My kick scooter project

[ElectricGod]

I noticed your folding arm is completely gone now I just done a fix for the folding mech but your lever is gone so no can do without it and looking at your locating pins it seems to be slightly different to mine, there seems to be a lot of small variation with these its like one child labourer builds one then Chinese whispers to the next how its done then he does his and so on down the line I bet the factory line bang them off the end of line no torque checks just twist throttle yeah it works paint chips whatever get stickers over them no one even blinks an eye lid straight on a container gone.

You wanted QC and standardization? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That and the welding is not very good either. They pretty much mash some welds on a few places and call it good. Eventually I'll need to strip everything out of the battery box and re-weld a lot of things. I keep wanting to buy a TIG welder, but that's $$ I'd rather spend on things to ride, but the welder would make so many other things possible too. Maybe after I get my credit card and paypal accounts back to 0 I'll buy a TIG welder. IF had a welder back when I first got mine, I would have redone a lot of welds on things just so they were going to hold up and not ever give out. Ah well...last another 6 months and the moped will be running around on a 3220 at 5000 watts and then I can tear this apart to fix welds.

Ever watch Top Gear? I love that show! They did a trip to China to look at Chinese cars. It was hilarious...they creeped a Chinese car up to brick wall and barely bumped the wall. The point was Chinese cars are so poorly built they can't take any abuse. These scooters are not much better.

The latching mechanism has always been sloppy and now that I'm running at 3X the horsepower, the front end needs to be solid. I used to have a problem where if I braked hard the front end would go into this oscillation and was really hard to control. I found that if I just got low on the scooter and leaned back that I could get most of it under control. It was pretty scary a couple of times with the handle bars wobbling in my hands and the scooter going back and forth with every oscillation. The new wheels and tires fixed a lot of that and then removing the front end latching mech took care of the rest. Last night just to test if it was all gone or not I got up to speed and crammed hard on the brakes and nada. It just slowed down hard in a straight line. The back wheel broke loose for a second, but that was all. I have no need normally to ever brake that hard. That's more like for when an idiot in a car pulls out in front of me. I'll post a pic of the final setup. It's still foldable, if I have a 5/8" and 9/16" wrench handy to take it apart, but why would I do that?

BTW...I was thinking about it this morning, but I just had the motor apart to replace the blown halls and meant to split out the phases so I could run delta or WYE. It's been on my mind that the next time I pulled part the motor for whatever reason to do that mod. I have those blue lights on the sides of the battery box. I never use them so I was thinking the switch which is on the throttle anyway would work great for switching Delta or WYE. And the blue lights could be added to the back side light switch.

 

[ElectricGod]

Well ES glitched and lost my last post.

I added a secondary support bracket made out of flat steel last night. I noticed that the turn buckles were stretching a tiny bit by the time I got home. IE: There was 1/16" of play that wasn't there in the morning. I put locktite on the threads on both turn buckles, but that may not have been enough to keep them from turning and loosening. I suppose I could have marked the turn buckles to see if they are slowly turning. Anyway, I used 3/8" all thread for everything. In the curved down tube, the top bolt was a pivot point for the old latching mechanism. It has a steel insert in it already so I just reused what was already there. The lower piece of all thread used to be 2 short pins in the vertical steel parts that were part of the latching mechanism when the handle bars were folded down. I drilled out the pins and tapped the holes for 3/8" thread. Threading the all-thread in there with two nuts and the support pieces was a royal pain. You thread in from one side, get the nut and bracket part in place on one side and then thread out the other side part way to get the bracket and nut in place for the other side. It would have been great if the all thread was instead a really long 3/8" set screw so I could have used an allen key to thread it in and out. Instead, I had to grip the threads with some pliers and turn it. That messed up the threads some, but I suppose the brackets will bung them up soon enough. I'll have to see about finding a 3/8 set screw that will fit here. Some kind of pipe around the all thread might help in the long run, but then accessing the all thread to screw it in and out would have been impossible. The two nuts just lock the all thread to the two vertical pieces. The brackets are secured against the sides of the down tube via the top piece of all thread so letting the bottom of each bracket "float" shouldn't be a problem. Also, this allows me to unbolt just the top of this support and then the brackets are free to swivel out of the way so the handlebars can fold. I'm thinking of using more flat steel to replace the turn buckles as well. If I trap the latching bar inside the flat steel, then the flat steel wont stretch and that will be more secure than the turn buckles. The top mount point could have been a 3/8" bolt, but I already had that piece of all thread in there from trying out bailing wire as a secondary support so I just reused it. The bottom mount points couldn't protrude beyond the vertical parts because that would block the deck from opening. I had to use all-thread there so it would sit flush to the vertical sides and then lock it in place via the two nuts.

 

[Ianhill]

That looks much better with the steel plates it not gonna budge now its pinned down in four places unless u put an elephant on it.

 

[ElectricGod]

That looks much better with the steel plates it not gonna budge now its pinned down in four places unless u put an elephant on it.

After the first two sets of turnbuckles stretched so quickly, I am skittish having them as the only support mechanism. The last thing I want is to be riding along doing 45 or 50 and have the front end fold up on me. I did that in my front yard going 2mph and that was bad enough. I'm pretty sure I'm going to replace the existing turnbuckles with something tougher and that will move the point of failure to the welds.

The u-bolts for the 3220 on the moped are ordered and the sprocket adapters are on their way. If the kick scooter was 100% I'd be doing work on the moped right now. The 3220 is just sitting there waiting for me to have time to try it out with the halls. I arbitrarily used red, blue and green on the hall signals, but have no idea which one is actually that color. I'll get back to this soon enough.

 

[Ianhill]

I got 1inch eye hooks designed for lifting that are small I think they hold .5 ton singularly and are couple pence each.


My razor bars folding mech snapped at full speed just one m6 thread took the full weight, I was very lucky my body weight going forward kept them upright so I could slow down, The folding mech on these act different if it failed would lunge the bottom of the battery box into the ground scratch shit out of the paint and fling who evers riding over the front of it , I see the concern with the neck folding not the bars.

 

[ElectricGod]

I got 1inch eye hooks designed for lifting that are small I think they hold .5 ton singularly and are couple pence each.


My razor bars folding mech snapped at full speed just one m6 thread took the full weight, I was very lucky my body weight going forward kept them upright so I could slow down, The folding mech on these act different if it failed would lunge the bottom of the battery box into the ground scratch shit out of the paint and fling who evers riding over the front of it , I see the concern with the neck folding not the bars.

I found some drop forged stainless eye bolts in 3/8" that will take whatever I can throw at them. The problem is the other end of the turn buckles are hooks. It's the only way to get something around the the latch bar. So either I use 7/16 hooks and forged eye bolts or just not use turn buckles at all. I think I'm going the "no turn buckle" route. A solid flat steel bar trapping the latch bar and bolting to that upper post should only come loose or undone if it gets taken apart. I'll cut a slot in the flat bar for the latch bar and then use another piece of steel that bolts to the flat bar and traps the latch bar between them. It wont be able to come apart or unlatch.

 

[ElectricGod]

I still haven't implemented the primary flat bar support pieces yet. So far the eye hooks and secondary flat bar parts are holding well. There is no movement or detectable stretching...yet.

 

[ElectricGod]

Last week I had a minor problem with my lights flickering one night. I went over a bump and that "fixed" them. Tonight they blinked out several times and then came back on. I looked over the wiring and found the connector that supplies 5 volts to the mosfet switch to turn them on was not making up. I looked at the solder connections and I have to say that I have been soldering since I was a kid and I'm pretty sure those connector ends were possibly my worst work ever. I must have been drunk when I soldered them. I don't know how the wires stayed in the connector or how it ever worked with the total lack of soldering skill I used on them. Well...fixed now.

 

[ElectricGod]

Check this out!!!

I picked up 7 of these BNIB including shipping for $45 each. That's an incredible price! On Hobbyking they are $59 + shipping. I have places for these right now in the Currie scooter or who knows...in the moped.

Supposedly the guy is going to have 16,000 mah turnigy packs in a couple of weeks. I'll probably buy a few of them too.

 

[Ianhill]

The 16000mah like I got are two 8000mah paralleled, your 10000mah cells are better really cuz there's just one, there's also a 20ah and thats a single cell if its a 16000mah lihv then they are single cells two, nice find cracking cell upto 60amp load.

 

[ElectricGod]

The 16000mah like I got are two 8000mah paralleled, your 10000mah cells are better really cuz there's just one, there's also a 20ah and thats a single cell if its a 16000mah lihv then they are single cells two, nice find cracking cell upto 60amp load.

Are yours 4S or 6S? I already sold 2 of them.

 

[Ianhill]

4s brick, How come they sold no likey ?

 

[ElectricGod]

4s brick, How come they sold no likey ?

Nope...my boss wanted a couple of them for his e-razor. He's currently running on a couple of SLA's at 24 volts. Two of these will get him to 33.6 volts and double his capacity and at half the weight and size. I ride my kick scooter into work every day and I see his e-razor and think about what cool things I could do with that little ride he has. I would dump the brushed motor immediately and then power it up to 48 volts and probably throw a BOMA on it or maybe the turnigy 80-160 I have. Either of those motors on that little platform would be really fast. Oh well...might get to do some of that as I get the EV bug into him. He might be satisfied with a small bump in performance, but might just decide that he wants to go the full ride too.

 

[ElectricGod]

I'm currently negotiating for 10 4S 16,000mah packs. We just got into that so who knows where that will work out. And the 10,000mah packs arrive today.

 

[ElectricGod]

I got 10 4S 16,000mah Turnigy packs for $74 each...That was $2 more than I wanted to pay per pack, but still lots cheaper than anywhere else and includes shipping. Geez! I have a shite load of batteries now! 10 16,000mah packs and 5 10,000mah packs and all those 18650's. LOL! I think I'm set for a while for batteries...and of course now I'm broke...but hey what can you do when a sweet deal like these come your way? Buy them and then worry about the details later! It's an investment...and I can always turn them over for a profit since I got them so cheap.

 

[Ianhill]

Thqt would build a lovely 20s4p 32ah pack and it would weigh bugger all and not that large a pack easy discharge 120amps i envy you, batteries are the expensive bit I'm looking at $435 for 5× 4s1p 20s 20ah in UK.
The 10× 4s2p 16ah would of only been $490 in UK hobbyking delivered.
I may stick with the 4s2p as they have not missed a beat for me considering all the bad hype, they not designed as a heavy discharge cell its even in their description but people still blast on them for the price and performance in my view they are very good even if 10c is ambitious 5c is plenty and can be designed around that.
Have you got a high erpm controller for the astro ? Its rpms may be limited, 10000rpm × 8poles will need a controller that can supply 80000erpm not many get that high ?

 

[ElectricGod]

Thqt would build a lovely 20s4p 32ah pack and it would weigh bugger all and not that large a pack easy discharge 120amps i envy you, batteries are the expensive bit I'm looking at $435 for 5× 4s1p 20s 20ah in UK.
The 10× 4s2p 16ah would of only been $490 in UK hobbyking delivered.
I may stick with the 4s2p as they have not missed a beat for me considering all the bad hype, they not designed as a heavy discharge cell its even in their description but people still blast on them for the price and performance in my view they are very good even if 10c is ambitious 5c is plenty and can be designed around that.
Have you got a high erpm controller for the astro ? Its rpms may be limited, 10000rpm × 8poles will need a controller that can supply 80000erpm not many get that high ?

My Kelly controllers will handle that no problem. I think the models I have are both capable of 20k RPM. If I run the motor at lower voltage and gear it taller, I can stay under that RPM limit. I've run the 3220 on a cheap Chinese controller at 48 volts and it reached the proper top RPMs. I haven't tried it on a Kelly running at 82 volts so who knows.

Like any battery solution...abuse it and of course it wont hold up well. Use it at less than it's ratings and it will do great. Manufactures all have marketing departments that "push" the agenda that their product is pure platinum when it's probably more like maybe sterling silver. LOL...I expect that. Any LIPO I buy wont be as good as the marketing monkeys say it will be. It's not hard to build extra capacity into the system so that you don't over drive the batteries. I think the people that dis on these batteries are trying to compare them to a high end pack at 2X the cost. Well of course they aren't that good. It doesn't take a rocket science degree to figure that out.

You talk about being envious...tell me about it! I've seen plenty of folks make sweet deals on batteries or whatever and I had no $$ to take part on the deal. Well it just worked out that I had the cash at the right time to take this one home. BTW...I don't know what shipping to the UK would be or if it's even possible to ship to you, but there's lots more packs to possibly buy in the future. So far I've bought 99% of the stock this guy has, but he says he will have more soon. I can probably swing a deal for you if you want it.

The 10,000mah packs arrived today. Check out all that gorgeous electron storage! If that's not "New in box" then I don't know what is. I checked the packs and all the cells are 3.85 to 3.87 volts. I have 3 chargers going right now pushing electrons into batteries and 4 more packs to go. Back when I got all those single 8000mah lipo cells to make up my existing 20S packs, I charged them 3 at a time. I think I have 70 cells...good grief that took a while! I'm pushing 3 amps per pack which is all my chargers will do.

 

[ElectricGod]

I got the 16,000mah packs coming...10 of those...geez...I have a lot of batteries now! But hey they were another sweet deal so I had to jump on them.

 

[ElectricGod]

6 more 10,000mah packs came my way for $40.79 each. LOL! bought them too! I'm pretty much set for batteries for a good while! I'm thinking that maybe Turnigy is dumping all their stock of packs for uber cheap because they are about to come out with a new product line and don't want the 10C packs competing with it. Better buy them up while the sun is shining! These packs will run out after a while and then you wont get any for these kinds of crazy prices. The guy I bought these from has 9 more, but I ran out of money or else I would have picked them up too.

It's not pretty, but it works really well. I used my LIPO charger to check the capacity of two packs. I set the discharge current to 5 amps, but for whatever reason it would only discharge at .7 amps. As a result, it took all day to check the capacity of the packs. Well that was nuts so I built a load tester. Or rather I threw one together. I had a couple of 50 watt, 3 ohm resistors and some heating elements out of a couple of hair driers. I used them all in parallel as my load. It draws a continuous 12 amps and then one of the heating elements switches on into high power mode every few seconds when it cools down. It doubles current draw to about 28 amps. It's a good opportunity to see if 2-3C discharge rates cause these packs to sag. I see about .3 volts sag under 28 amps load all the way down to discharged or 3 volts per cell. Anyway in 35 minutes or so, I can load test a 10,000mah pack to 3 volts per cell. The resistors get really hot so planting them on the aluminum helps keep them cool. The black thing is a fan from a blow drier. The aluminum gets really hot so the fan helps with that and draws a little more current. Everything is powered through the shunt so Ah and current draw are realistic for everything that significantly loads the battery. I have a celllog on the balance connector to make sure no cells drop too low. The fan is really loud (like a blow drier), but the contraption works. I reset the Ah to 100% at te start of each load test and then watch it count down. It tops out at 99.9Ah so when the cells reach 3 volts whatever is the difference from 100 Ah is the capacity of the pack. So far one pack has had a weak cell and caused me to stop the load test early. That one cell reached 3 volts while the rest were still at around 3.5 volts. I'll charge it again and load test it once more before I contact the seller. Hopefully that's the only one.

She's ugly as can be and looks seriously badly made, but oh well it took 30 minutes to cobble together and does what I needed. I'm pretty sure anybody trying to sell something that looked like this contraption would never sell even one.

 

[ElectricGod]

I was about to rig up a couple of 12S BMS boards for these packs, but realized I didn't have balance cables for them. Well that will be a week or two before I have cables so I can adapt a BMS to use the balance connectors on the packs. I intend to put 3 or 6 of them in the Currie and my boss is going to use two in his e-razor. Both need a BMS and I have 4 12S BMS boards. I plan to replace the XT 90's with 6mm bullets. +V will get a female bullet and -V will get a male bullet so I can connect the packs together in series. Other wise I need XT90's and wires to connect one pack to the next and that takes up lots more space. In between time I will need to balance charge on my RC charger. Ugg!

 

[ElectricGod]

I got a little present in the mail today.

 

[ElectricGod]

More presents arrived today. I now have 11 10,000mah packs and 10 16,000mah packs.

This is the last of the LIPOs I just bought. $40.79 a pack was pretty damned cheap!

 

[dventu]

Where did you buy them so cheap I'm interested.

Sent from my SM-G925I using Tapatalk

 

[ElectricGod]

Where did you buy them so cheap I'm interested.

Sent from my SM-G925I using Tapatalk

Ebay...I negotiated with the sellers

 

[ElectricGod]

Over the weekend I decided to take a close look at my batteries in the scooter. My LIPO packs are virtually worthless now. The used laptop cells are doing great. I load tested all of them and there were a few that were getting a little weak, but none that had failed completely and even the weak ones were delivering 1500mah or better. I replaced the weak ones anyway with others I had load tested and know are good. I have all those 10,000 mah packs just sitting there waiting to be used somewhere. Since I had my existing LIPO packs out of the scooter to test them, I tried the 10,000 and 16,000mah packs in the battery bay. The 10,000mah packs are a perfect fit across the width of the bay. 5 of them at 4S each is 20S and that's exactly what I am running on the scooter and 5 of them are a great fit side by side. What's more, their height stacked two tall is the right height for the bay. I'll be making 10 of these packs into a giant pack for the scooter. The old LIPO's are not all dead. Some cells are still good while others are not. I'll pull the packs apart and toss the used up cells and do something with the rest. I bought the Trunigy packs just because they were uber cheap and figured I would find a home for them somewhere. I didn't think of putting them in the kick scooter until now.

That will be 20mah at 20S2P or 16,000 watt/hours.