Ariel Rider X-Class 52 -> 72 & Refurb

Joined
Sep 8, 2019
Messages
433
Location
USA, CA, Bay Area
I snagged this xclass for a solid $800. As I began to tear it down to inspect things, it quickly became apparent why the seller was willing to let it go.

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Seller said it had an "08H" error, which I looked up and found to be a hall sensor error. Should be an easy fix.

Here's the first thing I found when taking the motor out to see what's up.

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Yikes. I've never heard of somebody spinning out the axle on these under stock conditions. I mean, I'm genuinely amazed, especially given this is a geared motor with a freewheel.

Another weird find:

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I can't fathom how this was done -- it's like an angle grinder was pushed against the caliper here. I mean, I could see the motor coming out, the rotor being misaligned and scraping on it -- but wouldn't you need to ride it that screwed up for, like, MILES to grind off that much? Plus there's no damage to the rotor. It's pretty wild.

I found a number of other issues the deeper I went:

  • PAS sensor just cut off
  • Slice in the display wiring up to the fork
  • Rear shock completely loose
  • Brake levers only activating ebrake sensors once you've applied HULK SMASH pressure
  • Bulb inside the headlight knocked loose
  • "torque arm" completely rounded out

Suffice it to say, as is needs a LOT of TLC -- but that's ok, I mostly bought this for the frame and style and I'm well on my way to upgrading it anyway.

Plans include:

  • Rear direct drive (statorade and possibly hubsinks)
  • dual Grin v4 torque arms (possible a custom torque plate at some point)
  • Frankenrunner controller
  • CycleAnalyst
  • 52v for now
  • Build up a dual 72v battery config later (AX shipping, see ya in a month or two!)
  • More upright handle bars
  • Replace that rear caliper, lol
  • Upgrade lighting
  • VeeSpeedster tires (so smooth, so quiet)
  • Longer seat
  • Torque sensor control

Should be a really fun build, and I'm excited to have a dual suspension 20x4.
 
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The replacement headlight mounted in the stock position, but with a 3D printed adapter. It's tiny by size comparison, but it puts out some major brightness. Comes with a functionally useful high/low beam as well.
 
Here's a rough wiring diagram so far

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A few notes:

  • The power for the PAS is taken from the DCDC stepdown because, when I upgrade to the 72v battery packs, GRIN says the CA can't handle providing the 10v power from the high voltage pack.
  • The batteries will be in just straight parallel. No battery blender or anything. In order to take advantage of regen, it must be setup this way
  • The DC jack from the CA can provide battery voltage at up to 1A; in my case 52watts or 72watts in the future. In either case, the phone + light combine to a mere 25watts at their respective voltages. Even with some loss in various step-downs, this should be fine.
  • The charge port will just be an XT90 to supply CC/CV to both packs at once
  • The antispark will be a Flipsky AS; while you can make some on the cheap, I like having the push-button svelteness of the unit
 
The battery plan is to pick up a Dorado 21700 case (excited to see these now) and a DP-6 shark style case which will go under the rear-rack.

  • https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256801840889323.html
  • https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256804350954140.html

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The Dorado will hold 60 molicel p42a cells.

The DP6 will house 60 molicel p26a cells (from a different build which I ended up having to downsize).

Between the two of them, both at 20s3p, I should get 12.6 and 7.8 Ah respectively. Each could easily handle a 60A draw individually, but combined won't even break a sweat.

The total WH will come out to just a hair over 1500, which will give me a range anywhere from 30-75 miles based on my general 20-50wh/mi estimate (trends towards 40).

----

I toyed with putting 18650's in the bigger Dorado case (the normal cases can only fit 80), and found a layout that might fit 100 cells in there for a 20s5p setup. However, the WH different was incredibly minor (962wh vs 932wh for 2170's) that it doesn't make much sense to abandon the pre-made cell holders that will come with it.

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Moved my statorade'd-and-hubsinked DD_45 FST motor into the fatbike rim. That was...a lot of hassle, lol. But got it installed, did a truing (wasn't too hard, that part), added the tannus armor, put in the trube, mounted the tire (vee speedsters) ... and then came the hard part...

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On the DD45 the drive side axle only has a "flange" about 20mm long. This works for a single speed freewheel, but when you add on a 7 speed, you need to bring that flange out further so you can wrench down the fork. While Grin makes freewheel spacing washers, they seem to be the only place I can source these and shipping cost+time from them...well, I opted to bust out the CNC and make some out of 6061 aluminum (since it's what I have on hand). They turned out alright.

Alas, even with the wheel spinning nicely, I only have access to the smallest 4 gears because the alignment is too far inward. I've had this happen before and fixed it with one of these freewheel relocators so I'll pick another up and should be sorted on that front.
 
ebuilder said:
Are you going to have a local welder reweld the dropout and then you go in and cut a new slot for the axle?

It's not worn out to the point I'm worried about it, like, shearing off, it just handle any torque now. So I'm going to lean on the double Grin V2 torque arms to do the bears share of torque resistance. If I feel _real_ fancy, I might make a torque plate and just drill through the original and bolt that on. I don't think I'll need it though.

ebuilder said:
When you run the batteries in straight parallel as you noted with no blender, are you going to run a single BMS in 'each' enclosure?...or a single much bigger BMS in one enclosure and no BMS in the other?

BMS in each. I've done that combo, including regen, a few times and it's worked fine. I plan on having both batteries be capable of running the bike, along with a quick way to turn down the max amps (thanks CA pot) to keep things mellow in case one of them goes on the fritz.
 
ebuilder said:
Last question please. How do you charge your batteries? Do you disconnect them from the bike to charge them at the same time with two different chargers?...or...since they are connected in parallel presumably at the discharge port of each wired together in parallel, do you charge with a single charger through the charge port of one battery which concurrently charges the second battery because it is connected in parallel to the first battery being charged?

I've got a tap on the line that let's me plug in a single charger to run them both up. Since they are in parallel, they'll always share the same voltage and charge up in parallel as well.

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This spot will eventually hold a second battery hung here, but that's being put together still.
 
ebuilder said:
because BMS's are typically wired through the charging port as you know to monitor charging current/voltage.

BMS' with separate charge and discharge ports are actually kind of the exception in do-it-yourself batteries. Most of the JK, Daly, JDB, etc are setup as "common port" designs where charge and load both go through the same wiring. The BMS is, in effect, just a fancy fuse on the negative line.

This setup, common port, is required so that I can do regen, since the controller will take power from the motor and feed it backwards into the battery. The BMS must accept charge this way.

Charging is just slow regen braking, in effect :D
 
Lots of folks with this bike will install a second or third battery. One common approach is a triangle battery in the frame, but I wanted that space for storage and I much prefer the "under seat" technique. Here's how I went about it:

First, I figured out where it could go. You need to mount this pretty close to the suspension, but there is room, even to be able to take the battery off without unbolting everything. I specifically picked up a DP-6 case with 70 spaces (will be a 20s3p) so that I could get the most out of the space. Avoid the cases with the controller spot, the non-controller base plates have more, better attachment points.

battery placement from above.jpg

Then you mark, punch, and drill:

marking.jpg
punch.jpg
drilled out.jpg

One of the quirks to this is that you can't just bolt the base plate on right after drilling; the bolts/nuts from the seat would interfere:

underside seat bolt placement.jpg

So, I made a 3d printed spacer to push the plate about 14mm out of the way of the bolts:

3d printed.jpg

Now you just bolt everything back together -- admittedly, doing up the seat bolts is a bit of a pain, but totally possible. And the clearance is great:

top bolted.jpg
bolt space.jpg
clearance.jpg

The bike has a nice hollow tube that I dragged an XT60 line up from the controller box to connect up to this battery:

wiring routed into tube charge port.jpg

And, tada, you've got a pretty sneaky extra battery on the rear rack:

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(We'll ignore the blue tape on the battery box; the battery isn't finished being built yet so it's empty right now)

If anyone cares for it, I've also attached the STL for the spacer I made in a zip file on this post.
 

Attachments

  • spacer.zip
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One of the reasons I went with keeping the main battery and a rear rack battery was so that I could remove them for loading/unloading the bike to keep the "heave-ho" weight down. What that means, though, is lots of connecting/disconnecting the batteries, which incurs the annoying "capacitors be chargin" spark at each reattachment.

To avoid the sparks, I'm installing a Flipsky anti-spark switch. Prevents the spark and gives me a cool light-up button to boot.

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If I were to to this again, I would *not* drill this so far up -- probably better on the side plate instead. It looks pretty dope right here, but getting the nut installed required smaller hands than I have to feed it up the wire and onto the button.
 
Got a lot done recently. Installed new brakes, Magura MT5e's, but didn't get any snaps of that. I also finished building both the small and main compartment batteries!

The smaller 20s3p 18650 molicel p24a pack:

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I trimmed up the plastic battery holder to smush a 60A Daly bms in the case. Very tight fit, but made it work ok.

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This is a new style Reention 2170 case which can hold 65 21700 cells -- specifically 20s3p configuration molicel p42a cells.

Awesomely, this case fits the standard cradle with no issues. The problem with this case though...there's zero room for a BMS. Since I'm using good, well-known, quality cells, and won't be abusing them much (max battery amps will be 60, spread between the two packs), I just left some balance leads in the pack so I can pop it open and check once in a while. I may consider an ENNOID BMS as some point, as it's small enough to fit the case, but for now I'll leave it as is and just manually check once in a while.
 
Works been a bit slow on this build, but I did move the set back a notch and had to drum up a way to keep the front bolts bolted to...something. Whipped up a quick CAD (cardboard aided design), measured, modeled in Fusion, printed, fixed measuring misalignments, reprinted, then printed a final full size.

Attached is the STL.

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Attachments

  • seat panel xclass.stl.zip
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