ZEV Motorcycles & Scooters

I'm going to try to embed a couple of photos. Let me know if the images are too big. These show the Cycle Analyst and TNC throttle installed together.

Frnt view of Cycle Analyst installed.

Rear view.

Now to how it looks today:

I still have to mount the cargo box, but before I can do that I have to get into it. The key(s) was lost in transit. There may or may not be a spare inside it, with the mounting hardware.

Ok, so my blogging has attracted a small following. ;-) I'll at least write when I do something, like take what might have been the last ride of the season here, yesterday...

70 degrees F is actually a bit cold for me and my cardio-vascular disease, but it was still somewhat humid yesterday, and the forecast is for highs in the fifties and sixties for the next full week, at least. So I got up a little early, bundled up a bit, gave the bike a little 3 minute pre-charge, and decided to see how far it will go in normal but gentle mixed riding. Darus of ZEV tells me that this model has been run down to 66 volts, so I crossed my fingers and stayed close to home.

I left it in Low until I was out of my suburb, and put it back there for most of the hilly terrain and even some of the not-so-hilly. Low on the ZEV is, as another poster noted, a little frustrating, but I disagree on the reason. It isn't that you are limited to about 35MPH, it's that the controller keeps changing the top speed. I'd be cruising along smartly at almost 40, then the bike would seem to die as the controller dropped the output until I got back down to 30-35. This can be moderated with the throttle by not going as fast as you can, but it still happened to me a few times anyway.

Medium power, or "2" in ZEV-speak, is a joy on this bike. It pulls smoothly and with enough power to feel like a motorcycle. What's more, the Gen 4 motor I now have has got longer legs in 2: while the Gen 3 motor would accelerate briskly up to 50MPH (indicated) and then stop right there, the Gen 4 will keep pulling on level ground up to an indicated 58 or so. Assuming the usual speedo error, 53MPH is really all I need for 95% of the riding I do. If I weren't trying to extend the range, I'd leave it in "2" all the time.

High, or "3", seems to be a bit superfluous. The bike only accelerates very, very slowly when I "shift" into 3 at the top end of 2, so I think it's really only useful for downhill running, and maybe dead-flat highways where a few more MPH is needed. I still haven't gotten it above 60 in 3, but I haven't tried really hard, either - the route I took is country roads and highways where 45 is usually the speed limit, and I can easily exceed it in 2.

The bike handles well and feels like a motorcycle, but maybe a bit more skittish in loose dirt, so watch out for that. Lowering the tire pressure would probably help, but at the cost of some range. The brakes work fine, but the levers are too far away from the grips for me to easily reach - I think I'm going to have to bend them in closer, once I confirm that they are a bendable alloy. I really like the upright riding position (I have a bad back), and while the windshield is far too low to keep my face out of the airstream, buffeting is not excessive. I also noted that I didn't get cold hands as usual (I was wearing moderately insulated gloves, as usual), so I think the fairing is redirecting air away from them. Maybe I won't even need the gigantic 'scooter mitts' I bought recently.

The suspension keeps the wheels on the road with no difficulty, but it feels a bit too high at rest, as if the preload is set at maximum (I looked, but don't see an adjustment. Maybe there is one I'm not seeing). I'm also getting rather disturbing, solid, 'clunks' when going over certain kinds of bumps. I don't know it it's the suspension itself, or something else. Any of you other ZEV riders encountering that?

As I passed the 45km mark I reached last time, I stayed fairly close to home, but still used 2 occasionally, if only to check my range. It turned out that rather than lock out 2, though, the controller started to 'warn' me by briefly cutting the power in Low when I put the voltmeter into the red when starting off - something that started happening regularly as I approached 50km. I parked it with almost exactly 50 k's added to the odometer. That's about 31 miles indicated, 29.5 with a 5% error. I'm going to assume that my maximum range is 50km indicated for typical riding, but there is a route I can take that keeps me on level ground almost the entire ride, so I may try for 60 or even 65...

The initial voltage indicated by the charger was 71.3 volts.

This is the end of a week-long cold spell, and we have almost a full week of nice weather forecast. With that in mind, I mounted the cargo trunk that the Environment Friendly Store, at http://www.environmentfriendlystore.com/ was nice enough to include with the bike. It's a very sharp-looking trunk that looks like it was made for the ZEV, and although I had a little trouble using the existing reinforced bottom mounting holes and brackets with the ZEV bracket hole spacing, I was able to get it mounted properly. I used a thin sheet of rubber between the trunk floor and the rack surface. The push button latch got jammed when the rest of the bike was damaged, but a little lube and it's now working smoothly.

I'm still visualizing and getting info on what I need to do to get the Cycle Analyst wired in. I could just connect the battery monitoring features easily enough, but I want to use the speedo function also, and that will require using the existing cable end to pull a guide wire out of the bike. The guide wire will then be used to pull both the CA monitoring cable and speedo cable back into the bike (the speedo cable is currently coiled up under the ZEV speedometer). Then I'll connect the magnetic sensor cable to the Hall "A" sensor cable going to the controller. One question: if there are two wires inside the speedo cable as I suspect, will the other one just be a ground that I can connect as such...?

Oh, and I manged somehow to wrench my right arm - it hurts like hell when raised higher than waist height. Hopefully it will be better by Saturday, when I plan to take my next ride.

I don't really see how using a stiff wire hanger is easier than using the CA cable and a piece of similar wire as a guide. I did something very similar with the throttle cable and it worked fine. Thanks for the tip on the speedo cable, though - I figured it was grounded already, but wasn't sure it would work if I left the second ground wire alone. I have well-reviewed micro flush-cutters coming in the mail from Amazon.com to cut that capacitor.

I hope to ride tomorrow.

This post is brought to you by the phrases "range anxiety" and "opportunity charging". Without the latter I'd still be pushing the bike home...

Yesterday evening I decided to take my traditional 'Last Ride of Summer' route, which involves climbing up out of the Hudson River valley to Schaghticoke NY, then taking rte 40 to, IIRC, Argyle NY, at which point I turn left on rte 29 and head back down into the valley at Schuylerville NY. The views of the Hudson Valley are really spectacular in spots, and once I'm out of Schaghticoke the road is pretty flat. Usually I ride over the river to Schuylerville and back, but the plan today was to just go down the hill and turn left onto the winding country road that runs along the East bank of the river to Stillwater, and then along the West bank to Mechanicville, across the river from me. I've never measured the route, but I figured it was about 60km, with almost all of the second half either downhill or more or less level.

Oops.

I was still a few miles from Argyle and the odometer was reading about 40km. The voltmeter was indicating that I'd reached or exceeded the halfway point of the pack. I had brought the charger along - not being completely insane - and started looking for a place to recharge. No luck. I even stopped at a boarded up building with an outdoor outlet right by the parking lot, but the power was off. Getting a little desperate, I pulled into a yard where a garage sale was winding down. It didn't look like they had sold much, so I politely asked the man who came over to me if he had an outdoor outlet where I could recharge for 20 minutes or so, for a few bucks. Happily, he both had one and was friendly, so I was able to plug in. The pack was reading 74 volts when I started the charger. I played kick the ball with the two little kids who were playing there for about 25 minutes, picked out a few small items from the tables, and then because it was now past sunset, I gave the woman in charge of the sale $10 - five for the charge and five for the stuff. The pack had just reached 77.8 volts. Hoping that this would be enough on the remaining, easy part of the ride, I decided to press on, because the turnaround point was only about a mile ahead.

I should mention that I had used Low to get out of my suburb, then, as it started to cut speed in its seemingly random fashion, I "shifted" to 2 (Medium) and left it there, keeping the speed between 40 and about 48MPH, indicated. After leaving the charging point, I cut back a bit, using Low to get to 20, then putting it in Medium and keeping it at around 35-40MPH. That run back down the river was *very* long; dark was falling and so was the voltmeter needle. By the time I reached the end of the road, across the river from Stillwater, the needle was not far at all above the Red and I was keeping it in Low. Oddly enough, under these conditions the voltmeter seems to drop more at speeds in the 20MPH range in low than it does in Medium.

Anyway, as I turned onto the road over the bridge to Stillwater, the controller started to cut the power under acceleration as the needle dipped into the Red. NOT fun. Just into Stillwater, there is both a sandwich shop/convenience store chain (Stewart's, the place that told me they would not be offering any recharging services) and a Mobil station owned by a nasty piece of work who also runs the oil distributorship next door to us. I S L O W L Y cruised past the store first: the only outdoor outlet was by the ice machine, but was, unusually for these stores, about 6' off the ground, out of reach of my charger. I gave up and tried the gas station. The attendant was outside, and when I explained my plight, his response was to say "I'm not authorized to allow that" and then walk away. There was an outlet 4' from me.

I was still about two or three miles from home, and the speed limit was about to go from 30 to 40MPH. I nursed the throttle like it was filled with nitroglycerin, and rode on the shoulder at about 15MPH, in the dark, with cars whizzing by the rest of the way. Amazingly, I made it. When I connected the charger again in my garage, the display briefly flashed 66.6, then immediately jumped to 70.0. The odometer on the bike told me I'd gone 83KM.

My conclusion, drawn from this little adventure, is that for me, the ZEV 5000LA has a range of 30-50km, depending on how briskly I ride. I'd love to know if these odometers are optimistic like the speedos, of if they are fairly accurate. Anybody here know? I'm also going to carry a 9' large appliance extension cord at all times.

Oh, I definitely won't be doing that, believe me. Yesterday's near-debacle was the result of two miscalculations (trip distance and how much charge I got back in 25 minutes) that I don't plan on repeating. From now on, one is the limit! ;-) I figure that the length of time required for a good range-extending opportunity charge is at least 45 minutes, and preferably an hour or more. It's one of the big disadvantages of SLA batteries - slow recharge times.

I got some good screenshots of the instrument panel, anyway, so I'll share them. Note that you can run this bike almost as fast in 2nd (about 50MPH) and use much less power than at a slightly higher speed in 3rd - look at the volt-gauge on the right. In the first snap, you can see the shadow of the camera rising above my helmet. My head is *not* normally pointed.

Now the two best instrument snaps. I didn't get the top speeds, in part because I was trying to watch the less than straight road at the time.

For some reason Photobucket always hangs up on my last upload, so the snap of the new motor may go in a later post...here is a shot of the bike with the cargo trunk mounted, instead. The only real problem with it is it won't hold a full-face helmet. I almost bought a much larger trunk on Ebay, for $69 on clearance, but didn't. Now I wish I had, and could put this one on the XM, instead. At least it *looks* great!

If you read a bit farther on, you'll see that the charger does indeed start charging regardless of level. It behaves oddly for an SLA charger, though: it starts in 'stealth mode,' with only the slowly climbing voltage level to show it's working. Then the cooling fan starts after a few minutes, which to me indicated bulk charging mode (used to get SLAs to 80% quickly), but in fact the fan just cycles on and off as needed to cool the unit. It doesn't seem to vary the charging rate much. It does work ok, especially when the pack has at least 25% charge left, like today: it recharged the bike in about three hours, instead of the usual 5-8 hours when the pack is lower. You probably ride a lot more than I do, but I've never killed an SLA battery. I had a *charger* kill one on the crappy LA Free Sport E-bike I had for a while, but the original AGM batteries in my Lepton still work, albeit at greatly reduced capacity, after 10 years.

I'm getting quite frustrated at my attempts at making vids. The latest one is the best, but the #@#!@ camera was *still* pointed a bit too low, so most of it is too boring to show. I did have a friend shoot me leaving on my ride, using the HD video feature on my Panasonic digital camera, and that came out ok. I'm going to post it on YouTube shortly, although even that will be ruined by the watermark from an "unactivated" video editor. Anyone know of a good freeware or reasonably prices shareware editor?

I finally got my 'visor cam' at the right angle, more or less! I shot a whole ride this evening in three segments, and will be uploading them to Youtube at some point. Lots of wind noise (it was a windy day again) and you don't see much of the bike, but you do get to see a lot of Fall foliage as well as how the bike performs. I had to abort a top speed attempt when a clueless driver in a Civic pulled out in front of me, and when I braked hard then, I encountered the front end shudder/wobble that's being discussed in another topic. I suspect that the front end of the ZEV frame *may* be Mountain Chen, with the rest of it being custom built, but I don't know that for a fact...