Tony01
100 W
DogDipstick said:
No.
My answer was yes before this tragic event occurred. I never really took a close look at the build. As far as I was concerned, the guy’s got experience, now he’s building his own frames and selling bikes. The American Dream.
The legal issue is that all these bikes are technically motorcycles. I heard the term “legal grey area” on this thread, no these aren’t legal at all. If you’re legal, you either sell true ebikes which do 20-25mph or whatever, or you are a motor vehicle manufacturer. Or, you build one or a handful of motorcycles and go through the home built registration process.
There’s a lot of stuff that bothers me about it. A lot of times I’ve seen things that weren’t up to my standard but somebody else said “it works fine”. I’ve learned to accept things that work well enough from people with more experience than me.
The xt90 discharge bothered me until I found that bike is only running like 100 amps peak. That kind of bothers me too because one of my batteries in that size would be capable of 200a peak at least. While I will run anything in a personal build, for customers I only used brand new SK cells. A typical sk 45ah pouch would have the standard 1/3/5c ratings or 225a peak. My builds use QS8 primary connectors and XT90 charge ports. Usually I just have the one QS8 soldered to 6awg for the 200a customers or 8awg for the 100a ones. The problem I have is with the BMS. I trust none. But I can’t just sell batteries without protection. My opinion is that batteries should have no bms and be manually balanced from time to time. I can’t just go and trust a Chinese BMS just because a lot of other people use them. Possibly a monitoring system rather than a full on management system to report a problem would be best. The BMS needs to be incapable of scrapping the pack if the circuit fails.
I’ve been designing a frame for a while. I wanted to do it in chromo and asked a local shop if they would, but they just told me to redesign it in aluminum. It takes non trivial preparation and knowledge that I just don’t possess. They do, and they don’t want to mess with it.
Reading about the tob welds is troubling. I guess it means those frames may have invisible trouble spots and may be prone to cracking.
The welded disc rotor appears to have been done to fit on a 6” dropout qs hub; those only have the freewheel with a 6-bolt iso brake pattern. Aka tiny. The right way to do it would have been to run an 8” dropout motor which would come with the big rotor mount, then have a machined freewheel adapter for the fake pedals.
DogDipstick, on your batteries with the compression straps, how do you know that the batts are actually getting an even compressive load on every square inch?
