Electric Ninja

My goal is to have the bike running by March 16th. Of course there will still be many months spent afterwards tweaking the user interface and refining the bike. This goal means setting aside a few design issues, like rebuilding the battery packs with thicker copper bus bars and finding a way to slightly reduce the size of the lower battery pack to fit inside stock fairings.

Other more pressing issues come to mind like bolting the motors into the frame without creating any large stress concentrations. Welding the aluminum created slight warping in the mount so I'm considering using a rubber damping material to distribute the load more effectively. I also would like to have better access to the motor terminals since there is little clearance in the mounting frame. This should be easily solved by trimming back the large aluminum mounting plates slightly. Luckily, doing so will have no effect on structural integrity, it will only take more time.

Honestly, until last summer the blog has been somewhat of a joke, and more of a log for myself than anything else. I realize I've done a terrible job both maintaining and updating it, so I'm going to make it a point to post quality updates regularly from now on. In light of this, here are some pictures taken back in August and Spring of 2010 of the motors in the bike frame.

Downtube attachments:

Side view of the bike taken at Manzanita Micro in Kingston (Notice the freshly painted rims and new tires!):

Quite a few parts for the bike are scheduled to arrive this weekend including some double walled color coded glue infused heat shrink, 700 amp fuses, and heavy duty tinned copper lugs. I also ordered a smaller bore sprocket to fit on the single motor shaft so I can get the bike running with one motor just for now.

The Agenda for this quarter:

-Bolt in motors and set chain to the proper length

-Lay out components where they will be bolted into place

-Cut cable to length

-Crimp lugs making sure to bend the cable as they will be installed

-Heatshrink lugs

-Bolt on finished cable

-Complete low voltage wiring

-Start the bike!