LiPoly powered 18HP Twin Motor Brushless MONSTER build!

This reminds me of the days when I rode street motorcycles. (mostly in the 1980's) Every year they kept coming out with bigger and more powerful bikes. Somehow the "fun" of the smaller displacement bikes got lost in the quest for maximum power. (I liked my relatively smaller sized RD400 and the F2 class it raced in) I even had a lot of fun with a tricked out MB5 (50cc) bike... you could ride 100 miles for about a dollar. :)

So history repeats I guess... :roll:

For me I'm going to commit to the 750 watt law and design for that... I know it sounds lame, but once you let go of the 750 watt limit you have to ask:

"Is there any distinction at all between the ebike and emotorcycle?"

(pedals?) :lol:

zero-x-electric-motorcycle-09.jpg


And I'm not saying that it's the wrong thing to do, but it's just not my genre...
 
Welcome Liveforphisics, or should I saw Death2physics? That is what we are doing here right? Trying to escape the eternal restraints of gravity and his bitchy mother= Earth (just kidding, I love the earth).

Anyway, I hope to see that Specialized on youtube this Spring. I too will be riding an electric FSR this year. Two weeks is very pessimistic, you dont have to lie here to kick it. LOL.

DAMN, you spent some $$$ on those bearings, but it sounds like Gary is right about those motors. I think you will find one big motor is better, and much less complicated than 2. We simply don't have the technology yet, most of us have already asked this question. You might want to focus on efficiency when deciding on motor, chain, drive. The tolerances in the higher end motors create a necessary platform in order to accomplish the power transmission to the wheel without overheating your whole system. Eventually these RC systems could be water cooled and have a radiator just like the big dogs. You are right on time to recieve one of the first editions of Matt's gearbox, this could get you into ebike trouble quickly. I know its daunting, but you really should read that whole thread on high power rc motors.

Well you do come from some very high power racing lines, but D is right, the lawman wont even look twice. I too have experienced the immortality of 180 mph, but I never got very good at wheelies. Hey, that's the REAL reason you are here....too many tickets. HAHA!

Forge ahead good sir
 
We welcome many different "genre's" of ebikes here:

"Big Iron" Hub Motors
Recumbents
Trick Riding Ebikes (Urban Assault)
Trials Riding Ebikes
Road Racer Ebikes
Mountain Bike Ebikes
Full Fairing Ebikes
etc...

...we all have our own tastes. :)
 
Hey Man!


WELCOME!!! :D

Looking forward to your build.

If you need any advice on reduction parts, just ask. Many of us here have been down this road or a similar road before.

I cannot wait to see this thing running!

Matt
 
Thanks for all the kind responses guys! What a nice forum to be so kind and welcoming! Great group of people!

To answer some questions, each pack is 5s and 4900mAh. I have 12 of these packs, but I'm willing to get more of them or different batteries or whatever it takes.

So, working with the motors today, I decided that the metal used for the shafts is not really as strong as I would like. It seems to be mild-steel.

So, I'm going to have new shafts made from something very strong, perhaps some sort of centerless ground tool steel. I like to eliminate the possible failure points for things BEFORE they fail when I think I find a weak point.

For the rear wheel, I got a tip that you can buy a wheel made that is designed for tandem bikes that uses 48+ spokes, and steel hubs with steel freewheel parts. I can't seem to find any in 24" sizes though... and my FSR frame is built to only use a 24" rear wheel. I'm guessing that I can have something custom drilled if needed.

With this sort of massive power on the rear wheel, I think it's very important to have the strongest rear wheel I can find to hopefully avoid tearing the hub out of the rim. That could be a pretty ugly thing to have happen at the wrong moment...

Looking over receipts, I found it funny that I paid more for just the new class 7 bearing upgrades for the motors than I paid for the motors themselves :? Strange how those things work sometimes...


I had hoped the Kelly would able to run sensorless, but if it requires it, then I will mount some halls, or go with the RC speed controllers.

As far as running them in series, I absolutely know that it works when the motors are timed correctly and mechanically synchronized. It's the same current through each coil at the same time, and it works great. I've done it with motors that were mounted inline on a common shaft with good results. Being chain coupled side-by-side should be no different.

Best Wishes,
-Luke
 
Luke:
My buddy used to build custom hubs (X-large diameter) for his tandems and the spokes would have 3-4 cross and lashed to each other at one crossover using stout wire. They were VERY strong.
I am sure anything can be broken but I think these would be strong enough for most stunts.
How about a composite wheel like a Spynergy?
Cheers,
Rob
 
Look forwad to seeing this up and running...Might
convince Methods to get rid of his "boat anchor" of a hub motor and get REAL motor in his Kona hehe ;-P

Dunno how your going to like it...well i do, you will find it mildly amusing i think, but wont be long before your back on either the KMX or Suzuki... I used to ride an earlier model of the Suzuki GSXR (slingshot) fantastic bike...

Anyhoot...best of luck with the build, very curious to see the 'drivetrain' ;)

Kim

Apprentice gangsta 8)
 
John in CR- It's designed for a rim that is 24", so I'm guessing that's an OD around 29-30" with tire. Dropping down to 23" over all diameter would be a pretty large drop, and it would definately effect it's ability to blast over logs, jump, and hill climb.

Skydog- Does your friend still make those fancy uberstrong wheels? I would love to talk to him and order up something bullet-proof for this application.

Aussiejester- Thanks :) Sportbikes and motocross bikes are fantastic machines. I have 4 motorcycles total, 3 toy/race cars, and 2 great transporation cars. I'm guessing that the E-bike wont get too used too much when the stable is filled with so many other rides begging to get used and abused, but I do love the silent and stealth aspect of the machine :)
 
Luke never disappoints.

Every time I think I built something cool I will call him up and be like:

"Luke, dude, I built this insane electric RC car that goes 55mph!"
(all proud of myself thinking that I am the man. . .)

and invariably he will respond with:

"Dude, I just built one that goes 90 miles per hour out of a solid blivet of titanium and it has a small nuclear reactor on it powered by plutonium that I stole from some Iranians while riding my 250hp motorcycle on a sidewalk at 180mph with no cloths on."!

The scary part is that he is no joke.
The real deal, a true nut-case no-BS mad-scientist

-methods

P.S. But. . . Even though you have a 6' x 4' custom built reef tank in your living room I still think I have you beat.

I have 500 Gallons of salt water precariously balanced on raw wood in my living room (the other half is out of the picture) which happens to be in an abandoned house that I squat at with no heater or AC (though I recently installed doors). My car has a Optima Yellow Top in the passenger seat because i have to use it to jumpstart my car every day, but that cools because I perminently mounted the jumper cables from under the hood through my firewall. My electric bill is over $600 every month, I went 6 weeks with a split open tooth in my mouth because I hate the dentist and I just bought another $500 bucks worth of ozone reactors off ebay because I am convinced I can raise the ORP of my tank to 500mV without killing all the fish :mrgreen:

For scale, that is 8 feet wide

Kelly_120V_220A_001.jpg

Cheers to over achievement, overkill, over engineering, and strangely overt heterosexuality
 
Methods- You have always been a delightfully ghetto super-hero to me. I love everything about you. I loved seeing all the metal "art" you would make when you first got a welder. I loved when you would blow up your zillion dollar prelude engine on a monthly basis. I loved the calls for emergency reef chemistry solutions at odd hours of the night.

For those of you that don't know, Methods started out from a very rough situation with no shortage of bad things going on in his life. He managed to take a situation that would have ruined the life of a lesser man and turn himself into a very well educated engineer for livemore national labs. He also managed to find an amazing and beautiful wife who is a laser physicist!!! **DROOLS**

He is inspirational to me, and I could never ask for a better friend than Methods has been to me over the years.

Methods has also always shocked me with the similarities in our choices in hobbies. We didn't talk for half a year, then I call him, and it turns out we both jumped head-first into saltwater aquariums. Another long period of time passes, and it turns out we both went into the most difficult aspect of aquariums, growing the stoney species of reef corals. And we both became overboard fanatics for it. Another period of time goes by with no comunication, and when we talk again, we are both obcessed with ultra stupidly high power RC stuff.

I don't have a clue what the next hobby I will be getting into, but I don't even have to wonder if Methods will also somehow get into it completely independent of whatever got me involved with it. We are very dialed into the same brainwaves or something.


You have me beat on aquariums. I have a meger 310gal tank... I wouldn't even be able to comfortably stretch out in it. I wanted to go 6ftx6ft, or even 6ftx10ft, but I would have had to tear the wall out of the house to get it inside, and when you are renting a place, I think they tend to frown on that :) As soon as a finally buy a house though, I'm going to do something in the multi-kilo-gallon range :)

Here is a picture of my coral tank:
gp1040476largexy5.jpg


And another:

tankend800cz3.jpg



If you want to do a little reading about it, and the 1-of-a-kind lighting system i built for it, you can check it out here.

http://glassbox-design.com/2009/part-1-lfps-xenon-and-led-reef-lighting-system/
 
Thanks for the link! Sounds like a great guy to give a call about getting the toughest possible wheel built for my project. Since adding 8lbs of motor/sprocket to the rear triangle is going to all ready ruin the handling of the bike, I'm not too worried about trying to get the lightest wheel on earth. That should cut costs. I would love to end up with something that can handle some abuse before it fails.

Even wimpy motocross wheels look so increadibly strong compaired to a bicycle wheel. I'm going to be feeding torque to that hub on par with a wimpy dirtbike. I'm hopeing bicycle parts exist that can handle that sort of stress.
 
liveforphysics said:
Methods- You have always been a delightfully ghetto super-hero to me. I love everything about you.
Click to expand...

less bromance, more building! 8)

Good luck with your project, liveforphysics, after riding http://www.stealthelectricbikes.com.au 's Stealth Bomber I'm convinced that beefy electric MTB's deserve their own place in the array of 2 wheeled vehicles. They are both useful and awesome. My build is progressing very slowly but I can't wait to get some kW's pushing my DH bike too!

file.php
 
Life,

That is so true about parallel hobbies. Many of us here have alot in common.

I started out garbage picking 80cc bikes when I was 12, porting and polishing them with a Dremel, milling the head and cutting a hemi chamber into it (all with a bench mounted hand drill), and selling them for a proffit. I moved into high SPL audio (had 800 pounds of gear in one car featured in Auto Sound and Security mag), then when into manufacturing RC helis. That led into top speed RC cars (126mph is my best yet). Then I got the E-bike bug.

Many guys here have quite a few achievements, indeed!

I think the draw for most E-bikers is the silence and relative simplicity of E-bikes. There is something to be said for stealth. Look at the stealth fighter, it is slow (relatively speaking) and handles so crappy you could not fly it without computers. But, it is stealth! COOL. 8)

Anyway, again, welcome to the frey...........

Matt
 
Ugh. . . I forgot about SPL...

I once had a 1992 Toyota Tercel with two JL Audio 15W6's
I became obsessed with stopping the rattles so I filled the entire uni body of the car with expanding foam
I then covered that in 2 layers of super dynomat

Where I went wrong was the trunk. . . I removed the trunk lid to fill it with expanding foam and when I did it went from a 90 degree angle to a 100 degree angle!
When I tried to put it back on it had a 1" overbite !!! DOH! Had to get a machinist to help me build a new bracket to engage the latch. Always leaked after that. . .

And then of course, once I got every square inch of the sheet metal damped then the back window started vibrating so hard that it worked itself loose

to hell with SPL !

-methods

P.S> Did you say 127mph electric car !?!?! Is that on the street or on some sort of sticky track? Wow. . .

P.S.S. Luke, you better get your ish together and start posting pictures or your thread is going to get spam sandwiched with tangential BS :mrgreen:
 
I also got into the SPL thing way back in the day... but I try to pretend I never was into it... Memories of 3 x 200amp alternators capable of killing my idling engine from electrical load alone come flooding back...

I'm out of town until Monday, so I'm afraid there wont be any new pics or new work getting done for the next few days. :(

It is fun to get to know you guys though :)
 
Too funny!

I had four 140 amp alternators sticking out the hood of my 94 Saturn SL2. It had eight 15 inch subs running 8,000 watts, 6 batteries, 1.5 inch thick Lexan windshield and it was driveable.

Way too much fun!

Yup, 126mph on the street no less. No BS on any of this. That was a modified TC4 with a hand laid CF body running a Neu 1515 on 12S (4000 watts). 0 to 85 in 2 seconds. 0 to 100 in 2.5 seconds.

Anyway, this is not my thread. Sorry for hijacking it. It is just good to see fellow "CDO" guys here. Oh, that is like OCD but in ALPHABETICAL ORDER! :mrgreen:

Matt
 
I authorize anyone to thread jack Lukes thread

dude. . . Luke, this guy is insane. We need to add him to the list. . .

You drove that SPL beast?
That is bad ass.

My electric car was built on a frame I got for free. It was some sort of old RC10 buggy?
(I dont know RC cars at all, I am a plane guy)

I took a Neu1110-2Y and ran 6S 2200 TP Extreme lipo packs on it with a Ph80 ESC
I am all about Ghetto rig so I did nothing to the car except to zip-tie a wheelie bar made out of carbon fiber rods taped together
I did not even strap down the battery inside.
I smoked the tires off in only a few runs. . . Stupid tires were smoking off all the way to the end
It would always either flip up into the air or spin out.

Here is a movie:
http://deviantmethods.com/PostHold/RC/Brushless_RC10/6S_Brushless_RC10_Buggy.wmv

I think the gearbox melted last time I drove it
I refuse to spend a single penny on it though. . . GHETTO!!!

-methods
 
recumpence said:
I had four 140 amp alternators sticking out the hood of my 94 Saturn SL2. It had eight 15 inch subs running 8,000 watts, 6 batteries, 1.5 inch thick Lexan windshield and it was driveable.
Click to expand...

dude. . . You have the sickness bad. . .
I am going to have to read your build thread.
I can only imagine what your bikes end up like.

I love insanely expensive hobbies that serve no practical purpose :lol:
Completely and totally unreasonable!
NICE

Bonus points for using a Saturn which I assume was just the car you happened to have when you started?

-methods

Luke: I think we need to start a thread just for insane people. High visual content sort of thing. Anything goes. Only real rule is that it has to be your own work/projects and not pictures/posts/things that others have done/seen. I have some super ghetto-rig pictures that I could fish off my old harddrive.

P.S. We need to find this guy and get him in on it too!
I got this from a post around here someplace.
The guy is a bad-ass

serialhybrid2ver2.jpg
 
methods said:
P.S. We need to find this guy and get him in on it too!
I got this from a post around here someplace.
The guy is a bad-ass
Click to expand...

That's fitek's : http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3423&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=15
 
I'm glad to be cured of car audio.

I had a tame system in comparison. 1.2-1.4kW running through two Adire Audio Tempest 15" subs in a monster MDF enclosure that took up the entire boot space of my '98 Camry and had ports that came straight through both the 6x9 holes on the rear shelf. :roll: :wink: I had fun then and can laugh now thinking back on it. Fark me the amount of liquid nails I had to use...

The car was a boat to drive as well. Dressing up a turd my be an applicable description. Thankfully it never ended up with a body kit, fully sick spoiler or MR2 twin turbo swap/hack job.

P.S. Good work on the coral liveforphysics. I know nothing about keeping fish@home but I've snorkled in the lower Great Barrier Reef and it's dying. Handy that you've got a mini one in the lounge. :D Always good to have a backup 8)
 
I kinda had a hunch that lots of folks here would have been former car audio fans.

Ghetto-crap cars so weighted down with audio equipment that they handle like garbage, and even with lame engine mods, they still ended up slow as slugs. This kinda describes my early highschool days. Then came the 300zx twin turbo, giant turbo upgrades, and I never cared a bit about car audio again :)

Now I'm into very lightweight cars. Gotta be under 2000lbs for me to be interested in it. Rarely even turn-on the radio when I drive, and couldn't be happier.

I'm excited to get this special wheel built. Does anyone know of someone pumping large amounts of brushless motor power through the freewheel of a bicycle? Has anyone here stripped a freewheel?
 
I have pulled 7kw through a cheap Dicta freewheel without problems.

I personally would recommend a White Industries ENO freewheel for your rig. They cost a friggin fortune, but are the cats ***

Matt
 
I checked my 24" bike wheel and it's 24" at OD including the tire, and my 17" motorcycle rim with tire is 23"OD. Looking at your pic, that looks like a 24" bicycle tire to me. I'm not sure why bike tires are quoted differently, but they are. If you want strong and light, I'm sure there's something made for motorcycles that will fit the bill. Plus then you can have a good built in drum brake too. The issue would be whether or not the motorcycle tire will fit in your frame, along with axle size and sprocket mounting issues which you obviously can easily solve. Money doesn't seem to be much of an object, so I'm sure you can find a downhill or freeride type wheel set up that is strong enough and save a bit of weight over something for a motorcycle, but at least with a motorcycle wheel there's not doubts about it holding up.

John
 
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