Chopper "Electra"Glide

Hi,

Just finished to mount all stuff on my custom chopper, now it only needs some paint here and there and it will be ready to cruise!

My dog "Lobo" seems to like the bike so much, that he won´t leave the place so I can take some decent pictures of it!


One side:



the other side:



And a close up on the stuff:




It has a Cyclone 500w motor, powered by a 24V 12 Ah lead acid battery pack and a 7 speed nexus rear hub.


Hope you like it!

I like it, sure!

need one like that, so old scool :wink:

get fun

Fab bike!!!!

Lovely looking dog too
post up some video when you go out riding please, if Lobo will let you ride it that is LOL


Cheers,

D

Kaño said:

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Interesting gear shift location........ :wink:

Kaño said:

Interesting gear shift location........ :wink:

Click to expand...

One of my buddies in Seattle puts his SRAM twist grip on the seat post itself. 22.2mm is the old standard BMX and cruiser seat post diameter, as well as the normal diameter for all handlebars other than drop bars.



Sorry for the tiny picture, but the bigger ones are broken here:
http://www.deadbabybikes.org/bikes/blakbike.htm

Chalo

michaelplogue said:

Interesting gear shift location........ :wink:

Click to expand...

Yes, the idea was to make it as old school as possible! Shifting below your seat is slower but adds that vintage feeling I like so much. :lol:

Also, I test ride it yesterday, and only got 1.5 km out of the pack before lvc kick in perhaps the cyclone motor is to much for my sla 24v 12Ah batteries.

Today, I plug in another 24v 12ah pack in parallel, and got about 4km before it cuts out again, man this motor is power hungry or what!

I’ve notice that if I ride in first gear, the pack last a bit longer, but when I want to shift up to ride a about 20 kmxh, it will last only 1 or 2 km. Any ideas? Could the 24v 12ah pack manage this motor or do I need the cumbersomeness of two 24v 12ah wired in parallel?

It's beautiful! If you are still running with SLA, upgrade ASAP to LiFePo4 or similar and get your Ah capacity UP,
and go for miles of smiles at high speeds.

What a bike, custom build, custom brains = a winner!

Reid Welch said:

It's beautiful! If you are still running with SLA, upgrade ASAP to LiFePo4 or similar and get your Ah capacity UP,
and go for miles of smiles at high speeds.

What a bike, custom build, custom brains = a winner!

Click to expand...

Wow! Thank you very much! I’m very happy with it! And I enjoy very much that you like it too!

As for the limited range, the problem is solved, it was a bad connection at the battery positive lead

Today I switch to LIPO batteries, two 22.2V 4ah in parallel (is that 2s2p or 12s2p??) for a total of 22.2v 8ah battery pack.

First thing I notice is the tremendous loss of weight of my bike; it was a super diet program! I traded 20 kilos of lead and Nimh, for 1 kilo of Lipos!

OK, that for the good part, for the bad part, the bike is even slower than before!! I use to reach 37 kmxh without pedaling and now I can hardly reach 32kmxh, also the motor feels "puffy". Those this has to do with the voltage of the Lipos being 22.2V instead of the 24V as the SLA pack?

Also, the bike lost torque and speed, is this normal?? I was caught by the videos we have here of you guys burning rubber with lipos, that me expectations were so high I broke my teeth when I hit reality.

Even Paul from Cyclone TW told me that this 500W motor could reach 48kmxh with Lipofe4 and 50 Kmxh with Lipos.

I’m totally lost, about this. I need some help!

I have a hub motor but as far as the SLA's go, I've had a similar experience. SLA's are horrible for e-bikes unless you absolutely can't get anything else. I can ride 10 miles on 60v9ah of SLA's but by the end of my journey, my LVC is kicking in like crazy. Have you checked the real voltage of the lipos? From what I've heard from reading on here is that when you have only a couple packs of lipos hooked up, the voltage droppage with load is enormous maybe even more than SLAs so maybe that is why your speed is slower. YOu'll need twice as many lipos probably or just go directly to lifepo4. I'd go for the evcomponents.com lifepo4. It's high quality. $349 for 48v10ah lifepo4.

here's that battery pack I was talking about. 100A max cutoff. That's very good.
http://www.evcomponents.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=H4810

I don’t understand, you say that I need more Lipo pack in parallel to achieve the same performance that I had with my SLA?

From what I read here, Lipos withstand high C loads better than other chemistries, these are 15C cells and I only reaching peak of 49 amps so that is 6 C so sag shouldn’t be so bad, I’m seeing 3V voltage drop under this kind of load. Is that bad?

I just tried a booster pack I managed to built form my former Nimh pack, I built a 4.8V 7ah pack just to see what happens.

Took the thing for a ride and after riding the bike for a little time, so the Lipo voltage stabilize to 22.2v, I hooked in series the booster pack, the bike got better acceleration, felt more powerful, but I could not test top speed as after 10 blocks the voltage suddenly felt to 19V under load, it seems that the mini booster pack disappeared or started to sag far worst than the Lipos, so no more voltage boost.

From this experience I could tell, that I need more voltage, but there are no 7S lipo cells around, how you guy achieve those great performances with this Lipo packs?

I'm not expert so maybe just disregard what I said. I have no idea. I'm just saying what I read. Another person said that his lipos had lots of voltage drop too just like what you are reporting.

I do know that SLA's can handle much higher amps than almost any other battery. Maybe it's the current draw that is causing loss of performance. You should go on the E-bike General Discussion forum and write something like "My Lipos aren't performing very well" and I'm sure someone will figure it out for you. This forum gets less traffic than that one. Maybe you have small C -rating on your lipos and they can't handle high current draw? I'm just guessing. You should ask someone who knows much more about it.

I don't see where anybody really addressed for you the relationships between volts/amps and speed/torque. The volts available to the motor determines the speed and the amps available to the motor determines the torque (the more amps the more torque and the quicker you get up to speed). Most controllers will limit the amps available to the motor so that the battery isn't damaged or used up too quickly, and the motor isn't overheated too quickly.

In short, no matter what battery chemistry you use, if the voltage is about 24V the speed will be about the same, with most differences being caused by sag. If you dropped from 40 pounds of battery to 2 pounds of lipos you probably don't have enough battery for speed or distance.

To really get what you want, you probably need more volts and more AH. Then the problem you run into is that your controller can't handle the voltage and/or the motor can't handle the voltage or amperage, and you will fry something. I don't know anything about the Cyclone, but I think some other threads have addressed that they don't like to be over volted.

yes, from what I understand, the cyclone motor likes to be on a 20" wheel. It has something to do with rpm range.

Have you had time to cycle the batteries a few times? Brand new batteries will normally need a few runs to really get going.




Ed

No , only two cycles so far about 5Ah each, I hope that the performance will get better as you said.


Edit, some news:
OK, I email Paco at Cyclone tw, and he told me the 500w Cyclone could manage 33.6V! So I would order 2 7.4V 4Ah lipo packs, to wire them in parallel and then put them in series with my two parallel 22.2V 4Ah packs.
That should give me 33.6V 8AH fresh out of the charger and 29.6V after voltage stabilize, if this baby doesn’t dance with this configuration I’ll be totally lost. (And broke )

Ok, it is time to update my cruiser status.

So what has happened, this time... well I improve my lipo pack to 33.6V 16amp (cheap lipos 15C), overvolting my Cyclone 500W motor to a safe limit since the controller has 35V caps, this turned out as an improvement in top speed and acceleration. Also, added a CA to see what was going on!
Nevertheless the bike was struggling to reach 42kmxh, taking ages to do so, and acceleration wasn’t something to be scare off.

So I decided to order a replacement 1200w controller ( the first one was blown away by me using it without any reduction) for my Cyclone 1500W motor, Paco at Cyclone was so kind to offer me a special price for the controller because it was a replacement, very nice gesture!
I also ordered two more 6S 4amps pack to built a 48V 12amps battery pack.

Finally all arrived to my place and i began to built my new power plant.

I tried to build my cruiser, as Mike (1000W) built his first bike, using a go-kart 219 chain, 83T chain ring and a 10T sprocket.

1er problem: motor barely fits in the place of the older 500W motor. Had to say Goodbye to me rear fender. Also the 10T sprocket gave me lots of troubles, finally I ended using the original Cyclone sprocket to help to fix in place that silly 10T go kart thing. Also, I have to built a chain tensioner for this setup, yes I know is it very ghetto, I will improve it over time.





2nd problem: rear 219 chain ring was a pain in the ##s• to adapt to my shimano nexus 7 speed hub! Today it is still barely off center. I used an aluminum plate, drilled holes for allen screw to fix the plate to the rear nexus sprocket, then bolted the 219 chain ring to that plate. The worst problem was that the nexus hub has all its shifting mechanisms between the wheel and the dropout, so there is very limited space to work.



Today I have done two test drives, acceleration is excellent ( compeared to thw 500W) it pulls very steady, with my 44V pack in first gear it tops at 38kmxh, on 4 gear (supposed to be 1:1) it reached 49 kmxh, didn’t try the others gears was a bit scare because this setup does a lot of chain noise vs. the 500w and I feared to loose a leg or something.

Finally I replace the custom homemade Springer fork, for a Hanebrink 40mm suspension fork and added a code 5 avid 206mm disk brake.



So for now, I will continue to improve the drive train,with a better chain tensioner, improve the motor mount perhaps add some rubber to absorb the vibration, and try to perfectly center the rear chain ring.
Also, I will have to fabricate a new battery box; will try to do something with fiberglass. Any ideas??