Snowmnason said:
for the fact I can't get a motorcycle on the road because of the pandemic so it will be a fun little project while I wait for a gas one to be street legal to practice more.
Not quite sure what you mean by this part. If you mean you want to build this to ride around, you'll need it to be street legal and registered, licensed, and insured, by whatever rules you have up there, or LEOs will probably notice you don't have a plate and take away your new toy.
If you want to ride something that doesn't need a plate, etc., you'd need to verify that ebikes are legal where you are (NYC had made them illegal, and I don't know that any of the efforts to change that have gone thru yet, because LEOs keep confiscating people's ebikes and ticketing/fining them for owning/riding them). If they *are* legal, then you'd need to find out what the limitations in speed, power, and weight are, and any other limitations, then build a *bicycle* that matches those, that you can pedal around and be assisted by the motor...or risk having the LEOs take it away and charge you money for it too.
Max range- probably like 100 miles, I live on Long island so nothing is too far, I don't expect to go cross country any time soon!
Max speed- 60 is the min, but the ability to go to 100 or so would be a cool pissing contest ya feel
If you need to go 60mph for 100 miles, that's going to be a huge and heavy and very expensive battery. If you need to go 100mph for 100miles, I think you will need a trailer.
60mph is, on an average-aero motorcycle, probably going to take around 150wh/mile or more if you are just going with no stops. If there's a lot of starts and stops, it'll take more, and a lot more the higher the weight of everything is, because you're wasting power re-acclerating all that mass over and over.
So to do that for 100 miles, it would take 100 * 150 = 15kwh of battery. That is a HUGE battery, I have a 2kwh battery that weighs around 35lbs, bare, no casing, and is the size of a stakc of hardback books. Yours would be seven times that, so battery alone would be, without a casing to protect it from weather and crashes and stuff, about 250lbs. It will be bigger than a human torso, perhaps closer to two. Gonna need a big bike to hold it, like a Voyager or Goldwing, etc. Not gonna fit on a little bitty sport bike.
Just to give you a real world reference, this electric motorcycle claims 112miles highway use, which I would presume is estimating around 60mph but doesn't say:
With an aerodynamic riding posture that helps deliver up to 223 miles in the city and 112 miles on the highway, the Zero SR offers the highest range in the Zero lineup.
But when you actually look at the specs page, it then gives some more realistic numbers:
https://www.zeromotorcycles.com/model/zero-s
City 89 miles (143 km)
Highway, 55 mph (89 km/h) 54 miles (87 km)
Combined 68 miles (109 km)
Highway, 70 mph (113 km/h) 45 miles (72 km)
Combined 60 miles (97 km)
So realistically you get about half of what it claims. It has a "7.2kwh" max capacity battery, which is about half of what you'd need for your range, and it gets about half of the range you want at the speed you want, so it has about the same 150wh/mile "efficiency" (kinda like MPG in a gas bike) at that speed as yours might.
Max recharge time-probably min of an hour because I wanted to use this to go to school (where they have electric charges and saves on gas)
FWIW, the standard charger on the bike above is a 1.3 kW, integrated charger, and takes about 5 hours to charge it up from about empty. For yours, it would take twice as long becuase your doulbe-size battery would take twice as long to fill up, unless you use a bigger, heavier charger (assuming the charge stations they have can output more power than that--some go up to 3kw or more, which would halve or less your charge time).
Quick Acceleration- Doesn't matter, I am not looking for a speedster, I am just looking to make someone awesome looking to make people look at me with awe
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"cool" looking bike-HELL yes, I want to be able to take this to car meets and as I said before to make people look at me with aw, but the more functionality the better if this could be MY bike I I'would love that
Well, if you mean look at you with awe as you ride down a street, you'd probably have to be riding something that looks like the TRON bike for that, as the average motorcycle probably doesn't draw much attention, much less awe, and no one will have any idea you have an electric motorcycle even if they think those are awesome (most people don't care). You'd need something that looks radically different from anything you see on the road...which probably means something that is not necessarily built to actually do a job well (other than the job of looking awesome), or be safe or maneuverable under various conditions you may encounter, or be efficient, etc., and is likely to be an engineering nightmare to work out the design for. And might not be allowed on the roads, if your local rules say anything about that sort of thing (probably not...but you'd have to check your DMV about that sort of thing, once you've worked out sketches and guesstimates of size/weight/etc.)
Draw up what you think people would find awesome. Show it to them. See if they do. When you have something they think is awesome (regardless of what *you* think of it, since if your goal is to have them look at you in awe, your bike's job is to satisfy them, not you), then you have a design to work with.
Do I need to pick it up myself- yes definitely
I'd recommend finding people that will lay their bike down for you and let you see if you can put it upright again a few times. Find as many differnet sizes of bikes to see where the limit is for you, then go down a size from there so you can still do it after you've been hurt in the crashes you're going to have. (everybody crashes, and if they're new they'll crash a lot).
Weight/size- I haven't put much thought into it, the lighter the better because if I could throw this in the back of my pick up would be helpful
How much can you dead-lift? I doubt you can lift your own weight, and just the battery could weight that much, and the bike even more (even if you have a much smaller battery), so you will need a ramp on the truck that you can walk or ride the bike up, or a lift built into the truck to do it. With a lift, it has to handle the bike's weight, and the bike can't be very long or it wont' be able to roll onto the bed from the lift, and the weight can't be too much unless it's a big truck, or the front end of the truck may lift off the ground with the lift's weight and the bike's weight both cantilevered off the tailgate end. (unless you have jacks back there to hold the back end off the ground).
Carry weight- I weight 240, so it needs to hold at least 400 if I EVER have a passenger.
You'll also have to design it to carry a passenger--it may be illegal where you are to carry one without a saddle/seat specifically for them, and footpegs for them, etc. You may have to make the bike longer than you want to ensure they are forward of the rear axle, or else you may have wheelie and control/handling problems with them on there.
The issue I am having with designing, or starting the designing is I am not sure what parts are needed. i.e. Battery, motor, breaks, horn, etc.
It doesn't matter about any of that yet.
First you must design the bike itself. What do you need it to do, what do you want it to look like, how do you want it to handle, etc. Then find out how to design a frame that does those things, and suspension that works like you need it to, etc. Or find an existing bike that does that and looks like you want or can be modified to do so without changing the other characteristics.
Designing and building a motorcycle from scratch is not a trivial task. I recommend just looking around the web for people that have done this, and see what they had to say about the process, and how much they knew before they started, and how long it took. If you literally know nothing about it, you could spend years learning enough to start from scratch.
So...what *exactly* do you want? Make some drawings that layout the bike you want, how you want it to be "cool", what you think will make people look at it in awe.
Look at bikes that do what you want to do. See what they're like. What is their steering angle? Rake? Weight distribution? Wheel sizes? Brakes types? Suspension type and travel? Etc.
If you don't know anything about any of those and why they make different bikes for different purposes, go to a motorcycle club and start talking to the members with different bikes to see what they can tell you. You'll learn some of it, see some of it. Then you have a basis to look other stuff up.
I used to design all sorts of vehicles (and other things) when I was much younger. They did look awesome...but none of them were actually practical to build or ride/drive/fly. Some of the stuff that exists now would've looked awesome back then...but today it's just stuff--it's everywhere so noone even notices it.
Nowadays I just do practical, and let looks work themselves out around that. Maybe if I had a lot of money I'd be able to do both, but there's no time without that.
