Man, this project has been driving me mad. I've made a few more changes to the bike. The weather in the UK is not that good some of the time. As this machine is designed to be used all year round, I made some changes to the motor cable protection. All connections now sit within the frame, out of the weather. This is why the bottom bracket area has been redesigned. I've also made some changes to the main frame area. This has made the bike a bit stiffer.
I've also mounted a rack so that I can use panniers to save me using a rucksack.
All cables and wires are cleaned up and the CA has a dedicated mount.
The final picture illustrates how marrow the frame is. It's just under 100mm wide. I wanted to make sure I could use a regular 68mm bottom bracket shell easily.
I've covered about 200 miles so far, testing the bike. Range between charges has been encouraging. Riding it fairly hard, but not taking the pi** too much has resulted in 75 - 80 miles, and not dropping below 3.6 v per cell. If I took it easy, I feel that 100 miles plus is possible.
Last night was a bit of a disaster. I've spent so many hours on this project I was getting frustrated. I plugged in the charger as I wanted to cover another 100 miles or so before the final strip down for paint. The charger made a buzzing sound and then popped, letting a small amount of smoke out. It's been used about three times. I need to figure out what the issue is as I only have a balance charger available now. It looks like one of the FETs has let go? I don't know enough about these things at the moment, so need to do some investigation work. Sigh. I'm struggling to find an 84v bulk charger, but I do have a Brusa charger that I might be able to program and use.
Anyway, the bike is now at my mates workshop as I was tired of looking at it. It was in danger of being chucked out of my workshop to reside in the garden.
That's it for now.
