Hi guys,
It's been a long while since the last update... Unfortunely not much happened on the build because I had some unexpected things to deal with (moving out to a new home).
Anyway, you are probably aware that in China the whole country has been shut down for a few weeks due to this virus everyone's been talking about. This, at least for me, has been a positive thing since I had plenty of time to catch up and continue moving forward on my build.
I started by finishing the battery box. That took a lot of work, sanding, coating with epoxy, sanding again, coating again, sanding... you get the idea.
Anyway, last time I coated it it looked like this:
The battery will be air conditioned using Peltier modules and a water cooling system, still havent finished working on the programming part of the electronics but hopefully it should be done soon.
Since then I sanded the box once again, hopefully for the last time before I'll clear coat it, so that's why it won't look nice and shiny in the following pictures.
I've entirely removed the original steel battery box. I weighted it at a bit more than 6 kilograms. The new carbon box is a little bit above 1.5 kilograms so that's a nice weight reduction so far. I had a very hard time fitting the new box in the frame, but after a while it did came in eventually:
After that, it was time to design and 3d print a box in order to protect my BMS:
It worked pretty well. In the end, I plan to print another one and cover it with carbon fiber, for looks of course but also for better waterproofing. Just waiting for a vacuum pump to arrive in the mail so I could do it properly.\
Installed in the frame:
Also designed some brackets to secure the box to the frame. Those are just some 3D printed temporary ones, I'll redesign them slightly and either make them out of carbon fiber, or cast them out of aluminum, I'm not decided yet.
Also worked on integrating my Ant BMS screen into my dashboard. I had some useless gauges since this one was intended for a gas bike. The rev gauge and fuel gauges weren't used so I thought I'd just remove them and put the screen instead.
Wasn't really easy but it worked well in the end.
Started by removing the useless gauges and fitting the screen on the PCB:
Cut the external cover:
3D printed a part to better hide all that mess:
Covered it in carbon fiber:
Made a very ghetto vacuum bagging using a vacuum cleaner. Wasn't great at all, my bag was leaking and the vacuum cleaner didn't have a lot of succion power. I had to leave it like that for two hours which was insanely annoying:
Spent almost a week of sanding, putting more epoxy, sanding again, etc...
And finally it came out OK. Could have been better if I had a vacuum pump, but it's not too horrific. Hopefully next carbon fiber parts will be better with proper gear.
Right now I'm riding the bike just like that, but that's a bit sketchy, I need to finish it quickly since its my daily driver.
Next steps to do
-build the battery box brackets,
- insulate the box with aerogel sheets (great fireproof material, extremely good insulation property to keep the temperature in the box as constant as possible)
- Make a lid to close the box
- finish the BMS enclosure
Once all of that will be done I plan to tackle an other composites challenge, copying the current gas tank from the current 5kg steel it's made out into a 1 or less Kg of nice carbon fiber. I also need to work on my battery air conditioning system before the hot days of summer arrive.