighten the chain properly cuz it's length "changes" as the cranks rotate. Since i can't actually really pedal much anyway, I'd change over to a standard round chainring if I had any idea where my other ones were, at the stuff still left at the house. All the ones actually on my bikes are this BioPace type, so I can't just swap them off one of them...and all the ones on scrap bikes out in the yard are the older Ashtabula one-piece type, which have a totally differnt BB anyway, so can't be used on here. Maybe on my next "vacation", hopefully next month, I will have time to dig thru my stuff at the house and find the other chainrings and see about that experiment.
I'd put a derailer on there as a chain tensioner, but it makes getting the wheel on and off for any maintenance a HUGE pain, adding about an hour to the process even at "home", and on the side of the road it's worse. That's basically why I took it off in the first place. If I didn't have the cargo pods on there or had more space between them and the wheel it wouldn't be such a big deal, but with the present design there's not much to do about that. If I ever get to put rear suspension on this bike, I can make the rear wheel stick out from *behind* the pods, which will make all the maintenance much easier. Until then....no tensioner/derailer.
Regarding the fairing: now the bike looks less like a homemade disaster of a bicycle, at a glance, especially with the lighting on there, and more like a wierd motorcycle. So I am getting more slow passes by police vehicles, which wasn't unexpected. :lol: But only one has stopped (while I was about to leave work last night, talking to one of my coworkers before I rode off) and asked anything about it. I expect at some point I'll be stopped to ask why I don't have plates or something similar, but it's not really a problem, cuz it's all perfectly legal, and I ride safely by the rules of the road (more than can be said for many of the officers themselves! much less other traffic on the road!), and perhaps it will spread awareness among the officers about what ebikes are (or can be).
Oh, and actually, as for pedalling, I can do better than before, thanks in large part to the joint supplements an ES member sent me after the fire, but not anywhere near good enough to pedal the bike completely on my own without the motor at all. If I start going with the motor up to about 7-8MPH or so, I can actually pedal for about 1/4 mile or so with just tolerable pain, but after that point it is too much and I have to either start using hte mtoro or stop and rest a long while. The bke isn't geared to go any faster than that on pedals only so I don't know if I could sustain any higher speeds, but I expect it'd be for an even shorter distance if I could. I managed the entire 1/2-mile of the bike path on 31st Ave between Camelback and halfway to Bethany once, on a warm but not hot morning, with only a short rest at the halfway point in the path, at just under 8MPH, but that was when we'd had stable weather for a couple weeks. Now it's getting colder/warmer again, and my joints are all suffering from the changes, so it's tough to manage even that 1/4-mile presently, and will likely continue to get worse thru fall and winter like usual.
But it is nice to know that I *can* pedal this thing for short distances at a speed slightly greater than the fall-over speed. If I *had* to, I could eventually get somewhere with it that way, though it would probably take as long as walking there. :lol:
Anyway, mostly positive results from the changes in the bike (and me) so far.
I'd changed out the tires for the new Maxxis Ringworms, and the thick tubes (Sunlite?) I got with them at Landis Cyclery. (I still feel strange buying new tires/parts for the bike, but really all of you here at ES that donated after the house fire bought them for me...and I appreciate it more than I know how to say). Aired them up to 40PSI; that was very bouncy while empty so I had to take them down to about 20PSI for the trip to work with the empty trailer. Added more drag but at least every bump didn't threaten to tip the trailer over. Aired them back up to 40PSI for the trip home, loaded with about 120lbs of stuff (groceries and litter).
Empty, on the way to work, sticking to around 18-19MPH as much a spossible, it was about 40Wh/mile. I'm sure a great deal of that was the big front hole in the trailer for it's door, catching the wind and making a big parachute out of it.
Full, on the way home, I had to stay down to about 12-15MPH, mostly down at the 12MPH speed, becuase of the weight in the trailer causing it to wiggle up and down and sometimes back and forth, on all the little bumps. I experimented a little with air pressure but found that anything higher than 40PSI seems to make it too bouncy--hard on the wheels and axles, I imagine, when loaded--and anything under 30PSI is too draggy. So I put it back to about 40PSI after a couple miles of experimenting and left it that way for the other 8 miles or so.
Even at the low speeds, it was still 36WH/mile by the time I got back to the apartment, between the load in the trailer and the aero drag of it.
Today I won't have the trailer, so I can see what my Wh/mile is with just the "fairing" changes on the bike. I'm sure it's going to be different than it was with the exposed frame/etc., which was typically 26-30Wh/mile at 18-20MPH cruise, probably 14-15MPH average, over the total 10-mile-one-1-way commute.
One thing for sure--the biek is a LOT stiffer and less wiggly when pulling the heavy loaded trailer, which is something I couldn't really judge well with Tiny in the trailer on the way home after doing those repairs, cuz SHE would wiggle around and make the trailer wiggle lots, which made the bike wiggle aorund, and not easy to tell what wiggles were from what source. :lol:
Normally, before I reinforced that middle frame last week, the bike would twist end-to-end and flex up and down mroe than enough to derail the pedal chain even when I wasn't pedalling, when going over evne little bumps/holes, with the trailer on there cuz the trailer's load would often be pushed onto or off of the hitch tube, which is on the lower left cargo pod rail.
Unfortunately even now it is still enough to cause the chain to derail when going over big bumps or holes if I am pedalling at the time--but if I stop pedalling long enough to clear the bumpy areas it is fine.
What is really wrong of course is that the pedal chainline isn't straight, by any means--it's about as bad as the typical granny gear in front to highest gear (smallest cog) in back, only reversed, for the diagonal displacement. Also, that since I still have the Shimano BioPace ovoid chainrings on there, I can't actually tighten the chain properly cuz it's length "changes" as the cranks rotate. Since i can't actually really pedal much anyway, I'd change over to a standard round chainring if I had any idea where my other ones were, at the stuff still left at the house. All the ones actually on my bikes are this BioPace type, so I can't just swap them off one of them...and all the ones on scrap bikes out in the yard are the older Ashtabula one-piece type, which have a totally differnt BB anyway, so can't be used on here. Maybe on my next "vacation", hopefully next month, I will have time to dig thru my stuff at the house and find the other chainrings and see about that experiment.
I'd put a derailer on there as a chain tensioner, but it makes getting the wheel on and off for any maintenance a HUGE pain, adding about an hour to the process even at "home", and on the side of the road it's worse. That's basically why I took it off in the first place. If I didn't have the cargo pods on there or had more space between them and the wheel it wouldn't be such a big deal, but with the present design there's not much to do about that. If I ever get to put rear suspension on this bike, I can make the rear wheel stick out from *behind* the pods, which will make all the maintenance much easier. Until then....no tensioner/derailer.
Regarding the fairing: now the bike looks less like a homemade disaster of a bicycle, at a glance, especially with the lighting on there, and more like a wierd motorcycle. So I am getting more slow passes by police vehicles, which wasn't unexpected. :lol: But only one has stopped (while I was about to leave work last night, talking to one of my coworkers before I rode off) and asked anything about it. I expect at some point I'll be stopped to ask why I don't have plates or something similar, but it's not really a problem, cuz it's all perfectly legal, and I ride safely by the rules of the road (more than can be said for many of the officers themselves! much less other traffic on the road!), and perhaps it will spread awareness among the officers about what ebikes are (or can be).
Oh, and actually, as for pedalling, I can do better than before, thanks in large part to the joint supplements an ES member sent me after the fire, but not anywhere near good enough to pedal the bike completely on my own without the motor at all. If I start going with the motor up to about 7-8MPH or so, I can actually pedal for about 1/4 mile or so with just tolerable pain, but after that point it is too much and I have to either start using hte mtoro or stop and rest a long while. The bke isn't geared to go any faster than that on pedals only so I don't know if I could sustain any higher speeds, but I expect it'd be for an even shorter distance if I could. I managed the entire 1/2-mile of the bike path on 31st Ave between Camelback and halfway to Bethany once, on a warm but not hot morning, with only a short rest at the halfway point in the path, at just under 8MPH, but that was when we'd had stable weather for a couple weeks. Now it's getting colder/warmer again, and my joints are all suffering from the changes, so it's tough to manage even that 1/4-mile presently, and will likely continue to get worse thru fall and winter like usual.
But it is nice to know that I *can* pedal this thing for short distances at a speed slightly greater than the fall-over speed.
If I *had* to, I could eventually get somewhere with it that way, though it would probably take as long as walking there. :lol: Anyway, mostly positive results from the changes in the bike (and me) so far.
Well, not long after the last post, the chain begain to makke rakcet while pedalling without a load on it (meaning above 10MPH); it's obvbsiojusly rubbing on something metal but i cn't see it hapening wiht the "fairing " on there while riding or off the bike.
I can of course see it from tunderneath the bike as there' sno cover there but i can't see anhyting rubbing. i followe d the chain by hand and felt without looking and the lcosest laces i comes to rubbing are at the strap holdin ghte interor pack ammocan in place, aobut 1/4" from it, and inside the front derailer thats only used as a chian guide to prevent bupms from knocking the chian off the chainrings. it doesn't actually touch that either, asnd is aobut 1/8" away from eithe rside o fit.
it isn't rubbin on the fairing materila either.
it comes close to rubbing on the bike frame at the return side on the bottom fo the frame, and does slap it on occasion in bumpy/vibratey conditions but isn't rubbingt just while rotating the cranks...but ther eis still the noise of it rubbong on SOMEHTING. and i can't see or hear what it is.
frustrating.
If there is tension on the chain like if I run hte motor up to about 7-8 mph so it's fast enough to not fall over while i pedal, then reduce motor power to nearly nothing so ic an put a lod on teh chain with pedals an dnot hurt my knees, then it stops making hte noise. that implies it's somewhere on the top side of the chain ut i can't see where it is yet.
i'm gonna have to taike the rightside center fairing off to see wheats hapening under there i guess. maybe saturday.
is really annoying since it wasn't doing it after i changed the stiffener struts to the new positions, for several days, then jus tsrtaed one day. probably caoused by a big bump shiftint something but i dont' yet know what.
well, off to work i go in a few minutes once the laptop battery dies. or rather back tot he apt from mcd 's wifi, then get ready to go to work. at least today isn't back to back closing hten opening shifts like yesterday, but i'm still really tired form that one, and it's realy cold in here making me shiver and hurts my hands making it hard to tpye.
wanted also to note that wh/mile yestsreday on the way to work awas almost 40 again, no wind basically, just cruising 18-20mph, usual route, about 10 miles, usual amount of compolete stops and starts.
had a detour after work to pick stuff up from bill's place, so ~3 miles north from work. that trip was about 26wh/mile.
trip back home from there, about 13 miles total, again no wind and usual everything else, same speeds, was about 29wh/mile. not sure i understand why, especially since it was more heavily loaded by about 50lbs than on the way to work and to bills. :?
watts at speed is still around 450-500w at 18-20mph cruising, so it's stilla round the same as before the "fairing". maybe whatever i am getting out of covering the body is used up by the funnel on the nose/headlight?
maybe it just makes no difference cuz the cargo pods are still bigt square aero disrrupters?
Gonna see about smoothing that out for a test. not sure what the best way to do it is, but maybe just a wedge shaped section with sharp edge vertical at rear? maybe slanted toward the back of the seat? either way it will require some serious thought and experiments with a way to make a tailbox that will still make it easy to access the cargo pods and won't block the taillights, etc.
nothing i do will not block the SMV sign or reflectiv estuff on the back of the boxes, though, so would have to figure out how to put those on the back of the tailbox fairing or else make it out of clear plastic.
i do have some big sheets of thin flexible clear plastic from the remodels, if they haven't been taken by looters, and maybe i'll remake the whole fairing form those someday if i can find them.
I can of course see it from tunderneath the bike as there' sno cover there but i can't see anhyting rubbing. i followe d the chain by hand and felt without looking and the lcosest laces i comes to rubbing are at the strap holdin ghte interor pack ammocan in place, aobut 1/4" from it, and inside the front derailer thats only used as a chian guide to prevent bupms from knocking the chian off the chainrings. it doesn't actually touch that either, asnd is aobut 1/8" away from eithe rside o fit.
it isn't rubbin on the fairing materila either.
it comes close to rubbing on the bike frame at the return side on the bottom fo the frame, and does slap it on occasion in bumpy/vibratey conditions but isn't rubbingt just while rotating the cranks...but ther eis still the noise of it rubbong on SOMEHTING. and i can't see or hear what it is.
frustrating.
If there is tension on the chain like if I run hte motor up to about 7-8 mph so it's fast enough to not fall over while i pedal, then reduce motor power to nearly nothing so ic an put a lod on teh chain with pedals an dnot hurt my knees, then it stops making hte noise. that implies it's somewhere on the top side of the chain ut i can't see where it is yet.
i'm gonna have to taike the rightside center fairing off to see wheats hapening under there i guess. maybe saturday.
is really annoying since it wasn't doing it after i changed the stiffener struts to the new positions, for several days, then jus tsrtaed one day. probably caoused by a big bump shiftint something but i dont' yet know what.
well, off to work i go in a few minutes once the laptop battery dies. or rather back tot he apt from mcd 's wifi, then get ready to go to work. at least today isn't back to back closing hten opening shifts like yesterday, but i'm still really tired form that one, and it's realy cold in here making me shiver and hurts my hands making it hard to tpye.
wanted also to note that wh/mile yestsreday on the way to work awas almost 40 again, no wind basically, just cruising 18-20mph, usual route, about 10 miles, usual amount of compolete stops and starts.
had a detour after work to pick stuff up from bill's place, so ~3 miles north from work. that trip was about 26wh/mile.
trip back home from there, about 13 miles total, again no wind and usual everything else, same speeds, was about 29wh/mile. not sure i understand why, especially since it was more heavily loaded by about 50lbs than on the way to work and to bills. :?
watts at speed is still around 450-500w at 18-20mph cruising, so it's stilla round the same as before the "fairing". maybe whatever i am getting out of covering the body is used up by the funnel on the nose/headlight?
maybe it just makes no difference cuz the cargo pods are still bigt square aero disrrupters?
Gonna see about smoothing that out for a test. not sure what the best way to do it is, but maybe just a wedge shaped section with sharp edge vertical at rear? maybe slanted toward the back of the seat? either way it will require some serious thought and experiments with a way to make a tailbox that will still make it easy to access the cargo pods and won't block the taillights, etc.
nothing i do will not block the SMV sign or reflectiv estuff on the back of the boxes, though, so would have to figure out how to put those on the back of the tailbox fairing or else make it out of clear plastic.
i do have some big sheets of thin flexible clear plastic from the remodels, if they haven't been taken by looters, and maybe i'll remake the whole fairing form those someday if i can find them.
I took the side panels apart at the top tube (easiest place) just enough to see and get into the center space, and couldn't see anything the chain could be catching or rubbing on. :? But just in case, I undid the whole secondary pack (7.62 ammocan) mount and moved it leftward all the way against the new braces, and clamped it to those and hte bottom frame only on that side, so it can't shift to the right at all no matter what (I don't think i toculd anyuway, since it was VERY tight against the bottom frame already, but...).
That leaves well over an inch and a half between the right side of the batery case and the chain, so even when the bike is tilted fully leftward the chain can't reach the case or clamps.
Next, I trimmed a little more plastic around the chain hole in front, even though there was no sign of rubbing.
Next, I put electrical tape around the bottom plate of teh center frame, and the bottom tubes, and hte right chainstay, at the points where the chain crosses those. That should let me see where any contact is as it wears the tape.
Naturally there is already paint long worn off all those areas from various chain experiments in the past, and they are nice and shiny form the chain slapping htem on bumps and stuff, but those don't have anything to do iwth the constant noise I hear when pedalling without a load on the chain even on smooth pavement/etc.
Now there is very little noise, but it's still present, so I will check the taped areas in aday or two when there's time and see exactly where the wear areas are, so I can figure out what to fix and how.
Everything else seems to be ok, othe rthan still having two broken spokes on the rear wheel, and not yet having found a local source for spokes short enough (except for places so far away they're essentially out of my single-day bike range without guaranteed charging at the other end for a few hours). Unfortunately even the bike shops like Landis that are all one company don't apparently transfer stuff from one location to another, so if a customer needs something that is only at a much too far away location, the customer must go get it themselves, instead of the bike shop being helpful and having it transferred over (even for an extra fee would be ok, but I guess it's just too much trouble for them).
Anyhow, so I will probably just order spokes thru Holmes Hobbies or Grin Tech, once I decide exactly how I want to lace this motor up to the Zero rim. I think I'd like to do a 1-cross lacing, using some sort of domed washer inside the rim for the nipple to ride on to get the required angle and still seat on the rim fully, and using maybe 13-14 butted spokes if they can be made this short.
So I need to find the right kind of washers, or else I need to get some thicker spacer types and file or grind them myself. I would much rather NOT drill out the eyelets in the rim if I can avoid it, as that is a part of what makes the holes strong enough for this kind of wheel use. I don't have the stuff to be able to put new (larger) eyelets in the rim afterward if I did do that.
That leaves well over an inch and a half between the right side of the batery case and the chain, so even when the bike is tilted fully leftward the chain can't reach the case or clamps.
Next, I trimmed a little more plastic around the chain hole in front, even though there was no sign of rubbing.
Next, I put electrical tape around the bottom plate of teh center frame, and the bottom tubes, and hte right chainstay, at the points where the chain crosses those. That should let me see where any contact is as it wears the tape.
Naturally there is already paint long worn off all those areas from various chain experiments in the past, and they are nice and shiny form the chain slapping htem on bumps and stuff, but those don't have anything to do iwth the constant noise I hear when pedalling without a load on the chain even on smooth pavement/etc.
Now there is very little noise, but it's still present, so I will check the taped areas in aday or two when there's time and see exactly where the wear areas are, so I can figure out what to fix and how.
Everything else seems to be ok, othe rthan still having two broken spokes on the rear wheel, and not yet having found a local source for spokes short enough (except for places so far away they're essentially out of my single-day bike range without guaranteed charging at the other end for a few hours). Unfortunately even the bike shops like Landis that are all one company don't apparently transfer stuff from one location to another, so if a customer needs something that is only at a much too far away location, the customer must go get it themselves, instead of the bike shop being helpful and having it transferred over (even for an extra fee would be ok, but I guess it's just too much trouble for them).
Anyhow, so I will probably just order spokes thru Holmes Hobbies or Grin Tech, once I decide exactly how I want to lace this motor up to the Zero rim. I think I'd like to do a 1-cross lacing, using some sort of domed washer inside the rim for the nipple to ride on to get the required angle and still seat on the rim fully, and using maybe 13-14 butted spokes if they can be made this short.
So I need to find the right kind of washers, or else I need to get some thicker spacer types and file or grind them myself. I would much rather NOT drill out the eyelets in the rim if I can avoid it, as that is a part of what makes the holes strong enough for this kind of wheel use. I don't have the stuff to be able to put new (larger) eyelets in the rim afterward if I did do that.
have to post pics later when wifi works better, but a critical bolt sheared off on the wya home from work today, that links the rear dropout area of the rear triangle to the lower rear left cargo rail, creating the triangulation that stiffens the whole rear end.
I don't know if it was a bump or a hole that I hit when it happened, as I was blinded by a string of cars' headlights, many of which were intensely blue-white and felt like searchlights in my eyes compared to the other more regular (but still too-bright) headlights. A couple were also running "fog lamps" down at ground level, though not amber, but that same intense blue-white. I don't know if it helps *them* see but it prevents anyone facing them from seeing anything at all except the lights themselves--you can't see the street, cars, sidewalk, curbs, signage, etc. that's between you and htem, and definitely can't see anything beyond them.
Anyway, I woudn't have likely hit whatever it was if it wasn't for being completley unable to see--I had already started braking because I couldn't know what was in my way at that time, even a parked car I wouldn't have been able to see until far too late. But then I felt the shock at the rear wheel and a second later a ker-chunk and the back end got all wiggly cuz of the missing bolt.
I will probably repair that tomorrow, as it's my day off and I have only one thing planned, (besides normal chores, clothes washing, etc) so most of the day is "free" to do stuff like that.
I don't know if it was a bump or a hole that I hit when it happened, as I was blinded by a string of cars' headlights, many of which were intensely blue-white and felt like searchlights in my eyes compared to the other more regular (but still too-bright) headlights. A couple were also running "fog lamps" down at ground level, though not amber, but that same intense blue-white. I don't know if it helps *them* see but it prevents anyone facing them from seeing anything at all except the lights themselves--you can't see the street, cars, sidewalk, curbs, signage, etc. that's between you and htem, and definitely can't see anything beyond them.
Anyway, I woudn't have likely hit whatever it was if it wasn't for being completley unable to see--I had already started braking because I couldn't know what was in my way at that time, even a parked car I wouldn't have been able to see until far too late. But then I felt the shock at the rear wheel and a second later a ker-chunk and the back end got all wiggly cuz of the missing bolt.
I will probably repair that tomorrow, as it's my day off and I have only one thing planned, (besides normal chores, clothes washing, etc) so most of the day is "free" to do stuff like that.
Solcar
10 kW
Overall, Crazybike2 is looking good based on the picture at the top of the page. It's evolution has been pretty steady.
WEll, it's had it's de-evolutions, too, unfortunately, now and then. I actually still wish it was chain drive but that's probably never going to happen again on this version of the bike.
pics of the damage and then of the repair. while fixing the broken left side i fixed the right side with a new bolt, spacers, washers, etc, before it could happen there too. Now it has 1/4"-20 bolt/nut on each side, instead of the random hardware I had before. Though the previous lefthand bolt that broke was a brake stud pivot bolt, you can see where the threads were mangled and the end bent; I couldn't get it to focus on the sheared off end for a pic of that though.
Then the fixes. The spacer is a steel axle spacer that usually goes "inside" the freewheel cassette on the right side of an axle, cuz I didn't ave anything else big enough to work, other than a sack fo washers that I don't have enough of and are too much of a pita to do in that particular spot, even with the pods off the bike to do the work. On the right side I had to use an axle nut.
View attachment 7
:
And here's the pics of the chainrub issue. the worst is right at the back edge of the old motor mount plate form the chain drive days. it's acutally notching that. it is only just lihglty scraping the tubes, though it saws quite effectively thru the electrical tape, showing me exactly where the rubbing happens. To fix the mount plate issue i will just grind off that area to leave a slot for hte chain. what i'd like to do is add a guide roller for the chain on the bottom side but i dn't ahve anything at the apartment that could be used that way. I'll have to dig around at the house to find something, next chance i get. Probably in another week or so when my next "vacation" (and final one for the year cuz of the holiday rushes at work) starts--that vacation is basically to get more bike fixes done, more rest, and to see about getting some stuff done at the house, to locate critical things and see aobut taking them to the apartment with me so at least teh looters cant' steal them.
. View attachment 4
And Tiny's new siezure meds do exactly what they say: induce drowsiness as a side effect:
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pics of the damage and then of the repair. while fixing the broken left side i fixed the right side with a new bolt, spacers, washers, etc, before it could happen there too. Now it has 1/4"-20 bolt/nut on each side, instead of the random hardware I had before. Though the previous lefthand bolt that broke was a brake stud pivot bolt, you can see where the threads were mangled and the end bent; I couldn't get it to focus on the sheared off end for a pic of that though.
Then the fixes. The spacer is a steel axle spacer that usually goes "inside" the freewheel cassette on the right side of an axle, cuz I didn't ave anything else big enough to work, other than a sack fo washers that I don't have enough of and are too much of a pita to do in that particular spot, even with the pods off the bike to do the work. On the right side I had to use an axle nut.
View attachment 7
:
And here's the pics of the chainrub issue. the worst is right at the back edge of the old motor mount plate form the chain drive days. it's acutally notching that. it is only just lihglty scraping the tubes, though it saws quite effectively thru the electrical tape, showing me exactly where the rubbing happens. To fix the mount plate issue i will just grind off that area to leave a slot for hte chain. what i'd like to do is add a guide roller for the chain on the bottom side but i dn't ahve anything at the apartment that could be used that way. I'll have to dig around at the house to find something, next chance i get. Probably in another week or so when my next "vacation" (and final one for the year cuz of the holiday rushes at work) starts--that vacation is basically to get more bike fixes done, more rest, and to see about getting some stuff done at the house, to locate critical things and see aobut taking them to the apartment with me so at least teh looters cant' steal them.
. View attachment 4
And Tiny's new siezure meds do exactly what they say: induce drowsiness as a side effect:
.
Solcar
10 kW
The rubbing on that tube might be addressed with something nylon to shield it. Maybe lay some nylon ties against it parallel to it, holding them in place with two more ties.
I used the angle grinder to cut away a notch around the chain mark on the flat mounting panel, and now the entire problem has gone away.
Now I just need to lengthen the chain a little bit and put a derailer in there as a tensioner, to help keep the chain from popping off the rear freewheel on bumpy roads sometimes (the problme is much less now than it was before stiffening the frame, but it still happens, because the chain "changes length" (gets looser or tighter) as the cranks spin around, cuz the chainwheels are those ovoid Shimano BioPace rings. Thus, every so often, the bumps and chain position and tension all line up just right so the chain can ride off the rear freewheel teeth, almost always to the right side onto the axle.
Wouldn't matter except that I am *trying* to use my slowly-improving knees and joints more, to pedal at startup a little (nowhere near full force cuz that hurts too much) and as hard as I can up to the ~9MPH where the geraing requires spinning so fast that *that* hurts instead. At that point I just slow down to a comfy spin rate and am no longer powering the bike but am stll moving my legs and joints. This at least helps me not be so stiff at the end of a ride that I can hardly get off the bike.
Once it starts to get cold again (soon, I'm sure) it will make evne more differnece than it does now.
None of hte pics came out right, but I altered the lighting a little. I moved the power to all the white LED downlighting strips front and rear to be switched by the old Honda headlight switch (which used to switch the traction pack power to the CFL headlight and taillight I no longer have on there). So if I need to or want to, I can turn off the downlighting, which saves a few watts.
Then I disassembled those little LED units to either side of the headlight, took out the CR2032 battery pair that powered each one, and ran 5V (5.12V, actuallY) from an old Dazzle AC adapter (see previous posts about the halloween lighting for more info on it), that itself is powered by the traction pack.
There is a little momentary button switch on each unit that turns the LEDs on solid on ht efirst push, then flashing on the second, then off on the third. Since they are both running off the same power source, and the switch just grounds an input line, I wired both to the same switch up on the "dashboard"--it's just one of the momentary switches from the units, with a little 10uF electrolytic capacitor across it to help absorb noise and spikes and bounce, since the wires are many many times longer than they were when the switch was inside the units and someitmes a single press doesn't do just one click now. (and sometimes I don't even have to press the button for an external RF noise source to induce an input into the wires). The cap fixes the problem completely, until I added one more lighting source--the plasma globe, powered off the same 5V source. After that, it helps, but isn't perfect.
So...I put another cap, a little chiclet type 0.1uF at the actual input wire and ground on each unit itself. that helps a lot more, but again, doesnt' eliminate the problem of the RF noise from the plasma globe.
I wrapped the plasma globe's electronics in a paper-backed foil (klondike bar wrapper) and that helped even more, but again, still not perfect. I twisted the power wires to the electronics, and helps a bit more, but not really much. I don't have any shielded wire here at the apartment to use for any of this, which might well solve a lot of it, so....
Out comes the junk box of bits left from the burned up computer I used to have in my bedroom before the fire. The PSU in it was at the bottom and so was almost untouched, other than having all the softer plastic (wire insulation, fans, switch, connectors) melted to slag. So I had saved a bunch of parts off of it whiel I was at Bill's, and happen to have th ebox with some of them here--including the inductors. So I put a pair of matching inductors on the power wires to the plasma globe, one on each side of the supply, and htat helped a lot more, but again, not perfect.
The righthand unit is a lot more sensitive ot the noise than the left. I tried a resistor as a pullup on the signal wire inside the unit, from it's 5V input to the signal wire, but that actually made things worse. I only had 100ohm and lower values, though, so maybe a higher value would work.
Anyway, now the LED units are powered by the bike itself, and are a LOT brighter, since the current supply from the little CR2032 batteries is way too low for the number of LEDs in the units. They could almost be used as headlights themselves, if I was on an otherwise completely dark path--but I wouldn't want to. They're just accent lighting, really, and a backup in case the actual headlight fails, to keep it "legal" on the road at night.
And also, whenever I am not on a street, but am on a well-enough-lit bike or multi-use path, I turn off the car headlight and use just those lights. Saves power, and doesnt' antagonize "purists" as much, since I don't need the headlight on paths that are well enough lit. But that is not very long on my work commute (just half a mile) and almost never on other rides. On canal paths and the like, there is so little (or no) lighting, that I *have* to use the car headlight just to see the path at all.
The plasma globe is mounted on top of the fork steerer tube (actually has it's mounting stem *in* the tube) so it pivots with the fork. It's not visible at all in even twilight conditions, but you can see it ok after dark. Against my other downlighting and headlight, it's not really visible from a distance, but that's ok. I gues if I really wanted it to be, I could turn off the downlights nd the car headlight, now that I have the switches for that and for the LED front "headlights", and still be legal on the roads, but I don't think without the headlight I could see the road well enough to go more than walking speed (and I can't keep the bke upright while riding at that speed; I'd literlaly have to duckwalk it).
But it looks cool sitting there. :lol:
And lots of kids and adults called out things like "cool bike" and "like your bike" and such, on the way from the apartment to this wifi spot at CJ at Christown, which is about 4 miles or so, including the ride aorund the parking lot to get here (cuz Bethany Home traffic is usually impossible this time of day on Saturday, taking 20-30 minutes to go from 23rd Ave to an entrance to the parking lot just a bit past 19th Ave, which is only half a mile! So I take Missouri, a bit south of BH, to 19th, then north to the first entrance to the parking lot and around the stuff on that northwest part of the mall).
And the chain noise dind't resume at anhy point in the ride, thought he chain did come off twice.
Now I just need to lengthen the chain a little bit and put a derailer in there as a tensioner, to help keep the chain from popping off the rear freewheel on bumpy roads sometimes (the problme is much less now than it was before stiffening the frame, but it still happens, because the chain "changes length" (gets looser or tighter) as the cranks spin around, cuz the chainwheels are those ovoid Shimano BioPace rings. Thus, every so often, the bumps and chain position and tension all line up just right so the chain can ride off the rear freewheel teeth, almost always to the right side onto the axle.
Wouldn't matter except that I am *trying* to use my slowly-improving knees and joints more, to pedal at startup a little (nowhere near full force cuz that hurts too much) and as hard as I can up to the ~9MPH where the geraing requires spinning so fast that *that* hurts instead. At that point I just slow down to a comfy spin rate and am no longer powering the bike but am stll moving my legs and joints. This at least helps me not be so stiff at the end of a ride that I can hardly get off the bike.
Once it starts to get cold again (soon, I'm sure) it will make evne more differnece than it does now. None of hte pics came out right, but I altered the lighting a little. I moved the power to all the white LED downlighting strips front and rear to be switched by the old Honda headlight switch (which used to switch the traction pack power to the CFL headlight and taillight I no longer have on there). So if I need to or want to, I can turn off the downlighting, which saves a few watts.
Then I disassembled those little LED units to either side of the headlight, took out the CR2032 battery pair that powered each one, and ran 5V (5.12V, actuallY) from an old Dazzle AC adapter (see previous posts about the halloween lighting for more info on it), that itself is powered by the traction pack.
There is a little momentary button switch on each unit that turns the LEDs on solid on ht efirst push, then flashing on the second, then off on the third. Since they are both running off the same power source, and the switch just grounds an input line, I wired both to the same switch up on the "dashboard"--it's just one of the momentary switches from the units, with a little 10uF electrolytic capacitor across it to help absorb noise and spikes and bounce, since the wires are many many times longer than they were when the switch was inside the units and someitmes a single press doesn't do just one click now. (and sometimes I don't even have to press the button for an external RF noise source to induce an input into the wires). The cap fixes the problem completely, until I added one more lighting source--the plasma globe, powered off the same 5V source.
After that, it helps, but isn't perfect. So...I put another cap, a little chiclet type 0.1uF at the actual input wire and ground on each unit itself. that helps a lot more, but again, doesnt' eliminate the problem of the RF noise from the plasma globe.
I wrapped the plasma globe's electronics in a paper-backed foil (klondike bar wrapper
) and that helped even more, but again, still not perfect. I twisted the power wires to the electronics, and helps a bit more, but not really much. I don't have any shielded wire here at the apartment to use for any of this, which might well solve a lot of it, so....Out comes the junk box of bits left from the burned up computer I used to have in my bedroom before the fire. The PSU in it was at the bottom and so was almost untouched, other than having all the softer plastic (wire insulation, fans, switch, connectors) melted to slag. So I had saved a bunch of parts off of it whiel I was at Bill's, and happen to have th ebox with some of them here--including the inductors. So I put a pair of matching inductors on the power wires to the plasma globe, one on each side of the supply, and htat helped a lot more, but again, not perfect.
The righthand unit is a lot more sensitive ot the noise than the left. I tried a resistor as a pullup on the signal wire inside the unit, from it's 5V input to the signal wire, but that actually made things worse.
I only had 100ohm and lower values, though, so maybe a higher value would work. Anyway, now the LED units are powered by the bike itself, and are a LOT brighter, since the current supply from the little CR2032 batteries is way too low for the number of LEDs in the units. They could almost be used as headlights themselves, if I was on an otherwise completely dark path--but I wouldn't want to. They're just accent lighting, really, and a backup in case the actual headlight fails, to keep it "legal" on the road at night.
And also, whenever I am not on a street, but am on a well-enough-lit bike or multi-use path, I turn off the car headlight and use just those lights. Saves power, and doesnt' antagonize "purists" as much, since I don't need the headlight on paths that are well enough lit. But that is not very long on my work commute (just half a mile) and almost never on other rides. On canal paths and the like, there is so little (or no) lighting, that I *have* to use the car headlight just to see the path at all.
The plasma globe is mounted on top of the fork steerer tube (actually has it's mounting stem *in* the tube) so it pivots with the fork. It's not visible at all in even twilight conditions, but you can see it ok after dark. Against my other downlighting and headlight, it's not really visible from a distance, but that's ok. I gues if I really wanted it to be, I could turn off the downlights nd the car headlight, now that I have the switches for that and for the LED front "headlights", and still be legal on the roads, but I don't think without the headlight I could see the road well enough to go more than walking speed (and I can't keep the bke upright while riding at that speed; I'd literlaly have to duckwalk it).
But it looks cool sitting there. :lol:
And lots of kids and adults called out things like "cool bike" and "like your bike" and such, on the way from the apartment to this wifi spot at CJ at Christown, which is about 4 miles or so, including the ride aorund the parking lot to get here (cuz Bethany Home traffic is usually impossible this time of day on Saturday, taking 20-30 minutes to go from 23rd Ave to an entrance to the parking lot just a bit past 19th Ave, which is only half a mile! So I take Missouri, a bit south of BH, to 19th, then north to the first entrance to the parking lot and around the stuff on that northwest part of the mall).
And the chain noise dind't resume at anhy point in the ride, thought he chain did come off twice.
Solcar
10 kW
That plasma globe reminds me of the movie Back to the Future.
Pics of the plasma globe by itself:
Some pics of the modified (now switchable) lighting. Bike is parked in the apartment a couple feet from the wall beside it, and 3-4 feet from the door at it's back end, and about the same from the wall in front of it.
First up, wiht the room lights still on (two CFLs and one LED spot, probably 100w total?), the LED accent lighting around the headlight, shining on the wall in front of it.
Then with the headlight on, too:
Then with both off:
Then just the headlight, no LED:
Then the switch for the LED lighting:'
Now these pics are all with the room lights off, only light coming from the bike itself.
Then the bike with only the tail light and the plasma globe on, mostly from the side:
Same lights, from the front, but with the LED accent lights, too:
Then from the side:
View attachment 8
Then with the headlight, too, from the side and hten the front:
Then with the downlights, too:
Then everythign except the headlight:
Oh, and a shot of the notch I cut out for the chain to pass unimpeded. Didn't need to be that big/deep but it doens't hurt, since there's no motor mounted ther enow.
.
Some pics of the modified (now switchable) lighting. Bike is parked in the apartment a couple feet from the wall beside it, and 3-4 feet from the door at it's back end, and about the same from the wall in front of it.
First up, wiht the room lights still on (two CFLs and one LED spot, probably 100w total?), the LED accent lighting around the headlight, shining on the wall in front of it.
Then with the headlight on, too:
Then with both off:
Then just the headlight, no LED:
Then the switch for the LED lighting:'
Now these pics are all with the room lights off, only light coming from the bike itself.
Then the bike with only the tail light and the plasma globe on, mostly from the side:
Same lights, from the front, but with the LED accent lights, too:
Then from the side:
View attachment 8
Then with the headlight, too, from the side and hten the front:
Then with the downlights, too:
Then everythign except the headlight:
Oh, and a shot of the notch I cut out for the chain to pass unimpeded. Didn't need to be that big/deep but it doens't hurt, since there's no motor mounted ther enow.
.
Attachments
Yesterday sucked. The CA v3 is fried, as is the rear motor. Not yet sure about the controller.
it started well enough, but a few hundred feet down the road on my 10-mile commute to work, the rear motor appeared to engage regen braking with no input from me. I have occasionally had issues with the brake lever switch over the years where it would get "stuck" on, so I stopped and squeezed/released the lever (the Honda scooter one) and the problem went away. So I assumed that was it. But then when i reached the light at Thomas and I17, where I had to come to a stop because of cars waiting to turn right, the rear motor wouldn't re-engage, so I had to use the wimpy front motor/6FET combo which barely gets the bike started moving at first, and takes a LONG ways to get up to any kind of speed. But once I was going, the rear motor wasn't in regen braking mode, yet the throttle hadn't gotten it going, so I was unsure what might be wrong at that point.
Once I reached the 26th Ave right turn I make off of Thomas, I got around the blind curves and pulled over to check things. I couldn't find any problems, and stuff worked normally.
Another mile or so down the road, though, and I started to accelerate (which I use the rear motor heavily for) from a stop, and I got the grindy sound of bad phase or hall connection. Then I noticed the speedo read zero on the Cycle Analyst, and that told me not only that it was a hall, but *which* hall, cuz it is used for the speedo sensor.
Got across the intersection and pulled over, checked the connectors, and found no problems. Meter showed all hall connections switching normally, at the back of the connector on the controller side of the motor/controller junction. But the motor still didn't spin up right, even off-ground/no load, and there was no speedo reading.
That was bizarre, cuz if I get the correct switching at that connector, it *has* to be connected to the controller or it wouldn't have the 5V pullup needed to do that. So that meant it was probably a failure inside the controller itself, maybe the MCU or something. Not gonna be troubleshooting *that* on the side of the road. But I do still need a speedo, so I was gonna move the CA shunt's speedo connector over to the 6FET instead, and i unplugged it from the 12FET. I needed to lean the bike on it's other side to get to the extra wire bundle inside the "fairing" that *might* let me reach it all the way up there, and in the process I bumped the rear throttle--and the motor worked very well, normally, pulling the bike quite a bit forward with no grindy sounds.
Hmmmm...I put the tools back and got back on the bike and rode for a ways, and had no problems. Stopped, reconnected the CA plug to the controller, and instant no-worky. Now that's definitely wierd.
At that point, i'm all out of spare time and need to get to work, so I rode the rest of the way like that--no speedo, but everything else on the CA still working, and the rear motor braking and accelerating fine.
Later, at lunchtime at work, I ate real fast first, then spent the next 20 minutes or so opening the fairing enough to get to the CA shunt and connectors, which is down on the left side of the battery pack in the center frame. I didn't take a pic, but should have--the three pass-thru wires that come out of the shunt to go to the controller were melted together; obviously something shorted within them somewhere, but I don't know what could have caused it. I couldn't see it until I peeled off the outer insulation jacket there, of course, but the speedo wire and (I think) the Vbatt wire were shorting. It only has the Vbatt, Ground, and Speedo, AFAICR, on that one--the rest are unpopulated, cuz the shunt wires aren't needed since the shunt is there just before the connector.
So, I pulled them apart, folded electrical tape over each wire all the way from one end to the other, and measured each wire to each other wire, the frame, batt positive, etc.--anything I could think of that might short stuff out. No shorts now, with them separated and taped. No voltage on the speedo line, at all, either.
So I thought I'd be clever and plug it back together to see if it worked now, and...
...Not only did it not work, but the CA screen was now blank, just lit up, much brighter than normal, and even after I quickly unplugged the shunt at both ends, it didn't revive (evne after a power cycle).
...And the motor now didn't work, either. Same problem it had had before, grindy like the hall was out.
I re-power cycled, no change. Rechecked connections, all good--but the center hall wire at the controller side of the motor/controller hall connector didn't toggle; that's the one used for hte speedo. it is stuck at 0V (well, actually it DOES toggle...between 0V and 0.11V). Unplug the hall connector, and I get 5V on all three hall lines as I should, so the controller's pullups are working, and the connection to the controller is good.
So that means almost certainly that the hall inside the motor is fried. And the controller's actual hall input to the MCU could also be fried, since I assume Vbatt shorted to Speedo and that's what did them in. Grounding them shouldn't ahve blown anything, at least not like this.
Of course, while closing up the fairing I must've disturbed something else, cuz the bike wouldnt' turn on at all--and my lunch was over so I had to wait till after we were closed and it was time to go home to troulbehsoot that.
That fortunately was easy--somehow I had pulled hard enough to dislodge an SB50 on the main breaker input. Not sure how that's possible, but....
Then, on the ride home, the downlighting in the rear kept flickering and then went out. (can tell cuz it lights up the road to the sides a lot, as it's meant to--can be seen while riding pretty easy). Pulled over once I reached my house, about 2.5 miles from work (still another 7 or so from the apartment) and checked it, and foudn that the brake light also wasn't working, though the tail lights both were. :?
Not only that, but the righthand turn signal had come unbolted and was just dangling there, and the tail/brake light was only half mounted. I don't understand either of those, cuz they were perfectly fine when I left work, and not even loose a little, so how they'd just begin disintegrating in 2.5 miles is beyond my comprehension. At least they were easy to fix.
I couldn't find the problem even after about an hour of pulling things apart and following wires and measuring things, flashlight in my mouth so I could use both hands (which hurt cuz it's starting to get chilly at night, and it was getting towards 11pm before I finished). So I finished the rest of the ride home without a brake light and rear downlighting, using hand signal for braking on the couple of occasions there was anyone behind me when I needed to slow or stop.
After I got home and fed and walked Tiny, sometime well after midnight,I pulled the fairing stuff apart again, much further than before, and started tracing every wire visually and with continuity and voltage. Eventually I found that somehow, the ground interlink between the two 12V sources on the DC-DC is no longer connected, so the one that *doesn't* run the headlight/turn signals/tail lights is no longer connected to the bike frame ground or the other 12V ground. I had the brake light running off the CA and downlighting 12V source, though I don't remembe rwhy I did that--I think it was just physically easier to get at that wiring point, not sure. Anyway, the FRONT downlighting wasn't affected, and I don't know why. The rear downlighting and brake light worked great once I connected the grounds between the sources. It should be connected *at* the DC-DC, soldered from pin to pin, so I'll ahve to actually get the DC-DC out of hte frame space under the seat to check that.
Since it also powers the CA I checked that and found no change there. For now I just cut the power supply to the CA so I dn't at least have the more-than-double-brightness white light shining in my face at night (makes it hard enough tos ee that I had to put electrical tape over the display on the way home).
But at least now the lighting all works.
So for now all I have to run the bike is the front 9C/6FET. And no speedo or watt metering.
I can fix the latter once I can get up to Bill's and get the CA off of Delta Tripper, and swap it out for this one.
I may be able to use the 12FEt on the front 9C, assuming the 12FET itself isn't damaged, but I have to unbundle wiring harnesses and run them up front instead of to the rear, and that's gonna take time I don't have today.
The good news is that I have next week off--but I had intended to spend that time fixing *other* problems and trying to organize and salvage stuff at the house now that it is cool enough for me and Tiny to be there all day, not fixing this.
The CA v3 is fried, as is the rear motor. Not yet sure about the controller. it started well enough, but a few hundred feet down the road on my 10-mile commute to work, the rear motor appeared to engage regen braking with no input from me. I have occasionally had issues with the brake lever switch over the years where it would get "stuck" on, so I stopped and squeezed/released the lever (the Honda scooter one) and the problem went away. So I assumed that was it. But then when i reached the light at Thomas and I17, where I had to come to a stop because of cars waiting to turn right, the rear motor wouldn't re-engage, so I had to use the wimpy front motor/6FET combo which barely gets the bike started moving at first, and takes a LONG ways to get up to any kind of speed. But once I was going, the rear motor wasn't in regen braking mode, yet the throttle hadn't gotten it going, so I was unsure what might be wrong at that point.
Once I reached the 26th Ave right turn I make off of Thomas, I got around the blind curves and pulled over to check things. I couldn't find any problems, and stuff worked normally.
Another mile or so down the road, though, and I started to accelerate (which I use the rear motor heavily for) from a stop, and I got the grindy sound of bad phase or hall connection.
Then I noticed the speedo read zero on the Cycle Analyst, and that told me not only that it was a hall, but *which* hall, cuz it is used for the speedo sensor.Got across the intersection and pulled over, checked the connectors, and found no problems. Meter showed all hall connections switching normally, at the back of the connector on the controller side of the motor/controller junction. But the motor still didn't spin up right, even off-ground/no load, and there was no speedo reading.
That was bizarre, cuz if I get the correct switching at that connector, it *has* to be connected to the controller or it wouldn't have the 5V pullup needed to do that. So that meant it was probably a failure inside the controller itself, maybe the MCU or something.
Not gonna be troubleshooting *that* on the side of the road. But I do still need a speedo, so I was gonna move the CA shunt's speedo connector over to the 6FET instead, and i unplugged it from the 12FET. I needed to lean the bike on it's other side to get to the extra wire bundle inside the "fairing" that *might* let me reach it all the way up there, and in the process I bumped the rear throttle--and the motor worked very well, normally, pulling the bike quite a bit forward with no grindy sounds. Hmmmm...I put the tools back and got back on the bike and rode for a ways, and had no problems. Stopped, reconnected the CA plug to the controller, and instant no-worky. Now that's definitely wierd.
At that point, i'm all out of spare time and need to get to work, so I rode the rest of the way like that--no speedo, but everything else on the CA still working, and the rear motor braking and accelerating fine.
Later, at lunchtime at work, I ate real fast first, then spent the next 20 minutes or so opening the fairing enough to get to the CA shunt and connectors, which is down on the left side of the battery pack in the center frame. I didn't take a pic, but should have--the three pass-thru wires that come out of the shunt to go to the controller were melted together; obviously something shorted within them somewhere, but I don't know what could have caused it. I couldn't see it until I peeled off the outer insulation jacket there, of course, but the speedo wire and (I think) the Vbatt wire were shorting. It only has the Vbatt, Ground, and Speedo, AFAICR, on that one--the rest are unpopulated, cuz the shunt wires aren't needed since the shunt is there just before the connector.
So, I pulled them apart, folded electrical tape over each wire all the way from one end to the other, and measured each wire to each other wire, the frame, batt positive, etc.--anything I could think of that might short stuff out. No shorts now, with them separated and taped. No voltage on the speedo line, at all, either.
So I thought I'd be clever and plug it back together to see if it worked now, and...
...Not only did it not work, but the CA screen was now blank, just lit up, much brighter than normal, and even after I quickly unplugged the shunt at both ends, it didn't revive (evne after a power cycle).
...And the motor now didn't work, either. Same problem it had had before, grindy like the hall was out.
I re-power cycled, no change. Rechecked connections, all good--but the center hall wire at the controller side of the motor/controller hall connector didn't toggle; that's the one used for hte speedo. it is stuck at 0V (well, actually it DOES toggle...between 0V and 0.11V). Unplug the hall connector, and I get 5V on all three hall lines as I should, so the controller's pullups are working, and the connection to the controller is good.
So that means almost certainly that the hall inside the motor is fried. And the controller's actual hall input to the MCU could also be fried, since I assume Vbatt shorted to Speedo and that's what did them in. Grounding them shouldn't ahve blown anything, at least not like this.
Of course, while closing up the fairing I must've disturbed something else, cuz the bike wouldnt' turn on at all--and my lunch was over so I had to wait till after we were closed and it was time to go home to troulbehsoot that.
That fortunately was easy--somehow I had pulled hard enough to dislodge an SB50 on the main breaker input. Not sure how that's possible, but....Then, on the ride home, the downlighting in the rear kept flickering and then went out. (can tell cuz it lights up the road to the sides a lot, as it's meant to--can be seen while riding pretty easy). Pulled over once I reached my house, about 2.5 miles from work (still another 7 or so from the apartment) and checked it, and foudn that the brake light also wasn't working, though the tail lights both were. :?
Not only that, but the righthand turn signal had come unbolted and was just dangling there, and the tail/brake light was only half mounted. I don't understand either of those, cuz they were perfectly fine when I left work, and not even loose a little, so how they'd just begin disintegrating in 2.5 miles is beyond my comprehension. At least they were easy to fix.
I couldn't find the problem even after about an hour of pulling things apart and following wires and measuring things, flashlight in my mouth so I could use both hands (which hurt cuz it's starting to get chilly at night, and it was getting towards 11pm before I finished). So I finished the rest of the ride home without a brake light and rear downlighting, using hand signal for braking on the couple of occasions there was anyone behind me when I needed to slow or stop.
After I got home and fed and walked Tiny, sometime well after midnight,I pulled the fairing stuff apart again, much further than before, and started tracing every wire visually and with continuity and voltage. Eventually I found that somehow, the ground interlink between the two 12V sources on the DC-DC is no longer connected, so the one that *doesn't* run the headlight/turn signals/tail lights is no longer connected to the bike frame ground or the other 12V ground. I had the brake light running off the CA and downlighting 12V source, though I don't remembe rwhy I did that--I think it was just physically easier to get at that wiring point, not sure. Anyway, the FRONT downlighting wasn't affected, and I don't know why. The rear downlighting and brake light worked great once I connected the grounds between the sources. It should be connected *at* the DC-DC, soldered from pin to pin, so I'll ahve to actually get the DC-DC out of hte frame space under the seat to check that.
Since it also powers the CA I checked that and found no change there. For now I just cut the power supply to the CA so I dn't at least have the more-than-double-brightness white light shining in my face at night (makes it hard enough tos ee that I had to put electrical tape over the display on the way home).
But at least now the lighting all works.
So for now all I have to run the bike is the front 9C/6FET. And no speedo or watt metering.
I can fix the latter once I can get up to Bill's and get the CA off of Delta Tripper, and swap it out for this one.
I may be able to use the 12FEt on the front 9C, assuming the 12FET itself isn't damaged, but I have to unbundle wiring harnesses and run them up front instead of to the rear, and that's gonna take time I don't have today.
The good news is that I have next week off--but I had intended to spend that time fixing *other* problems and trying to organize and salvage stuff at the house now that it is cool enough for me and Tiny to be there all day, not fixing this.
Got off work early today (super slow due to halloween i guess). I went up to Bill's and pulled the CAv2.23 off the Detla Tripper and got it temporarily setup on the bike, using the external speedo sensor on the rear 20" wheel with magnet on the spokes, rather than dealing with rewiring to connect ot a hall, since i was already using hte ext speedo / magnet on the front 20" wheel of the trike anyway, so it was already setup in the CA for htat.
So at least I have a wattmeter and a speedo, and becuase I haven't (yet) blown up hte internal regulator on this CA with my experimenting around, it still saves data on powerdown, so I can collect trip data properly again without having to remembe rto write down all the data before I power off the bike at the end of each leg of a trip. (which I usualy don't remember till after i flip the breaker...).
I haven't yet gotten the 12FET hooked up to the front 9C motor, so ATM acceleration from a stop takes at least 12 seconds of full throttle to get to just 15MPH, and twice that long (total) to reach about 19.5MPH. This isn't a big deal for me personally, but it is a HUGE problem when there are impatient drivers behind me at a light, starting out from a stop when the red light turns green. Unfortunately, that means most of the intersections I have to stop at, meaning about every mile or so (and several of them in the last 2.5 miles to work, which also unfortunately is where most of the impatient drivers are).
Few of them have a problem when it only takes me about 5-6 seconds to reach 20MPH, but most of them do when I'm crawling forward at a snail's pace...and even if I could stand to pedal hard enough to really help, it's only geared for about 10MPH max with the pedals anyway. And I can't relaly contribute anything useful--I tested taht today. I timed starting from a stop up to 10MPH with and without pedalling, and there was no detectable difference, with as little force as I can actually put into it.
So I do need more power than the ~1100W peak I get out of the 6FET and the 9C. Usually I get 2300-2700W peak out of both motors simultaneouslyin the same situation, and that is still not really as quick a takeoff as I'd like to be able to do, in some areas where there are really impatient drivers (typically at the freeway-overpass intersections it's like that, and in most places where construction has narrowed a 40-50MPH road to only one or two lanes and I have nowhere else I can be...and because I usually reach a light just as or after it turns red, I'm first in line with a bunch of later arrived cars waiting behind me--which is the suckiest situation to be in).
So, for the best fix....that's the hall problem in the motor....
I am gonna have to pick up one or more of the stators of old motors at the house on the way home from work (unfortuantely in just about complete darkness, with a flashlight, having to move all the stuff (looter deterrents) out of the way of the shed doors (20-30 minutes, at least, for each shed I have to get into, cuz i hav eto put it back afterward, too). I'm not sure *which* shed the stators are in, either, so....
Then I have to take the stator(s) to the apartment and test the halls, and then if any are working I cna pry them out of that stator and then try to install one into this HS3540 in place of the fried one.
I do actually have a little thing of halls that I think GMUseless sent me, IIRC...but I have absolutely no idea where they are, in all the stuff people carried out of the house in the cleanup after the fire. That's part of what this next week's vacation is supposed to be about, finding things I need to organize like that. Was also supposed to be what the last one was for, but I was so stressed out by the shed break-ins and other stuff, that I didn't get enough rest and coudln't go back and deal with it all after I got the absolutely critical bike stuff dealt with that day I finally got Tiny there with me.
If I'm lucky, I'll run across the halls when looking fo rhte stators--but they weren't in the same place in the house, so it's just as unlikely they'll be in the same place inthe shed(s).
If I had time to wait for them, I'd just order some new ones. But I didn't think of it until just htis very moment, cuz I am always thinking of using stuff I already have... So even if I order them right now, they probably wouldn't be here till Monday at the earliest, and that's a waste of two days of vacation time I could be using at the house...and since I can't go to the house and work on stuff without Tiny there, and I probably can't pull the trailer with her in it without both motors (not for 8 miles, anyway, at the speeds required in some places, and the startup rates needed at some intersections), I have to wait till I make a solution for that, which realistically means fixing hte hall int eh HS3540.
But, just in case, I guess I will go order some halls from Mouser or Digikey right now, with fastest shipping, and see how fast they get here. If nothing else I can later use them to install a second set in each motor as spares, or something. :lol:
We'll see how things go....
So at least I have a wattmeter and a speedo, and becuase I haven't (yet) blown up hte internal regulator on this CA with my experimenting around, it still saves data on powerdown, so I can collect trip data properly again without having to remembe rto write down all the data before I power off the bike at the end of each leg of a trip. (which I usualy don't remember till after i flip the breaker...).
I haven't yet gotten the 12FET hooked up to the front 9C motor, so ATM acceleration from a stop takes at least 12 seconds of full throttle to get to just 15MPH, and twice that long (total) to reach about 19.5MPH. This isn't a big deal for me personally, but it is a HUGE problem when there are impatient drivers behind me at a light, starting out from a stop when the red light turns green. Unfortunately, that means most of the intersections I have to stop at, meaning about every mile or so (and several of them in the last 2.5 miles to work, which also unfortunately is where most of the impatient drivers are).
Few of them have a problem when it only takes me about 5-6 seconds to reach 20MPH, but most of them do when I'm crawling forward at a snail's pace...and even if I could stand to pedal hard enough to really help, it's only geared for about 10MPH max with the pedals anyway. And I can't relaly contribute anything useful--I tested taht today. I timed starting from a stop up to 10MPH with and without pedalling, and there was no detectable difference, with as little force as I can actually put into it.
So I do need more power than the ~1100W peak I get out of the 6FET and the 9C. Usually I get 2300-2700W peak out of both motors simultaneouslyin the same situation, and that is still not really as quick a takeoff as I'd like to be able to do, in some areas where there are really impatient drivers (typically at the freeway-overpass intersections it's like that, and in most places where construction has narrowed a 40-50MPH road to only one or two lanes and I have nowhere else I can be...and because I usually reach a light just as or after it turns red, I'm first in line with a bunch of later arrived cars waiting behind me--which is the suckiest situation to be in).
So, for the best fix....that's the hall problem in the motor....
I am gonna have to pick up one or more of the stators of old motors at the house on the way home from work (unfortuantely in just about complete darkness, with a flashlight, having to move all the stuff (looter deterrents) out of the way of the shed doors (20-30 minutes, at least, for each shed I have to get into, cuz i hav eto put it back afterward, too). I'm not sure *which* shed the stators are in, either, so....
Then I have to take the stator(s) to the apartment and test the halls, and then if any are working I cna pry them out of that stator and then try to install one into this HS3540 in place of the fried one.
I do actually have a little thing of halls that I think GMUseless sent me, IIRC...but I have absolutely no idea where they are, in all the stuff people carried out of the house in the cleanup after the fire. That's part of what this next week's vacation is supposed to be about, finding things I need to organize like that. Was also supposed to be what the last one was for, but I was so stressed out by the shed break-ins and other stuff, that I didn't get enough rest and coudln't go back and deal with it all after I got the absolutely critical bike stuff dealt with that day I finally got Tiny there with me.
If I'm lucky, I'll run across the halls when looking fo rhte stators--but they weren't in the same place in the house, so it's just as unlikely they'll be in the same place inthe shed(s).
If I had time to wait for them, I'd just order some new ones. But I didn't think of it until just htis very moment, cuz I am always thinking of using stuff I already have...
So even if I order them right now, they probably wouldn't be here till Monday at the earliest, and that's a waste of two days of vacation time I could be using at the house...and since I can't go to the house and work on stuff without Tiny there, and I probably can't pull the trailer with her in it without both motors (not for 8 miles, anyway, at the speeds required in some places, and the startup rates needed at some intersections), I have to wait till I make a solution for that, which realistically means fixing hte hall int eh HS3540. But, just in case, I guess I will go order some halls from Mouser or Digikey right now, with fastest shipping, and see how fast they get here. If nothing else I can later use them to install a second set in each motor as spares, or something. :lol:
We'll see how things go....
I couldn't see anything well enough at the house in the dark to try to dig for stators or parts. Just afte rht e above post, I ordered the halls (and some caps and other stuff) from Mouser with USPS priority, cuz it's the cheapest "fast" shipping method and might get here Monday.
In the meantime, night before last, I dug around in teh wiring harnesses and moved the 12FET's phase and hall wires up to the front 9C motor, for faster startup acceleration. I left the 6FEt as it is, just not connected to the motor, in case I have to swap them on-road at some point for any reason.
It improves it greatly--halves the time taken to accelerate; 6 seconds to 15MPH, 11-12 seconds to 20MPH. That's much much better, and I have *less* impatient people acting like they'r egoing to run me over when starting from a stop after the red light turns green. But it still isnt' good enough, and adding more power to the front wheel isn't a good sooluton cuz it'll probalby end up overheating it when I'm in frequent start-stop situations--that's what happened to the last two motors, I think (which I was in the process of troubleshooting in the period just before the house fire, and might've had fixed by now if not for that).
So I definitley gotta fix the rear HS3540, and thus we'll see about that when the new halls arrive.
I shoulda thought about ordering a thermal sensor while I was getting hte halls, cuz I could've installed that when replacing the fried hall. Oh, well. Maybe I can find one locally before I open the motor up in the next few days. Tonight I will probably be pulling hte HS3540 wheel off the bike and putting a regualr 20" bike wheel on there (moving tire and tube over, too), until I can fix it, since the spokes are screwed up, the rim is flatted, and the motor is not usable in this state either, so it's just a bunch of extra weight on the rear end right now.
I don't think i'll be able to get the spokes in time to fix those at the same time as the rest of it, because I forgot to order them, too--meant to do that a month ago and totally forgot about it. Gave up on finding a local plce for it, cuz nowhere within my range is willing to do spokes that short, except for Landis--but the location that's actually in my range doesn't do the spoke cutting, and they won't have their other location across town do them and then send them to the location near me. So they're out, too. Much easier to just order them from JRH or Grin, or whatever, and have them mailed to me directly.
Also, I mistakenly posted that the CAv3 external shunt's pass-trhu wires that fried were the Vbatt, Gnd, and Speedo. But Vbatt isn't oneof those pass thru wires--it's actuallly Gnd, Speedo, and Throttle. And in fact it was the ground wire that actually thoroughly melted, and the hall sensor wire (Speedo) was the one whose insulation was most melted into it, but all three did get hot enough at some point, from something, to cause all three to be shorted at various points past the shunt, before the controller.
Now, there isn't enough current available in either Speedo or Throttle regardless of failure modes to cause what happened, so the ground is the only thing I can see that could have had that kind of current flow in it--but I don't understand where the current flow could've come from. The actual wire coudln't have shorted to anything to cause that, at least not that I can see or am aware of. I still have to examine the entire bike's wiring harness to find out what it might have been, though. Obviously something failed somewhere pretty dramatically to cause enough current flow to melt insulation off those bundled wires.
It is possible that it's related to the failure of the 12V system ground to the rear downlight and brake light, as that also hasn't been specifically located (just worked around).
I'm hoping to take the harness apart and rewire it all anyway this week, with new wires, assuming any of the stuff planned for that purpose hasn't been stolen by looters at the house (it was in the sheds, but I still don't know all of what's missing from them from that break in).
For now, I just disconnected both Speedo and Throttle, leaving only Shunt + / - , Vbatt, and Gnd, on the cable coming out of the CAv3 external shunt, and am using that shunt with the old V2 CA, since I have the V3 shunt soldered inline with the main battery connector already.
Data-collection wise, I haven't actually written down much from my trips yet, but have noted that on each of hte last two 20-mile work commutes, which each include a couple o fmiles of side trips, total Wh/mile average is 32.1Wh/mile. Average speed is 16.3MPH, peak at 19.8MPH; I think I've been cruising at about 18.8-19.2MPH for the most part. It's harder to hold speed with this controller, cuz I don't have cruise on it, and I don't have the Zombiess' Throttle Tamer put back on yet and adjusted for this motor/controller setup to keep bumps and stuff from changing my throttle setting.
Today I adjusted the throttle so it is "pinned" by the handlebar grip so I have a form of cruise, since the ebrake/regen will turn off the motor when I brake, anyway.
Batteyr is dying so gotta post this and will be bakc later with more if I can.
In the meantime, night before last, I dug around in teh wiring harnesses and moved the 12FET's phase and hall wires up to the front 9C motor, for faster startup acceleration. I left the 6FEt as it is, just not connected to the motor, in case I have to swap them on-road at some point for any reason.
It improves it greatly--halves the time taken to accelerate; 6 seconds to 15MPH, 11-12 seconds to 20MPH. That's much much better, and I have *less* impatient people acting like they'r egoing to run me over when starting from a stop after the red light turns green. But it still isnt' good enough, and adding more power to the front wheel isn't a good sooluton cuz it'll probalby end up overheating it when I'm in frequent start-stop situations--that's what happened to the last two motors, I think (which I was in the process of troubleshooting in the period just before the house fire, and might've had fixed by now if not for that).
So I definitley gotta fix the rear HS3540, and thus we'll see about that when the new halls arrive.
I shoulda thought about ordering a thermal sensor while I was getting hte halls, cuz I could've installed that when replacing the fried hall.
Oh, well. Maybe I can find one locally before I open the motor up in the next few days. Tonight I will probably be pulling hte HS3540 wheel off the bike and putting a regualr 20" bike wheel on there (moving tire and tube over, too), until I can fix it, since the spokes are screwed up, the rim is flatted, and the motor is not usable in this state either, so it's just a bunch of extra weight on the rear end right now. I don't think i'll be able to get the spokes in time to fix those at the same time as the rest of it, because I forgot to order them, too--meant to do that a month ago and totally forgot about it.
Gave up on finding a local plce for it, cuz nowhere within my range is willing to do spokes that short, except for Landis--but the location that's actually in my range doesn't do the spoke cutting, and they won't have their other location across town do them and then send them to the location near me. So they're out, too. Much easier to just order them from JRH or Grin, or whatever, and have them mailed to me directly. Also, I mistakenly posted that the CAv3 external shunt's pass-trhu wires that fried were the Vbatt, Gnd, and Speedo. But Vbatt isn't oneof those pass thru wires--it's actuallly Gnd, Speedo, and Throttle.
And in fact it was the ground wire that actually thoroughly melted, and the hall sensor wire (Speedo) was the one whose insulation was most melted into it, but all three did get hot enough at some point, from something, to cause all three to be shorted at various points past the shunt, before the controller. Now, there isn't enough current available in either Speedo or Throttle regardless of failure modes to cause what happened, so the ground is the only thing I can see that could have had that kind of current flow in it--but I don't understand where the current flow could've come from. The actual wire coudln't have shorted to anything to cause that, at least not that I can see or am aware of. I still have to examine the entire bike's wiring harness to find out what it might have been, though. Obviously something failed somewhere pretty dramatically to cause enough current flow to melt insulation off those bundled wires.
It is possible that it's related to the failure of the 12V system ground to the rear downlight and brake light, as that also hasn't been specifically located (just worked around).
I'm hoping to take the harness apart and rewire it all anyway this week, with new wires, assuming any of the stuff planned for that purpose hasn't been stolen by looters at the house (it was in the sheds, but I still don't know all of what's missing from them from that break in).
For now, I just disconnected both Speedo and Throttle, leaving only Shunt + / - , Vbatt, and Gnd, on the cable coming out of the CAv3 external shunt, and am using that shunt with the old V2 CA, since I have the V3 shunt soldered inline with the main battery connector already.
Data-collection wise, I haven't actually written down much from my trips yet, but have noted that on each of hte last two 20-mile work commutes, which each include a couple o fmiles of side trips, total Wh/mile average is 32.1Wh/mile. Average speed is 16.3MPH, peak at 19.8MPH; I think I've been cruising at about 18.8-19.2MPH for the most part. It's harder to hold speed with this controller, cuz I don't have cruise on it, and I don't have the Zombiess' Throttle Tamer put back on yet and adjusted for this motor/controller setup to keep bumps and stuff from changing my throttle setting.
Today I adjusted the throttle so it is "pinned" by the handlebar grip so I have a form of cruise, since the ebrake/regen will turn off the motor when I brake, anyway.
Batteyr is dying so gotta post this and will be bakc later with more if I can.
I forget what else I was going to post, other than that the "surge" problem wiht the 12FET and HS3540 doesn't appear to happen with the 12FET and 9C. So it's some sort of wierd "compatibility" thing, maybe, between the rear motor and that controller specifically?
Once I fix the hall in the HS3540 maybe I will try the 6FET on it and see if it acts the same way with it as it did the 12FET...I also have some of my other controllers here at the apartment, though I have to figure out their phase/hall combos, and some of them have ot have connectors put on htem (which I don't have here, and have yet to locate at the house, so I'd probably have to cut and splice the connectors off the 6FET or 12FET to them in order to test them out...I don't even know if they work because of the problems I had with the bike with all of the motors and controllers I had before the fire; I assume those were winding or hall problems in the motors themselves, form overheating due to all the frequent stops and starts I had to do for a while with heavy loads, but I don't relaly know...I never got that far in troubleshooting.
The rest of yesterday was spent with friends, and walks with Tiny. Today has been walks with Tiny and cleaning stuff in the apartment, and switching her over finally to her catch-tray style potty tray instead of the clay litter (cuz I need to cut costs wherever I can...and the litter is around $17/month to $25/month at the rate she's going thru it now that the siezure meds cause her to drink so much more water, and of course pee a lot more--almost always when i am not home, of course (she goes a lot when we're on our walks, but she goes thru an almost-2-gallon bowl of water during the day, at minimum...I've started filling her food bowl (empty except during breakfast and dinner for her) with water, too, so that gives her nearly 4 gallons of water, just in case she runs out of the other one (which has happened once). Not like she'd die of thirst or anything, but I wouldn't want to be thirsty with no access to water either....)
Anyway, just out to the "wifi spot" at the apartments near the gate across from Dunkin to post this and check email, before I go back to the apartment to give Tiny a bath and then more walkies, right after I have lunch. I dunno if I'll get any bike stuff done today. The Mouser hall order doesn't say it's shipped yet, though the USPS site said it's got "electronic shipping info". I can hope it is here tomorrow (Monday) so i can fix the motor wheel. If not, I may just have to try taking the trailer with Tiny up to the house anyway, just to accomplish a few organizational/cleanup things.
Whatever happens, happens, though, and what doesn't, doesn't. At least i am getting lots of rest since I don't have to go to work so I can nap whenever Tiny doesn't need me and I'm not doing anything in particular.
EDIT: oh, and I was gonna order some spokes from Grin, and a thermistor, but when I tried to check out, it says the order total is $109.50 USD for a $2.50 NTC and a $35 spoke set...*before shipping* (and I can't get the shipping calculator to come up for some reason). So I've emailed to try to get the actual order total plus shipping so I can get the parts on their way (they won't likely arrive till after my vacation is over, but at least they'll be here for me to rebuild the wheel when I do get time to do it).
Once I fix the hall in the HS3540 maybe I will try the 6FET on it and see if it acts the same way with it as it did the 12FET...I also have some of my other controllers here at the apartment, though I have to figure out their phase/hall combos, and some of them have ot have connectors put on htem (which I don't have here, and have yet to locate at the house, so I'd probably have to cut and splice the connectors off the 6FET or 12FET to them in order to test them out...I don't even know if they work because of the problems I had with the bike with all of the motors and controllers I had before the fire; I assume those were winding or hall problems in the motors themselves, form overheating due to all the frequent stops and starts I had to do for a while with heavy loads, but I don't relaly know...I never got that far in troubleshooting.
The rest of yesterday was spent with friends, and walks with Tiny. Today has been walks with Tiny and cleaning stuff in the apartment, and switching her over finally to her catch-tray style potty tray instead of the clay litter (cuz I need to cut costs wherever I can...and the litter is around $17/month to $25/month at the rate she's going thru it now that the siezure meds cause her to drink so much more water, and of course pee a lot more--almost always when i am not home, of course (she goes a lot when we're on our walks, but she goes thru an almost-2-gallon bowl of water during the day, at minimum...I've started filling her food bowl (empty except during breakfast and dinner for her) with water, too, so that gives her nearly 4 gallons of water, just in case she runs out of the other one (which has happened once). Not like she'd die of thirst or anything, but I wouldn't want to be thirsty with no access to water either....)
Anyway, just out to the "wifi spot" at the apartments near the gate across from Dunkin to post this and check email, before I go back to the apartment to give Tiny a bath and then more walkies, right after I have lunch. I dunno if I'll get any bike stuff done today. The Mouser hall order doesn't say it's shipped yet, though the USPS site said it's got "electronic shipping info". I can hope it is here tomorrow (Monday) so i can fix the motor wheel. If not, I may just have to try taking the trailer with Tiny up to the house anyway, just to accomplish a few organizational/cleanup things.
Whatever happens, happens, though, and what doesn't, doesn't. At least i am getting lots of rest since I don't have to go to work so I can nap whenever Tiny doesn't need me and I'm not doing anything in particular.
EDIT: oh, and I was gonna order some spokes from Grin, and a thermistor, but when I tried to check out, it says the order total is $109.50 USD for a $2.50 NTC and a $35 spoke set...*before shipping* (and I can't get the shipping calculator to come up for some reason). So I've emailed to try to get the actual order total plus shipping so I can get the parts on their way (they won't likely arrive till after my vacation is over, but at least they'll be here for me to rebuild the wheel when I do get time to do it).
I didn't get the halls today, either. Since I thought I should prepare the bike for working without that motor, I went ahead and pulled the whole HSR3548 (previously incorrectly listed as HS3540; I've edited the posts I can find with teh wrong designation) wheel off.
In it's place I put the regular bike wheel on there, a 48-spoke 20" I'd previously used on the front of Delta Tripper, and then also as the rear wheel of this bike before I got the HSR3548 from Grin Tech.
I moved the tire, tube, and liner over, but before I did I first moved it onto the ex-Zero rim from Ypedal, just to be sure it'd fit since that rim is MUCH wider than either of these. It fits fine, and inflated to 65PSI it doesnt' pop off the rim when bounced gently, or at lower PSI (around 30) when the tire is laterally pushed around by hand...of course the rim isnt' laced to anything yet, so if that makes a difference, then I might ahve to get a wider tire for it. But presently I guess it ought to work. If it doesn't, I'll see if I can find a moped or motorcycle street-type "slick" tire that will fit this 20" Zero rim. (I'd like to do that anyway, but the less money I can spend until I *have* to, the better).
I had planned to just use the regular bike wheel until I got the hall replaced in the HSR3548, leaving it's existing crappy Crystalyte rim on there, but replacing the two broken spokes (one of the 1X and one radial) that were broken. But right after pulling the wheel off the bike, I could see the rim is really trashed, actually has two sections where spokes are pulling sections of the rim right out, and I don't know how much more the rim will take before it comes apart in an unrideable way, stranding me somewhere. In addition, two more spokes (another radial and another 1x) snapped as I was pushing the stator out in my next step.
View attachment 16
View attachment 14
Then I pulled the rightside cover off the HSR3548 to get at the halls, or rather, to see if they were on that side. Yes, they are.
But I wanted to pull the whole stator out, both to just see what the magnets look like, and to make it easier to get the dead hall out, and to make it lighter for when I lace up the Zero rim to the motor Pulling the cover was pretty easy, just unscrewing the 9 (as-yet-untouched) cover screws, then gently pushing the left end of the axle against the ground until the cover lifted from the rotor, putting a couple of screwdriver *handles* into the gap, then letting the stator slowly back into the rotor, which popped the cover off teh axle.
Having seen the halls, and noting they appear glued in , I thought I'd push the stator out--but I realized that with the cable in the axle the way it is on the left side, there's no way to push past it without damaging the cable, AFAICS. So I unscrewed the leftside cover, then pushed the rightside axle end against the ground until the stator was out of the rotor.
View attachment 10
I don't know whihc operation snapped the other two spokes, as I only noticed them after the stator was pulled out. They must've been already ready to go, though, or this slight sideloading wouldnt' have broken them.
At this point I also noticed some lamination damage on the stator, but I have no way of knowing if it already existed or if I somehow managed to do that when pulling the stator. I've never had that happen on other motors, doing teh same method of stator removal, so I suspect the problem was already there from the factory--I just can't know, though. There's also rubbing marks on some of the magnets, where they've been polished by something moving past--probably not the stator as I don't see similar shiny marks on it's laminations. So probably another factory thing.
View attachment 9
View attachment 7
View attachment 6
There is a pretty big defect (two, actually) in the right side cover--one is a bubble that was exposed by the machining done at the factory to clear the windings. The other appears to be a casting defect that *looks* like a crack, but probably isn't, and instead is where the two "ends" of the flowing cover metal (aluminum?) met inside the mold, unable to merge due to contaminants picked up off the mold itself, I'd guess, or oxidation/etc on the cooling surfaces of the flowing metal. Neither appears to be causing further flaws in the cover, though I can't see under the paint on the outside, there's no visible evidence on the inside cover.
At this point, Tiny was pretty insistent it was walkies time, so we took a break for a while.
Then i unlaced the trashed Crystalyte rim off the rotor, and dug up my spare half-set of radial spokes Grin Tech sent me with the original order of half-radial/half-1x. Thankfully there were two spares, so I had enough even with the two broken ones to be able to attempt to use them to radially lace the Zero rim to the rotor. However, there werent' enough nipples--even with a few extra in there, I was still short 13-14 of them (don't remember exactly). I had 8 of the right size from the Fusin spokes sent to me as spares from Fusin Motors for the Fusin 1000W geared motor kit, which thankfully I haven't had to use yet (though I expect to someday), and I picked the rest out of the used nipples off the previous lacing...but most of these are very badly damaged from the crappy Chinese spoke wrench that doesn't actually fit the flats on nipples, which I'd used to lace this wheel the firs ttime around. The best ones are still distorted but at least have some flats left that might work with the *real* wrench I bought from Landis for this purpose. I hope.
I got all the spokes installed, nipples threaded down to the point that a screwdriver can't be used to turn them (not a regular flatblade, anyway) cuz the spokes are beginning to stick out the top of the nipple. But the wheel is still "loose", not even beginning to be stiff much less tensioned--one can "wind up" the spokes so they're all at an angle, or laterally wiggle the wheel, quite a lot. I will probably run out of thread on the spokes before I get them tight enough to stop that, much less tension/true them.
Oh, well, I had expected to have to order new spokes for this wheel, but the rims seem so close when I look at them visually that I thought I would try this first, just to save some time and see how tough it might be as a radial lace. I already inquired about the 1x spokes from Grin Tech, a couple of days ago, haven't been able to check email since yesterday (monday) though for a response, and am typing this up at hte apartment to copy/paste into a post once I get to wifi (later tonight, tuesday, probably). However, I can see pretty clearly that even the 1x spokes would end up too long by several mm, most likely, so I'll have to cancel that inquiry and send a new one once I figure out the *actual* ERD of this wheel, and work out how I could lace it as 1x both sides, without bending the spokes like I did the others (which prevents me form realy being able to tension the wheel correctly, I think), and without drilling out the rim's "washers" at the nipple holes (I forget what they are actually called).
Tiny decided it was time for more walkies at that point, and I'm typing this up now that we're back from it, and will go post it shortly. More experiments with stuff later as time permits.
EDIT: forgot the pics, added inline, except this one of TIny, bored to sleep while I was lacing the wheel:
View attachment 20
Since I thought I should prepare the bike for working without that motor, I went ahead and pulled the whole HSR3548 (previously incorrectly listed as HS3540; I've edited the posts I can find with teh wrong designation) wheel off.In it's place I put the regular bike wheel on there, a 48-spoke 20" I'd previously used on the front of Delta Tripper, and then also as the rear wheel of this bike before I got the HSR3548 from Grin Tech.
I moved the tire, tube, and liner over, but before I did I first moved it onto the ex-Zero rim from Ypedal, just to be sure it'd fit since that rim is MUCH wider than either of these. It fits fine, and inflated to 65PSI it doesnt' pop off the rim when bounced gently, or at lower PSI (around 30) when the tire is laterally pushed around by hand...of course the rim isnt' laced to anything yet, so if that makes a difference, then I might ahve to get a wider tire for it. But presently I guess it ought to work. If it doesn't, I'll see if I can find a moped or motorcycle street-type "slick" tire that will fit this 20" Zero rim. (I'd like to do that anyway, but the less money I can spend until I *have* to, the better).
I had planned to just use the regular bike wheel until I got the hall replaced in the HSR3548, leaving it's existing crappy Crystalyte rim on there, but replacing the two broken spokes (one of the 1X and one radial) that were broken. But right after pulling the wheel off the bike, I could see the rim is really trashed, actually has two sections where spokes are pulling sections of the rim right out, and I don't know how much more the rim will take before it comes apart in an unrideable way, stranding me somewhere. In addition, two more spokes (another radial and another 1x) snapped as I was pushing the stator out in my next step.
View attachment 16
View attachment 14
Then I pulled the rightside cover off the HSR3548 to get at the halls, or rather, to see if they were on that side. Yes, they are.
But I wanted to pull the whole stator out, both to just see what the magnets look like, and to make it easier to get the dead hall out, and to make it lighter for when I lace up the Zero rim to the motor Pulling the cover was pretty easy, just unscrewing the 9 (as-yet-untouched) cover screws, then gently pushing the left end of the axle against the ground until the cover lifted from the rotor, putting a couple of screwdriver *handles* into the gap, then letting the stator slowly back into the rotor, which popped the cover off teh axle.
Having seen the halls, and noting they appear glued in
, I thought I'd push the stator out--but I realized that with the cable in the axle the way it is on the left side, there's no way to push past it without damaging the cable, AFAICS. So I unscrewed the leftside cover, then pushed the rightside axle end against the ground until the stator was out of the rotor. View attachment 10
I don't know whihc operation snapped the other two spokes, as I only noticed them after the stator was pulled out.
They must've been already ready to go, though, or this slight sideloading wouldnt' have broken them. At this point I also noticed some lamination damage on the stator, but I have no way of knowing if it already existed or if I somehow managed to do that when pulling the stator. I've never had that happen on other motors, doing teh same method of stator removal, so I suspect the problem was already there from the factory--I just can't know, though. There's also rubbing marks on some of the magnets, where they've been polished by something moving past--probably not the stator as I don't see similar shiny marks on it's laminations. So probably another factory thing.
View attachment 9
View attachment 7
View attachment 6
There is a pretty big defect (two, actually) in the right side cover--one is a bubble that was exposed by the machining done at the factory to clear the windings. The other appears to be a casting defect that *looks* like a crack, but probably isn't, and instead is where the two "ends" of the flowing cover metal (aluminum?) met inside the mold, unable to merge due to contaminants picked up off the mold itself, I'd guess, or oxidation/etc on the cooling surfaces of the flowing metal. Neither appears to be causing further flaws in the cover, though I can't see under the paint on the outside, there's no visible evidence on the inside cover.
At this point, Tiny was pretty insistent it was walkies time, so we took a break for a while.
Then i unlaced the trashed Crystalyte rim off the rotor, and dug up my spare half-set of radial spokes Grin Tech sent me with the original order of half-radial/half-1x. Thankfully there were two spares, so I had enough even with the two broken ones to be able to attempt to use them to radially lace the Zero rim to the rotor. However, there werent' enough nipples--even with a few extra in there, I was still short 13-14 of them (don't remember exactly). I had 8 of the right size from the Fusin spokes sent to me as spares from Fusin Motors for the Fusin 1000W geared motor kit, which thankfully I haven't had to use yet (though I expect to someday), and I picked the rest out of the used nipples off the previous lacing...but most of these are very badly damaged from the crappy Chinese spoke wrench that doesn't actually fit the flats on nipples, which I'd used to lace this wheel the firs ttime around.
The best ones are still distorted but at least have some flats left that might work with the *real* wrench I bought from Landis for this purpose. I hope. I got all the spokes installed, nipples threaded down to the point that a screwdriver can't be used to turn them (not a regular flatblade, anyway) cuz the spokes are beginning to stick out the top of the nipple. But the wheel is still "loose", not even beginning to be stiff much less tensioned--one can "wind up" the spokes so they're all at an angle, or laterally wiggle the wheel, quite a lot. I will probably run out of thread on the spokes before I get them tight enough to stop that, much less tension/true them.
Oh, well, I had expected to have to order new spokes for this wheel, but the rims seem so close when I look at them visually that I thought I would try this first, just to save some time and see how tough it might be as a radial lace. I already inquired about the 1x spokes from Grin Tech, a couple of days ago, haven't been able to check email since yesterday (monday) though for a response, and am typing this up at hte apartment to copy/paste into a post once I get to wifi (later tonight, tuesday, probably). However, I can see pretty clearly that even the 1x spokes would end up too long by several mm, most likely, so I'll have to cancel that inquiry and send a new one once I figure out the *actual* ERD of this wheel, and work out how I could lace it as 1x both sides, without bending the spokes like I did the others (which prevents me form realy being able to tension the wheel correctly, I think), and without drilling out the rim's "washers" at the nipple holes (I forget what they are actually called).
Tiny decided it was time for more walkies at that point, and I'm typing this up now that we're back from it, and will go post it shortly. More experiments with stuff later as time permits.
EDIT: forgot the pics, added inline, except this one of TIny, bored to sleep while I was lacing the wheel:
View attachment 20
Some pics I forgot to post yesterday, plus a couple new from today.
Yesterday, I also noticed that the axle must be chrome plated, over copper plating (unless it's actually made of copper, which I doubt...I don't think it would have survived very long just on the weight of CB2).
View attachment 6
When taking the covers off, I stripped the philips on the head of one of the screws I'd loctited (just those on the left cover), when my hand slipped while turning it. Pretty soft metal I guess. Thankfully I had already turned it just enough to be able to get a grip on the edge of it's beveleed head with pliers to turn it and get it out. The loctite itself had held fine under vibration on the road, but idd not present any challenge to me unscrewing them. So it did it's job perfectly.
The other side, the right cover, I hadn't undone the screws at all, and they had no issues coming loose like th eleft ones did, while riding. So they had no loctite unless it was from the factory or from Grin Tech. I had no problmes undoing any of *these* screws either...but one of htem was only half a screw, so either there's half a screw still donw in one of the holes (I haven't looked yet) or it was broken off before installation at the factory--dunno which.
Also I noted that a number of the 1x spokes had significant wear at their cross points--some were just scratched, but others were actually grooved. I di dnot note which spoke came from where in the wheel during disassembly; I wish I had. It might have told me something mroe about the wear mode and reason behind it, becuase I have never seen this wear on a spoke before.
While doing the soldering work, or rather the desoldering of parts off the VCR/DVD to salvage parts, I slipped several times, as usual, and burned my hands in a few places (this happens almost every time I use a soldering iron, or a welder, and often when i cook; I'm just very clumsy even normally and my hands shake more now and more often, making it even worse the last few years). None of them is particularly problematic, except for the one where I stabbed the point of the iron into the crease of my finger joint pretty hard. That one still hurts a fair bit, even today.
Today, i managed to finish getting the Zero rim laced using the half set of radial spokes saved off the old lacing with the Crystalyte rim, plus the unused half-set of radial spokes intended also for that rim if the half-1x didnt' work out. To my surprise, it actually did tighten and tension despite the excess spoke length. But the spokes are definitely too long to *use* this way, unless I grind down the tips of them all:
They stick out several millimeters from the inner edge of the rim surface, so the innertube could be shredded by them even with rim tape in multiple layers.
So most likely I will have to try to carefully use the angle grinder to level the tips of the spokes with the rim surface, before I will be able to use this lacing of wheel...and when I order new spokes for it, I need to be sure they are a few mm shorter than these, if I use radial lacing. I don't know what lenght I'll need for 1x, if I decide to try that--firs tI'd have to modify the nipple holes so I can angle the nipples to match the spokes, and use domed washers inside the rim under the nipple heads to properly spread the spoke load on the rim. that would also mean drilling out hte doulbewall's holes in the rim so I could ge the washers in there, too, from the tire side of the rim.
I didn't want to put the mtor back together just to true it, so I put it on the axle backwards, facing away from the stator, so I could spin it and watch it's roundness and side-to-side wobble. it's still not fully trued, but it's close. Will probably take me a few more hours to actually true it, at the rate I can manage, but it should actually work with these spokes. Of course, once I put it on the bike and *ride* it, it may well break some of the used spokes, or go far out of true, but it should be tensioned fully and evenly right now, thanks to the *correct* spoke tool with actually *right sized* slots in it (unlike the crappy Chinese version I had previously, with which I virtually destroyed most of the nipples on the previous lacing just trying to tension it, and was never able to actually true it because of that).
Of course, Tiny was very bored by all of this, and told me so many times, so we did a lot of walkies. It was a really nice day today, so I had the windows open the whole day for the breeze to blow thru...I don't think that helped her much cuz she kept smelling and hearing things she wanted to go investigate.
During each of the walkies, we stopped to check the mailbox, and until one in the late afternoon it was empty--and it only had junk mail in it even that time. No Mouser package. But according to the USPS website, that package has been "out for delivery" since a bit after 7am this morning. It's not at the office, and not in the mailbox...and it shouldn't be big enough to not fit in even the tiny little apartment mailbox, given what's in it. No notice was in there about a package to have to pick up cuz i twouldn't fit, either, so all I can think is maybe it didn't make it onto the right truck, or was forgotten when he delivered my mail.
Either way, it means no halls to fix the motor yet, so it's still disasembled but laced, just as in the last pic of it above.
Yesterday, I also noticed that the axle must be chrome plated, over copper plating (unless it's actually made of copper, which I doubt...I don't think it would have survived very long just on the weight of CB2).
View attachment 6
When taking the covers off, I stripped the philips on the head of one of the screws I'd loctited (just those on the left cover), when my hand slipped while turning it. Pretty soft metal I guess. Thankfully I had already turned it just enough to be able to get a grip on the edge of it's beveleed head with pliers to turn it and get it out. The loctite itself had held fine under vibration on the road, but idd not present any challenge to me unscrewing them. So it did it's job perfectly.
The other side, the right cover, I hadn't undone the screws at all, and they had no issues coming loose like th eleft ones did, while riding. So they had no loctite unless it was from the factory or from Grin Tech. I had no problmes undoing any of *these* screws either...but one of htem was only half a screw, so either there's half a screw still donw in one of the holes (I haven't looked yet) or it was broken off before installation at the factory--dunno which.
Also I noted that a number of the 1x spokes had significant wear at their cross points--some were just scratched, but others were actually grooved. I di dnot note which spoke came from where in the wheel during disassembly; I wish I had. It might have told me something mroe about the wear mode and reason behind it, becuase I have never seen this wear on a spoke before.
While doing the soldering work, or rather the desoldering of parts off the VCR/DVD to salvage parts, I slipped several times, as usual, and burned my hands in a few places (this happens almost every time I use a soldering iron, or a welder, and often when i cook; I'm just very clumsy even normally and my hands shake more now and more often, making it even worse the last few years). None of them is particularly problematic, except for the one where I stabbed the point of the iron into the crease of my finger joint pretty hard. That one still hurts a fair bit, even today.
Today, i managed to finish getting the Zero rim laced using the half set of radial spokes saved off the old lacing with the Crystalyte rim, plus the unused half-set of radial spokes intended also for that rim if the half-1x didnt' work out. To my surprise, it actually did tighten and tension despite the excess spoke length. But the spokes are definitely too long to *use* this way, unless I grind down the tips of them all:
They stick out several millimeters from the inner edge of the rim surface, so the innertube could be shredded by them even with rim tape in multiple layers.
So most likely I will have to try to carefully use the angle grinder to level the tips of the spokes with the rim surface, before I will be able to use this lacing of wheel...and when I order new spokes for it, I need to be sure they are a few mm shorter than these, if I use radial lacing. I don't know what lenght I'll need for 1x, if I decide to try that--firs tI'd have to modify the nipple holes so I can angle the nipples to match the spokes, and use domed washers inside the rim under the nipple heads to properly spread the spoke load on the rim. that would also mean drilling out hte doulbewall's holes in the rim so I could ge the washers in there, too, from the tire side of the rim.
I didn't want to put the mtor back together just to true it, so I put it on the axle backwards, facing away from the stator, so I could spin it and watch it's roundness and side-to-side wobble. it's still not fully trued, but it's close. Will probably take me a few more hours to actually true it, at the rate I can manage, but it should actually work with these spokes. Of course, once I put it on the bike and *ride* it, it may well break some of the used spokes, or go far out of true, but it should be tensioned fully and evenly right now, thanks to the *correct* spoke tool with actually *right sized* slots in it (unlike the crappy Chinese version I had previously, with which I virtually destroyed most of the nipples on the previous lacing just trying to tension it, and was never able to actually true it because of that).
Of course, Tiny was very bored by all of this, and told me so many times, so we did a lot of walkies. It was a really nice day today, so I had the windows open the whole day for the breeze to blow thru...I don't think that helped her much cuz she kept smelling and hearing things she wanted to go investigate.
During each of the walkies, we stopped to check the mailbox, and until one in the late afternoon it was empty--and it only had junk mail in it even that time. No Mouser package.
But according to the USPS website, that package has been "out for delivery" since a bit after 7am this morning. It's not at the office, and not in the mailbox...and it shouldn't be big enough to not fit in even the tiny little apartment mailbox, given what's in it. No notice was in there about a package to have to pick up cuz i twouldn't fit, either, so all I can think is maybe it didn't make it onto the right truck, or was forgotten when he delivered my mail. Either way, it means no halls to fix the motor yet, so it's still disasembled but laced, just as in the last pic of it above.
USPS site this morning shows that at 430pm yesterday a notice was left. But there isnt' one at the office, in my mailbox, or on the door. I checked the junk mail thoroughly when I got it out of the box and nothing was in it, either, and nothing fell to the ground, so wherever they left their notice, it wasn't anywhere I could possibly have gotten it.
It also shows at 630pm that the package is "available for pickup", but I don't know which station it's at, cuz that would b eon the notice I didn't get. So I'll have to look up their numbers and call to see which one to go to.
No other news on the bike or anything else, yet.
It also shows at 630pm that the package is "available for pickup", but I don't know which station it's at, cuz that would b eon the notice I didn't get. So I'll have to look up their numbers and call to see which one to go to.
No other news on the bike or anything else, yet.
Trip with Tiny to the house was a success, even on only the front 9C motor with the 12FET running it. Took a lot longer than I'd like at higher powre to get moving, around 1200-1800w for 15-30 seconds just to reach 10mPH from a stop, and another 10-15 seconds to get to 15MPH from there. Is much better than that without the trailer and Tiny, but that's at least another 130-150lbs, on top of my own 165lbs, and the bike's 130lbs (since it doens't have the almost 20lb HSR3548 on there right now).
Still, considering it's moving around 450lbs-ish of mass, with four wheels of rolling resistnace (two bike, two trailer), that's probably not too bad. motor wasn't too hot by the end of the ride, though Wh/mile was 42 in the first couple miles with more stops and starts, and down to 36Wh/mile by the time I reached the house.
One thing I did notice is that I was wrong about the 12FEt's behavior with the 9C being different than on the HSR3548: On the latter it will reach it's demanded throttle speed, then severely rollback power, then surge to higher than demanded, then rollback, then surge even higher, then rollback, then surge less, rollbakc, etc etc. On the former, I *thought* it had felt normal, but that was without the trailer. With the trailer on there, the power demands are different, and I was able to notice the same behavior with it--not nearly as bad as with the HSR3548, but definitely still present.
It's easy to tell that it is happening, becuase I pushed hte grip up against the throttle to make a "cruise control" by friction, so I can set the throttle to say, 15MPH, then let it go. After that, with or without the Zombiess Throttle Tamer, it will reach the demanded speed, then roll back just a little bit before surging up faster than demanded by just a little bit, then rollback then surge but not to the demanded speed, etc etc etc. It's so much less severe than with the HSR3548 that it took half my trip to the house to be sure it was acutaly happening at all, and the rest of the tirp there plus the tirp home to be sure it was teh same behavior.
So i can live iwth it on the 9C...but on the HSR3548 it makes it literally impossible to ride with a constant throttle setting, becuase it does not stay anywhere near the demanded speed, for more than a second or two, before dropping way back and revving up way over it, repeatedly.
Another problem that's suddenly cropped up--a few days ago, a couple LEDs on one of the units (left side of the headlight) started flickering really fast, while the rest were steady. After one ride, the ones that had been flickering were now dim, and others flickered instead. Now, only one LED on that one lights up at all, and is flickering. The other unit had been working fine but today it won't turn on at all. That might just be a connection problem; haven't checked.
But I suspect the driver chip for the LEDs on the left unit might've died, channel by channel, though it oculd be the LEDs thesmelves. it's actually at lower voltage than it was meant to run on, with ~5.xomething volts, when it was meant to run on 6 (2x cr2032 in series). But the current availablity of my DC-DC is a lot higher than those coin cells, which can't put out much, so I guess they designed the circuit to count on the characteristics of those cells' Ri / current limit. Oh, well, it was just an additional light, not a necessary one. But it was nice to have while it lasted.
I guess next I will see about what kind of cheap LED strips I can find to make these kinds of things from at dollar stores or whatever. Doesn't have to be bright, but that would be a bonus.
I didn't take the same route home as I did goiong there (see the House Fire updates thread for details on the trip there), because I knew I would never be able to make a left turn across Thomas at 26th Ave to cross the freeway, so I went north to Dunlap and crossed the freeway there, instead. I did that instead of Northern (going south, which would be less mileage) because Northern sucks to make a left turn across almost as much as Thomas this time of day, and Dunlap would be a right turn. Also becuase Northern is a busier road nowadays, by a little bit, and Dunlap has had the Light Rail construciton on it long enough that manhy people avoid it during this time of day just cuz they know how bad it will be as it narrows toward 19th Ave, plus the speed is restricted to 25MPH instead of 40+, due ot construction, which makes it safer for me given only about 5MPH theoretical speed difference. (of course, people are actually going faster than that, probalby 30-35, but they would be going *50-60* mph under normal circumstances).
Then I went south (right) at 23rd ave, which goes all teh way home with a bike path, even for the little jog I have to make leftward (east) at Indian School cuz 23rd ave doesn't actually go thru there, and I have to go around 22nd or something liek that for a bit. but IS itself has a bike lane, and the left turn light is long enough for me to safely turn *and* cross all the lanes to the right afterward and get into the lane, even pulling the trailer. After that, it's a straight shot home down 23rd, turn right on Thomas, then right into the complex.
Only real stupidity I saw on the way home that's different from usual: As I was slowing to a stop at the red light at Thomas , on 23rd Ave in the right-turn lane, a big pickup truck that had been going my way in the car lane (I was in the bike lane up to that point) was making a left turn (no signal, of course) and continued in that left turn lane...without slowing down.
I thought for sure he was going to just crash right into the cross traffic on Thomas, which still had a green light while we both had a red, but he managed to slam on his brakes and stop with his nose just past the far side of the crosswalk, only sticking out inot the intersection a foot or two. He's just lucky no one was actually right there at that second, or that a pedestrian was in teh crosswalk (it was still a walk signal for them).
Then we got our green light and I waited a bit for all the traffic that had illegally and stupidly filled the intersection despite the fact there was nowhere for htem to go yet, then I turned right, and contined to the apartment lot entrance and on home. Tiny was really really happy to get out of the trailer again, and go into the apartment...and even happeier to go on walkies after I got hte trailer and bike apart and inside.
Oh, also, last night on my first attepmt to go get the package of halls/etc from the USPS post office (utter failure becuase they lied by omission to me about hwne I could get it), I stopped by Goodwill on the wya home. There, I found some drawer handles that should be perfect to mount to the bike's cargo boxes/rails, and to the trailer, so I can use tiedowns/cargo straps more easily, across basically any angle or hodling down any shape/size cargo that will physically fit on eithe rone.
I sitll have to either cut the existing screws MUCH shorter, or find shorter ones, but shouldn't be a problem either way, and may be able to install some of htem before the end of this vacation. (got two days left).
I also found a ball hitch, 1-7/8", just about the same type as what I'd found on the roadside on the wya to work during the remodels before the fire, but since I have no idea where the one I'd found is, I bought this one since it was only $2, and it has teh bolt in it already (I don't have that for the ohter one). Now I just have to find the tongue part I bought at HF (the day of the fire, I think), which is probably up at Bill's place (I hope...otherwise it's buried somewhere in one of hte sheds and it'll be months before I see it...would be better off buying another one).
Then I can pick up a piece of square tubing from the house (I know where THAT is and can get to it) that I can bolt to the trailer's existing arm, to hold that tongue, and buy some bolts to put it on with (don't think what I have here is long enough), and then I will have a REAL tow hitch for the trailer that won't break/etc., like the one on it is always threatening to cuz it wasn't designed for th eloads I've put on it, being just a spring and some polymer (that is already torn). Some more square tubing or flat pieces bolted across the back end of the bike itself, and bolt the ball to those, and i have a much better trailer hitch setup than I've ever had...cuz it could handle pulling a CAR if I had to. :lol:
Then maybe I will see about buying Bill's old motorcycle traielr from him, too, if he decides not to keep it, since that will handle jsut about any load I care to put on it, out of the kinds of things *I* would haul with the biek, anyway. it already has a tongue on it for this ball size, I think.
Still, considering it's moving around 450lbs-ish of mass, with four wheels of rolling resistnace (two bike, two trailer), that's probably not too bad. motor wasn't too hot by the end of the ride, though Wh/mile was 42 in the first couple miles with more stops and starts, and down to 36Wh/mile by the time I reached the house.
One thing I did notice is that I was wrong about the 12FEt's behavior with the 9C being different than on the HSR3548: On the latter it will reach it's demanded throttle speed, then severely rollback power, then surge to higher than demanded, then rollback, then surge even higher, then rollback, then surge less, rollbakc, etc etc. On the former, I *thought* it had felt normal, but that was without the trailer. With the trailer on there, the power demands are different, and I was able to notice the same behavior with it--not nearly as bad as with the HSR3548, but definitely still present.
It's easy to tell that it is happening, becuase I pushed hte grip up against the throttle to make a "cruise control" by friction, so I can set the throttle to say, 15MPH, then let it go. After that, with or without the Zombiess Throttle Tamer, it will reach the demanded speed, then roll back just a little bit before surging up faster than demanded by just a little bit, then rollback then surge but not to the demanded speed, etc etc etc. It's so much less severe than with the HSR3548 that it took half my trip to the house to be sure it was acutaly happening at all, and the rest of the tirp there plus the tirp home to be sure it was teh same behavior.
So i can live iwth it on the 9C...but on the HSR3548 it makes it literally impossible to ride with a constant throttle setting, becuase it does not stay anywhere near the demanded speed, for more than a second or two, before dropping way back and revving up way over it, repeatedly.
Another problem that's suddenly cropped up--a few days ago, a couple LEDs on one of the units (left side of the headlight) started flickering really fast, while the rest were steady. After one ride, the ones that had been flickering were now dim, and others flickered instead. Now, only one LED on that one lights up at all, and is flickering.
The other unit had been working fine but today it won't turn on at all. That might just be a connection problem; haven't checked. But I suspect the driver chip for the LEDs on the left unit might've died, channel by channel, though it oculd be the LEDs thesmelves. it's actually at lower voltage than it was meant to run on, with ~5.xomething volts, when it was meant to run on 6 (2x cr2032 in series). But the current availablity of my DC-DC is a lot higher than those coin cells, which can't put out much, so I guess they designed the circuit to count on the characteristics of those cells' Ri / current limit.
Oh, well, it was just an additional light, not a necessary one. But it was nice to have while it lasted. I guess next I will see about what kind of cheap LED strips I can find to make these kinds of things from at dollar stores or whatever. Doesn't have to be bright, but that would be a bonus.
I didn't take the same route home as I did goiong there (see the House Fire updates thread for details on the trip there), because I knew I would never be able to make a left turn across Thomas at 26th Ave to cross the freeway, so I went north to Dunlap and crossed the freeway there, instead. I did that instead of Northern (going south, which would be less mileage) because Northern sucks to make a left turn across almost as much as Thomas this time of day, and Dunlap would be a right turn. Also becuase Northern is a busier road nowadays, by a little bit, and Dunlap has had the Light Rail construciton on it long enough that manhy people avoid it during this time of day just cuz they know how bad it will be as it narrows toward 19th Ave, plus the speed is restricted to 25MPH instead of 40+, due ot construction, which makes it safer for me given only about 5MPH theoretical speed difference. (of course, people are actually going faster than that, probalby 30-35, but they would be going *50-60* mph under normal circumstances).
Then I went south (right) at 23rd ave, which goes all teh way home with a bike path, even for the little jog I have to make leftward (east) at Indian School cuz 23rd ave doesn't actually go thru there, and I have to go around 22nd or something liek that for a bit. but IS itself has a bike lane, and the left turn light is long enough for me to safely turn *and* cross all the lanes to the right afterward and get into the lane, even pulling the trailer. After that, it's a straight shot home down 23rd, turn right on Thomas, then right into the complex.
Only real stupidity I saw on the way home that's different from usual: As I was slowing to a stop at the red light at Thomas , on 23rd Ave in the right-turn lane, a big pickup truck that had been going my way in the car lane (I was in the bike lane up to that point) was making a left turn (no signal, of course) and continued in that left turn lane...without slowing down.
I thought for sure he was going to just crash right into the cross traffic on Thomas, which still had a green light while we both had a red, but he managed to slam on his brakes and stop with his nose just past the far side of the crosswalk, only sticking out inot the intersection a foot or two.
He's just lucky no one was actually right there at that second, or that a pedestrian was in teh crosswalk (it was still a walk signal for them). Then we got our green light and I waited a bit for all the traffic that had illegally and stupidly filled the intersection despite the fact there was nowhere for htem to go yet, then I turned right, and contined to the apartment lot entrance and on home. Tiny was really really happy to get out of the trailer again, and go into the apartment...and even happeier to go on walkies after I got hte trailer and bike apart and inside.
Oh, also, last night on my first attepmt to go get the package of halls/etc from the USPS post office (utter failure becuase they lied by omission to me about hwne I could get it), I stopped by Goodwill on the wya home. There, I found some drawer handles that should be perfect to mount to the bike's cargo boxes/rails, and to the trailer, so I can use tiedowns/cargo straps more easily, across basically any angle or hodling down any shape/size cargo that will physically fit on eithe rone.
I sitll have to either cut the existing screws MUCH shorter, or find shorter ones, but shouldn't be a problem either way, and may be able to install some of htem before the end of this vacation. (got two days left).
I also found a ball hitch, 1-7/8", just about the same type as what I'd found on the roadside on the wya to work during the remodels before the fire, but since I have no idea where the one I'd found is, I bought this one since it was only $2, and it has teh bolt in it already (I don't have that for the ohter one). Now I just have to find the tongue part I bought at HF (the day of the fire, I think), which is probably up at Bill's place (I hope...otherwise it's buried somewhere in one of hte sheds and it'll be months before I see it...would be better off buying another one).
Then I can pick up a piece of square tubing from the house (I know where THAT is and can get to it) that I can bolt to the trailer's existing arm, to hold that tongue, and buy some bolts to put it on with (don't think what I have here is long enough), and then I will have a REAL tow hitch for the trailer that won't break/etc., like the one on it is always threatening to cuz it wasn't designed for th eloads I've put on it, being just a spring and some polymer (that is already torn). Some more square tubing or flat pieces bolted across the back end of the bike itself, and bolt the ball to those, and i have a much better trailer hitch setup than I've ever had...cuz it could handle pulling a CAR if I had to. :lol:
Then maybe I will see about buying Bill's old motorcycle traielr from him, too, if he decides not to keep it, since that will handle jsut about any load I care to put on it, out of the kinds of things *I* would haul with the biek, anyway. it already has a tongue on it for this ball size, I think.
CrazyBike2's new look:
Ok, not really, but dang if it wouldn't just bolt right to the back of the seat frame.... Am actually kinda tempted, but it would greatly impede getting thru doorways, or narrow paths, or even riding on bike lanes (it's rather way too wide).
Out on walkies this afternoon with Tiny, I saw something big and shiny on top of the dumpster contents (which were nearly spilling over it's side) at the back of the complex. Tiny always wants to investigate that dumpster for smells anyway, so I looked at it while passing, and it was this:
It's way too wide for the trailer too, but hey, it would fit:
.
I've been trying to reach the two closest post offices that my package might be at since my attempt the other day, and have yet to get thru to eithe rone again by phone, to make sure the package is actually there before I go to get it, and that they'll be open when I get there. No luck yet, never get any answer at all, no matter what time of day I call at.
But today while out on walkies with Tiny I happened to be right there when the mailman drove up in his van, and caught up with him at the office, and asked which location it would be at, since there wasn't a notice left to tell me which one. He said it'd be the one I did try, and that I had reached that said it wasnt' there at that time (but that it would be there after 530pm...but they're closed after 4pm which they didn't tell me, which was stupid). Anyway, he also said that he'd just make sure to redeliver it Tuesday, (they're closed Monday) and leave it at the office for me. So while it will be about a week late, at least I won't have to keep trying in vain to get it myself.
Once it's here, I can maybe finally fix the HSR3548.
Ok, not really, but dang if it wouldn't just bolt right to the back of the seat frame.... Am actually kinda tempted, but it would greatly impede getting thru doorways, or narrow paths, or even riding on bike lanes (it's rather way too wide).
Out on walkies this afternoon with Tiny, I saw something big and shiny on top of the dumpster contents (which were nearly spilling over it's side) at the back of the complex. Tiny always wants to investigate that dumpster for smells anyway, so I looked at it while passing, and it was this:
It's way too wide for the trailer too, but hey, it would fit:
.
I've been trying to reach the two closest post offices that my package might be at since my attempt the other day, and have yet to get thru to eithe rone again by phone, to make sure the package is actually there before I go to get it, and that they'll be open when I get there. No luck yet, never get any answer at all, no matter what time of day I call at.
But today while out on walkies with Tiny I happened to be right there when the mailman drove up in his van, and caught up with him at the office, and asked which location it would be at, since there wasn't a notice left to tell me which one. He said it'd be the one I did try, and that I had reached that said it wasnt' there at that time (but that it would be there after 530pm...but they're closed after 4pm which they didn't tell me, which was stupid). Anyway, he also said that he'd just make sure to redeliver it Tuesday, (they're closed Monday) and leave it at the office for me. So while it will be about a week late, at least I won't have to keep trying in vain to get it myself.
Once it's here, I can maybe finally fix the HSR3548.
I went to a friedn's yesterday to fix his laptop (what little I've seen of windows 8 sux to troubleshoot) and ssomehow I los tthe top (and velcro strap) to my toolbox on the leftside under the seat. I *should* have a spare for it at the house somewhere, but I wont' know for at least a couple of months. I expect I must not have strapped it down properly and it vibrated or blew off while riding. I noticesd the problem while getting ready to leave his place, and i looked for it on the path home, but didn't see it anywhere. Wasnt' at the partment when igot back either.
for now I am using a styrofaom lid and a differnet velcro strap. .
what bothers me is that i had just salvaged a lock hasp and some hinges off a cabinet being tossed out at the apartments, and had planned to put that on that toolbox lid in the next week or so whenever I found the right nuts and bolts, so I wouldn't hav eto depend on the strap anymore, and so it could be locked. I guess i should've done it as soon as i got hte hasp and hinges. Oh well.
i have an idea I might just swap this plastic box out for another 50cal ammocan that I can easily lock; i already have hte ammocan at the apartment. pro lem is it is a lot smaller, mayb ehalf the volume of the plastic box, so can't carry as many tools/parts in there for fixing things on the road with. Normally it holds a spare tube for each wheel (one 20" one 26"), compressor, tire/tube repair kit, thin first aid kit same size as th e repair kit, my toolbag, multimeter, some assorted cargo straps (pallet straps and paracord and velcro straps), etc., and hte 12V pack for emergency lighting or compressor use.
I guess what i'll have to do is dedicate some of the carog pod space to that instead. I still need to get hasps to put on the pods, too, for padlocks, since i can't seem to find even halfway decent cabinet locks that don't use potmetal for the cores, or any of the keys to the ones iI already had that are good locks, etc. I jus tdon't like the idea of the padlocks jangling around banging on the pods wihle i ride, but other than simoehow tying htem down after locking them eveyr time i ride, i don't see how to prevent it.
I *should* have a spare for it at the house somewhere, but I wont' know for at least a couple of months. I expect I must not have strapped it down properly and it vibrated or blew off while riding. I noticesd the problem while getting ready to leave his place, and i looked for it on the path home, but didn't see it anywhere. Wasnt' at the partment when igot back either. for now I am using a styrofaom lid and a differnet velcro strap. .
what bothers me is that i had just salvaged a lock hasp and some hinges off a cabinet being tossed out at the apartments, and had planned to put that on that toolbox lid in the next week or so whenever I found the right nuts and bolts, so I wouldn't hav eto depend on the strap anymore, and so it could be locked. I guess i should've done it as soon as i got hte hasp and hinges.
Oh well. i have an idea I might just swap this plastic box out for another 50cal ammocan that I can easily lock; i already have hte ammocan at the apartment. pro lem is it is a lot smaller, mayb ehalf the volume of the plastic box, so can't carry as many tools/parts in there for fixing things on the road with. Normally it holds a spare tube for each wheel (one 20" one 26"), compressor, tire/tube repair kit, thin first aid kit same size as th e repair kit, my toolbag, multimeter, some assorted cargo straps (pallet straps and paracord and velcro straps), etc., and hte 12V pack for emergency lighting or compressor use.
I guess what i'll have to do is dedicate some of the carog pod space to that instead. I still need to get hasps to put on the pods, too, for padlocks, since i can't seem to find even halfway decent cabinet locks that don't use potmetal for the cores, or any of the keys to the ones iI already had that are good locks, etc. I jus tdon't like the idea of the padlocks jangling around banging on the pods wihle i ride, but other than simoehow tying htem down after locking them eveyr time i ride, i don't see how to prevent it.
Some pics from last trip, including the temporary cover for the toolbox till I figure something else out. Also a metal (old aluminum Navy electronics) box strapped to the back of the bike that has almost as much volume as one of the cargo pods, in a different shape. Not sure what I'll use it for yet, but decided to save it from the stuff to be trashed at the house, at the last moment, cuz it can be made waterproof and lockable easy enough.
View attachment 2
Oh, also, the school across the street from me finally finished their covered parking--turns out is is also a solar power installation:
View attachment 2
Oh, also, the school across the street from me finally finished their covered parking--turns out is is also a solar power installation:
Today, since the halls haven't been delivered to me by the USPS yet (they do have them...somewhere ), I worked on a few non-critical little things I have pondered for a while.
The first was trying to use a better antenna on the Thinkpad laptop from Bigmoose to see if I can improve it's wifi enough to actually connect to a "ghostly" unsecured wifi that sometimes shows up with almost a whole bar of signal :lol: from my bedroom. Pretty sure after some walking around with the laptop in and near the complex that it's almost directly east of me, but cant' be certain.
Basically, I had a little external Rosewill USB wifi thing from Bill that has a big antenna on it that did actually get almost 1/3 better signal (sometimes more) than the internal Thinkpad wifi does. But that USB thingy died--it is still sometimes detected by the system but it will never even come back from "scanning for wifi sources". Just goes away and doesn't even detect the hardware until the system is power cycled. Tried it on the desktop still up at Bill's place and it does the same thing. He'd had (different) issues now and hten with it beofre, which is why he gave up on it, so it's not unexpected.
But the antennal mounts to a threaded RF connector, so I took that connector off the PCB, so I could mount it on hte laptop somewhere, and run a wire from it to the internal wifi PCI card on the laptop. Opened up the Thinkpad, and found it has a Bluetooth antenna but no card in there, so i disconnected the cable from that BT antenna, as it has the same connector on it that would be used to connect to the wifi card, and hooked i tup to te internal end of the RF connector from the Rosewill USB thingy. i tried out the wifi like that, and it does get a marginally better signal, but not enough to improve that unsecured connection enough to work.
I will probably have to make a dish-type that focuses into a single direction to make it do what I need. I am thinking of just making a "focuser" I can slip over the antenna, then swivel it around to see where it picks up that wifi the best. Short of that I have (somewhere in the stuff stilla t the house) a DISH antenna, that if I could find it could od this:
http://www.ab9il.net/wlan-projects/wifi3.html
but that's wya more than I want to get into just at the moment.
Anyway, that's all for the wifi stuff. Next, I needed a batery upgrade. The power on the laptop lasts about an hour now, maybe a bit more if i turn the screen brightness all the way down and am spending most of my time just reading instead of opening links or anything that causes a new wifi transaction or harddisk activity. but the screen is pretyt hard to read in anything besides pretty dark rooms like that, and gives me headaches. I'm not really wanting to buy a new battery for it, and I have no idea where all my 18650 cells are at the house to add to or replace the ones in it now. There's almost never a wall outlet where I can find free wifi, either. So most of the time, while I'm still trying to get info I need/want, or just read ES or reply, the system autohibernates to prevent data loss, and I have to go back to the apartment and charge it up again, which takes quite a while, and then go back out (which there usually isn't time for). I do not want to hack into the existing battery since it does still work, and I *might* make a mistake and trash it's BMS which would make it not work on battery at all, or something, maybe even worse (like make it overdischarge or charge the cells!).
So...the next best thing I could do is make a battery pack that pretends to be the AC adapter, plugging into that external port. Well, I have my bike's 3s EIG 20Ah lighting pack that's 12V, and adding a fourth cell (I did bring the few spare EIG cells here with me, thankfully) makes it 16V, which is the same as the ac adapter's nominal voltage, thankfully.
So I did that, and am using the Turnigy Watt Meter to monitor power usage from it, and the old plug cut of the power adapter from the Accucel charger (after it's internal DC jack broke off and I cut the cable and sodlered it straight in) happens to also fit the IBM Thinkpad's input jack, too. So that connected to a spare set of banana-plug-to-anderson wires off that same Accucel charger then plugs into the load side of the TWM and into the laptop.
Since the laptop only uses about 1A from this pack on average, I could theoretically get at least 16-18 HOURS of usage off of it, from a full charge, and still have the ~hour or so left on the internal battery, assuming that the laptop will still run on it once it drops down in voltage as the pack discharges (probably would). But I don't anticipate that sort of length of time needed, anytime soon--when i'm out at wifi hotspots, my bladder can only last about two hours anyway--three tops! :lol:
Only disadvantage is that the pack is actually about the same wieght as the laptop (possibly a bit more). But I can live with that.
Now, I just have to add a tap to it for 12V for the emergency lighting/compressor usage on the bike itself, should I need that on the road, but leave it configured for 16V for the laptop, as tha'ts a much more likely use.
If i do have to use the compressor or lighting, I can then use the Accucell to charge it in balance mode. Otherwise I can just use it in fast charge mode like I usually do.
Oh, and I guess I should re-add the balance connector to it, too, since I took that off for this test.
So, as noted above...the Mouser package still ain't here, more than 10 days past it's original delivery date per the USPS. So far I've called the location it is "available for pickup" at and gotten only the response "it's not here, must be out for delivery, they'll back at 5:30pm", each time. But of course, the pickup part of the PO is closed before then, as I found out when I tried to actually go pick it up anyway.
According to the actual postal worker that does the delivery to my apartment complex, the package has been waiting at the PO itself since the first day, 10 days ago, after it wouldn't fit in the apartment's mailbox when he tried to deliver it. He said he put a notice on my door but I never got it (why not in the mailbox itself, where I would be certain to actually get it?), could've been taken by someone else or blown away; who knows?
About a week ago that same PW said he'd redeliver it to the complex's office for me, once they resumed service on Tuesday this week. Well, it's Saturday now and each day I've checked and no packages for me have shown up at the office.
I tried to call the PO today and no one ever picked up at all, cuz I didn't want to go all the way there and then find out they didn't have it cuz it was out for delivery for real this time. But no, at the end of the day I checked the office again, and no packages.
Tomorrow the PO would be closed, and my next day off after that will be next Saturday, so I guess I'm gonna just have to head out on my work commute an hour early some (or every) day next week so I can stop at the PO and see if I can get *someone* to actually give me my package, or else help me file an insurance claim (apparently it's insured for *almost* as much as it cost me) on it so I can re-order everything and try this again.
), I worked on a few non-critical little things I have pondered for a while. The first was trying to use a better antenna on the Thinkpad laptop from Bigmoose to see if I can improve it's wifi enough to actually connect to a "ghostly" unsecured wifi that sometimes shows up with almost a whole bar of signal :lol: from my bedroom. Pretty sure after some walking around with the laptop in and near the complex that it's almost directly east of me, but cant' be certain.
Basically, I had a little external Rosewill USB wifi thing from Bill that has a big antenna on it that did actually get almost 1/3 better signal (sometimes more) than the internal Thinkpad wifi does. But that USB thingy died--it is still sometimes detected by the system but it will never even come back from "scanning for wifi sources". Just goes away and doesn't even detect the hardware until the system is power cycled. Tried it on the desktop still up at Bill's place and it does the same thing. He'd had (different) issues now and hten with it beofre, which is why he gave up on it, so it's not unexpected.
But the antennal mounts to a threaded RF connector, so I took that connector off the PCB, so I could mount it on hte laptop somewhere, and run a wire from it to the internal wifi PCI card on the laptop. Opened up the Thinkpad, and found it has a Bluetooth antenna but no card in there, so i disconnected the cable from that BT antenna, as it has the same connector on it that would be used to connect to the wifi card, and hooked i tup to te internal end of the RF connector from the Rosewill USB thingy. i tried out the wifi like that, and it does get a marginally better signal, but not enough to improve that unsecured connection enough to work.
I will probably have to make a dish-type that focuses into a single direction to make it do what I need. I am thinking of just making a "focuser" I can slip over the antenna, then swivel it around to see where it picks up that wifi the best. Short of that I have (somewhere in the stuff stilla t the house) a DISH antenna, that if I could find it could od this:
http://www.ab9il.net/wlan-projects/wifi3.html
but that's wya more than I want to get into just at the moment.
Anyway, that's all for the wifi stuff. Next, I needed a batery upgrade. The power on the laptop lasts about an hour now, maybe a bit more if i turn the screen brightness all the way down and am spending most of my time just reading instead of opening links or anything that causes a new wifi transaction or harddisk activity. but the screen is pretyt hard to read in anything besides pretty dark rooms like that, and gives me headaches. I'm not really wanting to buy a new battery for it, and I have no idea where all my 18650 cells are at the house to add to or replace the ones in it now. There's almost never a wall outlet where I can find free wifi, either. So most of the time, while I'm still trying to get info I need/want, or just read ES or reply, the system autohibernates to prevent data loss, and I have to go back to the apartment and charge it up again, which takes quite a while, and then go back out (which there usually isn't time for). I do not want to hack into the existing battery since it does still work, and I *might* make a mistake and trash it's BMS which would make it not work on battery at all, or something, maybe even worse (like make it overdischarge or charge the cells!).
So...the next best thing I could do is make a battery pack that pretends to be the AC adapter, plugging into that external port. Well, I have my bike's 3s EIG 20Ah lighting pack that's 12V, and adding a fourth cell (I did bring the few spare EIG cells here with me, thankfully) makes it 16V, which is the same as the ac adapter's nominal voltage, thankfully.
So I did that, and am using the Turnigy Watt Meter to monitor power usage from it, and the old plug cut of the power adapter from the Accucel charger (after it's internal DC jack broke off and I cut the cable and sodlered it straight in) happens to also fit the IBM Thinkpad's input jack, too. So that connected to a spare set of banana-plug-to-anderson wires off that same Accucel charger then plugs into the load side of the TWM and into the laptop.
Since the laptop only uses about 1A from this pack on average, I could theoretically get at least 16-18 HOURS of usage off of it, from a full charge, and still have the ~hour or so left on the internal battery, assuming that the laptop will still run on it once it drops down in voltage as the pack discharges (probably would). But I don't anticipate that sort of length of time needed, anytime soon--when i'm out at wifi hotspots, my bladder can only last about two hours anyway--three tops! :lol:
Only disadvantage is that the pack is actually about the same wieght as the laptop (possibly a bit more). But I can live with that.
Now, I just have to add a tap to it for 12V for the emergency lighting/compressor usage on the bike itself, should I need that on the road, but leave it configured for 16V for the laptop, as tha'ts a much more likely use.
If i do have to use the compressor or lighting, I can then use the Accucell to charge it in balance mode. Otherwise I can just use it in fast charge mode like I usually do.
Oh, and I guess I should re-add the balance connector to it, too, since I took that off for this test.
So, as noted above...the Mouser package still ain't here, more than 10 days past it's original delivery date per the USPS. So far I've called the location it is "available for pickup" at and gotten only the response "it's not here, must be out for delivery, they'll back at 5:30pm", each time. But of course, the pickup part of the PO is closed before then, as I found out when I tried to actually go pick it up anyway.
According to the actual postal worker that does the delivery to my apartment complex, the package has been waiting at the PO itself since the first day, 10 days ago, after it wouldn't fit in the apartment's mailbox when he tried to deliver it. He said he put a notice on my door but I never got it (why not in the mailbox itself, where I would be certain to actually get it?), could've been taken by someone else or blown away; who knows?
About a week ago that same PW said he'd redeliver it to the complex's office for me, once they resumed service on Tuesday this week. Well, it's Saturday now and each day I've checked and no packages for me have shown up at the office.
I tried to call the PO today and no one ever picked up at all, cuz I didn't want to go all the way there and then find out they didn't have it cuz it was out for delivery for real this time. But no, at the end of the day I checked the office again, and no packages.
Tomorrow the PO would be closed, and my next day off after that will be next Saturday, so I guess I'm gonna just have to head out on my work commute an hour early some (or every) day next week so I can stop at the PO and see if I can get *someone* to actually give me my package, or else help me file an insurance claim (apparently it's insured for *almost* as much as it cost me) on it so I can re-order everything and try this again.
ddk
100 kW
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2011
- Messages
- 1,903
If you haven't done so yet, complain about your service to the local postmaster general.
I've always found this to be Super Effective.
(for a year or so, then repeating the action after that for additional years of relief)
P.S
The best/least expensive mailing service I get is from USPS, and I get lots of packages from all four services (ups fedex dhl usps)
I've always found this to be Super Effective.
(for a year or so, then repeating the action after that for additional years of relief)
P.S
The best/least expensive mailing service I get is from USPS, and I get lots of packages from all four services (ups fedex dhl usps)
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