Currie Kick Scooter conversion

[ElectricGod]

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

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ElectricGod]

A little work done today...

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

The bottom access panel is complete and in place.

 

[ElectricGod]

A bit more work done...

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

 

[Ianhill]

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

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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


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

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

 

[ElectricGod]

The tires and tubes arrived today...looking good! No more crappy cup bearings! Ceramic bearings only.

 

[Ianhill]

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

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

It's the frame and handlebars that are original.

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

 

[ElectricGod]

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

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

 

[ElectricGod]

Deleted post

 

[ElectricGod]

The Currie is running again!!!

I found these RGB lights on ebay and thought they would be cool. Also the amber lights I had on the scooter were coming off. The double sided tape was crap and they basicly came unstuck on their own. The new lights have a controller and will run through a variety of colors and patterns. It doesn't show up so well in the pictures becasue the camera flash washes them out, but the LED strips are cycling through various color combinations.

Also, the epoxy for the front rotor gave way today. I was expecting it wasn't going to hold permanently and sure enough braking hard, the epoxy gave way. That was the final straw for the old wheels. Also, I needed to adjust the spacing for the chain to move it away from the tire a bit more. With the new tires, it rubbed a little and made a lot of noise. As a result, it was time to replace the rear wheel too. Now the rotors sit a little better in the brakes and the new wheels are on. The back wheel is much quieter now.

I didn't do any speed runs earlier today to see how fast it would go on 16S, but it's definitely faster and WOW so much stronger too. It's nuts how much power I have now. I also didn't see what the controller was doing. It's set fairly conservatively right now so who knows what it can really do. I guess this is to be expected...more battery voltage, lots more capacity and current deliver and the controller is upgraded so it no longer is limiting the motor.

 

[chuckklr98]

I desperately need help with my Currie Phat flyer. Think I need a new motor as the speed control may be toast. Nobody has a new motor in stock as they are ancient. Do you know of any source or are willing to wire mine for external speed control?

 

[ElectricGod]

I desperately need help with my Currie Phat flyer. Think I need a new motor as the speed control may be toast. Nobody has a new motor in stock as they are ancient. Do you know of any source or are willing to wire mine for external speed control?

just PM me...we can discuss offline from my build thread.

 

[ElectricGod]

I've been a hall adding fool for the last week plus. Every motor I have that didn't have halls, has them now. Also since the C80100 has been glitchy on this controller, I added a second set of halls on the bottom of the stators. The motor is all back together and I connected it to the controller and so far so good. The motor ran great. I had a problem with one of the set screws on the motor sprocket. It had cracked in half in the sprocket so I wasn't able to loosen it. I ended up having to partly take the back end of the scooter apart to get a puller in there to pull off the sprocket. I've spent a few hours getting things back together today and I'm close to getting this thing running again.

Here's the motor with new halls added. It now has 2 sets of them.

 

[ElectricGod]

The scooter is all back together again. Up on blocks the motor works lots better now. There was a problem with the throttle running away due to misreading the halls and occasional rough running. That's all gone now. However, this controller has a weird issue where it doesn't like to run the motor under load at low RPM's. I can barely tap the throttle and it will run with me on the scooter, but do a normal take off and the motor cuts out after a second or so. If I push off and get going, then the motor runs strong. I have no idea what this dead band is at low RPM's or why it happens. It makes riding impossible since I can't just take off and go. Grrr! I was hoping it was all good to go with the new halls. A while back when I upgraded to 16S, I also upgraded the shunts to larger ones. The factory shunts couldn't carry enough current for what the other upgrades were capable of. Some time before that I replaced the mosfets with AOT290's, replaced the phase and battery wires and tested it out then and everything was fine. Anyway, I'm wondering my new shunts are to low. I went from shunt wire to copper wire so it's possible that the MCU at low motor RPM's can't read a voltage drop across the shunts and it stops as a result. I don't know...at the time I didn't have better shunts and now I do. Maybe I should just replace the copper wire for real .005 ohm shunts and see what happens. That means pulling the controller off again and taking it apart. LOL...sometimes I'm too lazy for my own good.

 

[Ianhill]

The scooter is all back together again. Up on blocks the motor works lots better now. There was a problem with the throttle running away due to misreading the halls and occasional rough running. That's all gone now. However, this controller has a weird issue where it doesn't like to run the motor under load at low RPM's. I can barely tap the throttle and it will run with me on the scooter, but do a normal take off and the motor cuts out after a second or so. If I push off and get going, then the motor runs strong. I have no idea what this dead band is at low RPM's or why it happens. It makes riding impossible since I can't just take off and go. Grrr! I was hoping it was all good to go with the new halls. A while back when I upgraded to 16S, I also upgraded the shunts to larger ones. The factory shunts couldn't carry enough current for what the other upgrades were capable of. Some time before that I replaced the mosfets with AOT290's, replaced the phase and battery wires and tested it out then and everything was fine. Anyway, I'm wondering my new shunts are to low. I went from shunt wire to copper wire so it's possible that the MCU at low motor RPM's can't read a voltage drop across the shunts and it stops as a result. I don't know...at the time I didn't have better shunts and now I do. Maybe I should just replace the copper wire for real .005 ohm shunts and see what happens. That means pulling the controller off again and taking it apart. LOL...sometimes I'm too lazy for my own good.

My sunwin controller seems to be doing this I swapped my motor a while back and I seem to be having a intermittent hall failure under load pulling off then after a minutes riding the problem has gone I may have a failing cap on the controller I'll have to strip it all back down again over winter after the metro has been finished and that has to get inline with the house but I'm nearly there with that so soon I'll be back on the bike I'm swapping the crank out and going single speed keep it simple as possible make it robust as the frame design allows.

 

[ElectricGod]

The scooter is all back together again. Up on blocks the motor works lots better now. There was a problem with the throttle running away due to misreading the halls and occasional rough running. That's all gone now. However, this controller has a weird issue where it doesn't like to run the motor under load at low RPM's. I can barely tap the throttle and it will run with me on the scooter, but do a normal take off and the motor cuts out after a second or so. If I push off and get going, then the motor runs strong. I have no idea what this dead band is at low RPM's or why it happens. It makes riding impossible since I can't just take off and go. Grrr! I was hoping it was all good to go with the new halls. A while back when I upgraded to 16S, I also upgraded the shunts to larger ones. The factory shunts couldn't carry enough current for what the other upgrades were capable of. Some time before that I replaced the mosfets with AOT290's, replaced the phase and battery wires and tested it out then and everything was fine. Anyway, I'm wondering my new shunts are to low. I went from shunt wire to copper wire so it's possible that the MCU at low motor RPM's can't read a voltage drop across the shunts and it stops as a result. I don't know...at the time I didn't have better shunts and now I do. Maybe I should just replace the copper wire for real .005 ohm shunts and see what happens. That means pulling the controller off again and taking it apart. LOL...sometimes I'm too lazy for my own good.

My sunwin controller seems to be doing this I swapped my motor a while back and I seem to be having a intermittent hall failure under load pulling off then after a minutes riding the problem has gone I may have a failing cap on the controller I'll have to strip it all back down again over winter after the metro has been finished and that has to get inline with the house but I'm nearly there with that so soon I'll be back on the bike I'm swapping the crank out and going single speed keep it simple as possible make it robust as the frame design allows.

Get er built! I want to here about how well it does.

 

[ElectricGod]

hi everyone!

My controller weirdness is my own fault. I had replaced the 2 shunts in the controller with a couple of pieces of 14 awg solid core wire. The factory shunts were limiting max amps to about 40 amps. The AOT290's should allow me 60 amps. So I needed stronger shunts. Hence the copper wires in place of the factory shunts. The problem was the whole point of shunts is to detect voltage drop across them so that current can be calculated by the MCU. The copper was just too low resistance for the controller to detect a voltage drop across them. You need about .001 ohm to work with this controller. I replaced the copper wires with four .005 ohm shunts or .00125 ohms. Once it was all soldered together, and put back in it's shell, I tried the controller out on the scooter and everything worked great. So it was time to get it outside and give it a load test. No problems at all. No skipping at low RPM's. It just ran like a beast. It's pretty cool outside...60F, the motor warmed up to maybe 80F and the controller was slightly warmer than air temp. So far so good. I didn't try going full out, but it was plenty strong and I never topped out the scooter. I did exceed my old top speed of 32mph which was with 30% field weakening. I don't have field weakening on right now so who knows what that will add to it's top speed.

I need to glue the back tire to the rim again. From my very short ride, I was already spinning the tire on the rim and the valve stem is already crooked. This little scooter was never intended to run at 4000 watts so no surprises that the tires don't stay put. The new wheels run great, the brakes are strong. I tried the brakes out at 30mph to 0 and I stopped in 20 feet...not bad and no skidding and that wasn't full brakes either. I'm pretty happy now that it's running again. I need to tune the controller some to see what is the best it can be. It's been messed with so much that nothing is set right at the moment. It's certainly strong and accelerates very nicely. Total weight is about 60 pounds. It's night out when I did this test and until now I've never tried the lights in actual darkness. The front lights are twin 18 watt LED lamps...very good front view lighting. The rear strip LED's were very visible. Turning on the down tube lights, is so bright that even a blind person could see me coming. I also have RGB LED strips around the battery box that flash color patterns. It looks like I'm the cops on a 4 foot scooter or something. The flashers from the front and sides were very visible. I could look over my shoulder and easily see the reflected light from the tail flashers on the road. I'm VERY visible on this thing with the lights on.

It's time to just ride this thing and work out whatever small details with configuration are left in the controller or any other minor quirks. My temp meter isn't reading for some reason.

I deflated the back tire and rotated it back around to straighten out the valve stem again. I hadn't paid attention to the pressure rating on the tires, but it says 65 psi. I was running at 30 psi so maybe I don't need to glue the rims to the tires. They have 55 psi in them now...so we'll see if the rear tire slips on the rim now or not. Worst case I'll try another 15 psi and if that doesn't work, glue it is. The back tire after riding around was fairly warm. I'm sure it's tread will wear quickly! No one ever designed anything is this size for 4000 watts. Oh well...I guess I'll get limited life out of the rear tire and who knows, I might find a much better tire than these ones. These tires were designed for children's bicycles, not an over powered EV. These tires are definitely better than the last set of higher performance tires I bought for the scooter. The back tire has maybe 10 miles on it and already looked like it had been used for several months.

 

[ElectricGod]

I've never charged before other than to try out the charger and the batteries have been used multiple times so they were partly run down. Today, I took the Currie out for a test ride to see how far I would get. I didn't have regen turned on so who knows how far I would have gotten if I had. I'm estimating that I got about 6 miles before I got down to 48 volts and the controller LVC shut me down. If I had regen turned on, I could have gotten a lot further and also walked the scooter and pushed current back into the batteries. Anyway, none of that was the case so 6 miles on partly run down batteries was pretty good. It ran strong right up to the point that it shut down. The controller never got more than 10F warmer than air temperatures. The motor got a good bit warmer, but still not ever too hot to touch. My top speed today was 36mph, but I was never trying for a speed run and never allowed the scooter to top out. I was going for more of a "let's see how far we get on a typical ride". I'm pleased with how the whole experience went.

The back tire never moved thanks to pumping it up much harder. I still need to work out my temp sensor issue.

My crappy Chinese charger died immediately upon plugging it into the scooter. GRRR! Time for some meanwells and never have a problem again! Right now I can't charge until I build a new charger so any further testing will have to wait for now.

Three Meanwell SE-600-24 PSU's set me back $216. They are rated to 25 amps, but I know they will run up to 30 amps. I made an 82 volt charger some time ago out of these same PSU's and they have worked flawlessly so I went with the exact same PSU. Worst case if I ever blow up a PSU, I have standardized on a single model that I know has served me well. The SE series have no current limiting, but they are definitely overload protected so it's pretty hard to kill them. The PSU's will be here mid next week.

 

[ElectricGod]

The new Meanwell PSU's arrived on Thursday. Last night I got around to putting together a new charger. As expected the Meanwells are well built and they held up to charging just fine. My watt meter maxes out at 20 amps so it won't display what the actual charge current is. I'll replace it with a higher capacity meter later. This one was sufficient for the crappy PSU's I was attempting to use. The charger never shut off even without even without the current limiters.