Schwinn s600 mod help for competition!

Phil823

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Jun 28, 2022
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Taking part in a neighborhood electric ride build off/booze cruise. Everyone's budget is set at 350$ to spend on building, buying, or sprucing up an electric booze cruiser some type. To be judged on: speed, battery life (distance), comfort, and crowd favorite.

i tried searching the forum but cant find much on a 600 or direct links to ideas of motors/stuff

I have been given an old s600 for free. Allegedly it ran last summer.

Stock battery's are bad, motor seems to be currie 600w chain drive motor. Battery slot is 14"x7"x 3.5". Could go deeper if need be. appears drop out is 130mm. Maybe can i could bend the metal apart a little? or get a new swing arm welded if need be?

I'm 300lb, shooting for a solid 5 mile range. And whatever balance I can get for acceleration and top speed for my size would be great. Flat concrete use only.

Maybe switch to a hub drive if there is one that will pull me?

Anyone have any ideas for lithium or other new tech battery's/ controller and perhaps a new motor?

Stay with 36v? Go to 48v or 60v?

Any advice is more than welcome!
 
Honestly, unless you buy used stuff like from battery clearing house and other battery-recycling places, and test the cells and then build your own pack from it (which will mean learning a fair bit about how they work and how to safely disassemble and reassemble them, and possibly buying tools to do this depending on what you have), you may not be able to buy a (decently useful, not-made-of-unsafe-crap) lithium battery within that budget, depending on what you need it to do. :(

You can buy cheap new lithium batteries, but I wouldn't guarantee they'll work even once, much less safely continue to operate for any length of time, based on the kinds of problems we see from people coming here to troubleshoot them.

You can get direct SLA replacements for about $100-$150 or more, but they won't perform any differently than the originals did (they'll work, but you don't want to run them down to empty very often or leave them uncharged ever, always recharging them immediately when you stop and park, to keep their lifespan up). SLA are heavy and only provide about half the Ah they are rated at, when used at higher currents like EVs use.

How many wh you need for a range of 5 miles depends on terrain and riding conditions and speed you ride at, given 300lbs of you, plus call it 30-50lbs of scooter.

Is your s600 like this one?
https://electricscooterparts.com/schwinns600parts.html
If so, then based on this
https://electricscooterparts.com/hookup/SPD-36750Bwiring.htm
it uses a brushed motor and controller, with 36v SLA batteries.

The motor itself would handle 48v, but the controller may not, at least not without modification. Brushed controllers are relatively cheap, so if you did change to a 48v battery, you could also change the controller if yours either doesn't work at 48v or fails when doing so. The motor can spin proportionally faster with higher voltage, but it may take more power than the controller can output or the motor itself can handle for long periods to maintain the higher speed under load, depending on any slopes you ride on, or winds, etc.

It's possible the motor won't handle pulling the total weight up any slope at all, even with a bigger controller, but it's worth testing once you get a working battery, before you change anything else out.

You could probably upgrade the motor and keep ti as chaindrive, but you can also probably use a brushless (BLDC) motor in the wheel, these are available relatively cheaply these days, but you'd need a new controller for that, and you'll need to manually wire up the throttle/etc to the new controller, because it's unlikely to have matching connectors. Sometimes places like BCH have more than batteries, sometimes they have scooter motor wheels, too.

If you keep the chaindrive, then you have the option of changing gearing ratios to have better low-end torque, for startups or hill climbing, etc., though doing that lowers teh top speed. (I don['t recommend going the other way for more top speed because the motor might not have enough startup torque to get you moving.
 
thanks for the reply! mine is exactly like the one you linked. i have been looking at BCH for stuff. My terrain in the neighborhood is pretty flat , with little wind due to trees and houses. so that's a perk!

not looking to get a spot welder and making my own packs. I'm sure I could figure it out, but it appears that cost per battery vs prebuild seems to be fairly close together assuming time?

yea I contemplated SLA's, adding a 4th batter to bring it to 48V and about 10AH. wasn't sure about how well that would perform vs a little but more for lithium.

i saw these...perhaps 2 in of these in parallel 48v 15.6ah...so 31.2 AH (1500WH) in Parallel for 150$? or maybe just 1 is sufficient? 1 should at least be pretty close to stock SLA's?
https://www.batteryclearinghouse.com/products/greenway-48v-ebike-lithium-ion-battery-15-6ah-748-8wh-13s6p-18650



i have been looking into Hub motor options, but the Drop out is 130mm on a 12.5" tire. finding a motor to fit that spec seems to be challenging . i have no issue manually wiring up everything if you know of a motor to fit this required size.

or do you think keeping chain drive and trying for a 1000W or 1500W would be ideal? stock is a 90 tooth sprocket and 11 i think on the stock motor.
 
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