Electric Ninja

This quarter is moving way too fast. A lot of progress has been made this month. The design is complete and even further simplified from what it was just weeks ago. The plates will be water jet cut out early next week. The motors also arrived and I found a way to turn the face plates so the mounting bolts don't interfere with the chain and the belt drive.

Alex's dad painted the rear fairing. It looks like new.

There have been some pretty significant changes on ZX-E. We're going with dual k91-4003 motors now. I completely redesigned the motor mount and managed to incorperate the battery mount into it.

Here's a solidworks model Alex drew up of the bike frame with the motor mount design inside it:

Finite Element Analysis:y

We were able to build a mockup of the design seen in this picture. Notice how the motor mount and battery mount are incorperated into one piece. The motors are also offset for a few reasons, to keep the cg of the motors towards the center of the bike, and to reduce the forces on the motor shafts.

I also have one of the earlier versions of the Synkromotive controller we'll be using in the bike:

The project is really shaping up and we've finally settled on a design that is simple and effective.

This quarter Alex and me are working with a few people to build the motor and battery mount. The design and fabrication will be my senior project at UW and everyone else is getting 499 credits. We're planning on cutting out the aluminum plates for the mount at the school's water jet CNC machine.

We've been learning a lot about how to fabricate such a complicated mount set up to fit the warp 8. There are new pictures in the photo gallery.

In recent news, Alex cut out the bottom of the old gas tank and painted it a new clean white color.

Our agenda for this quarter is to:

-Do FEA on the motor mount

-Determine placement for the controller, DC-DC, and charger

-Build the battery frame after I get exact specifications on how the BMS will be set up

-Fabricate the motor mount with UW's water jet

Over the last few months I've been writing a Matlab program to estimate 0-60 time, quarter mile time and top speed for any electric vehicle. I ran some numbers using Travis Gintz's EVFR to test the program. There are more screen shots under the Planning section of the Photo Gallery

There are also a few pictures of our basic wiring diagram in the Planning section of the Photo Gallery. We want to get a better idea of the wiring layout before we finalize the battery mount design.

We built the first battery pack this week. 48 cells, 40 volts with four cells in parallel. Woo hoo!

I'm going to be redesigning the motor mount next week. We're still trying to determine how exactly to mount the batteries to the frame. After some discussion this last weekend, we're considering doing some pretty serious modifications to the frame itself to make the battery cages.

The batteries, contactors, dc-dc and charger are in! Thank you Dave Kois! Pictures in the photo gallery.

So going with the Warp 8 means we are going to have some difficulty mounting this beast in the frame. Direct mounting it to the front sprocket means the outboard side of the motor would stick out the right side of the bike about 5 inches or so. So we are planning on a mount that would hold the motor more in the center ofthe bike, with an intermediate shaft between the motor driveshaft and the rear wheel. This allows us to use 2 sets of gears, which results in more fine tuning of the final gear ratio as well as allowing us to usea smaller rear sprocket (as opposed to the huge rear sprockets found on many direct drive e bikes). Pics can be seen in the photo gallery.

Last night we finally dropped the motor at 3am. We sold it to a guy down in Tacoma who wants to put it in a small dune-buggy. The pictures are up in the photo gallery.

I've been working with Dave Kois as a summer intern this last month. They're all really great guys down there and they have been helping out getting the conversion going. Dave Kois runs the show in Lacey and he's been extremely helpful getting parts at cost for me. Thanks Dave! I'm planning on picking up a Warp 8 from work tomorrow and getting an idea of how it will fit.

Oh and just last weekend Alex and me went to the Wayland invitational and saw a few Teslas, the Killacycle and the White Zombie. I'll post some pictures soon.

-Rich

Sorry for not updating the site for so long. (I know we have a lot of fans out there). hah.

After a few hours of frustration, trying to figure out what the vibrations were coming from. We got  the motorcycle running smoothly when my uncle Rocky helped me out over the phone. He told me to use a screwdriver and put the handle on my ear while touching the metal end to the bike frame while the engine was running. The homemade stethoscope worked like a charm and we found that the vibrations were coming from one of the down tubes. At one end of the down tube, two bolts held the tube in place. One of them was missing and the other was too long. When the end of the down tube was held in place, the vibrations stopped.

Alex and I were both surprised because the sound seems to emanate from the front of the bike, but the loose part was towards the rear.

Update: We're not sure if we want to use an AC motor anymore. A large DC outperforms AC and  still costs less.

We got a little time to work on it over the weekend so we cleaned and flushed the fuel pump and new gas tank and connected all the hoses back up and gave her a shot. After a few attempts the motor roared to life. There is likely a loose piece somewhere making that vibrating noise that comes and goes when you lean the bike side to side and the throttle cables are probably crushed somewhere making smooth revving difficult, but we are happy that the bike runs.