Electric Motorcycles

Well another 3 weeks have passed, I am still not riding YET. Other, more important things have taken up every spare minute. The garden is in,

my oldest graduated from high school

went to Cedar Point Park in Ohio,

and I was heavily involved for almost a week in the moving of our work place. Now I have a 6 mile commute to work. AND my youngest son broke his arm at Scout camp. He is expected to make a complete recovery. Mostly his pride hurts more than his arm .
So finding time to work on the bike has been difficult.
Here is the current status:
2 weeks ago, I went for a short test ride . My batteries were very low, and everything was hooked up temporary, kind of hanging all over the place. The bike was slow, but I was able to test the low speed handling and balance. I was very happy. A big EV grin . In the process of changing out some of the bad batteries, I shorted out the controller to the frame, and fried the controller . A major rookie error, but that is part of the reason I took on this project, to learn by doing. I have since learned that I MUST disconnect the B+ connection from the controller BEFORE servicing the battery pack. What this has done however, is give me time to complete the balance of the work on the bike, while not being tempted to just ride it, and worry about finishing the "little" things later.
A few days ago, I started the final installation of the body work.
Thursday, July 3rd, I finished the main charging station.

I used a 9 pin trailer style connector, and installed the female side on the main cowl of the bike.

July 4th it was raining here most of the day, so I was able to work on the bike all day. I finished the dash by installing a cycle computer and the Pak-Trakr.

I really like the Pak-Trakr. It is an amazing little tool. For the cycle computer, I chose a Panorama v-12. I used JB QUICK WELD to attach the magnet to the bike wheel. The sensor tie wraps to the fork, and the fender covers it all up so it is protected, and not visable. The display will be attached to the face of the dash with HD velcro.
I have finished the installation of the 2-Power Stream 36 Volt onboard chargers. They fit nicely under the tank. The batteries balanced out pretty well while charging. The Pak-Trakr was very helpful during the testing of the on board chargers. I am in the process of making the extention cord storage area in the tank, so the cord will come out of the gas cap.

So now, as soon as my controller comes back (hopefully by July 12th) I should be able to ride with everything functioning and complete.


That's it for now. I hope my next post is with speed and range information.
I just wanted to thank all who post on this forum. I have used a TON of info from this site. Many of you deserve much thanks. Thanks for the encouragement along the way, and thanks for taking the time to check out my project blog.

Motorcycles driven with electric power.

One of my vehicles is a three wheel motorcycle...

I got it 1 1/2 yrs ago through an ebay auction, meaning I did not build the thing. I started to register it last year but during that process the thing stopped working. So for the last 9 months it's been sitting idle while I've focussed on the Lectra. It's been this big white elephant sitting in the driveway to walk past and occasionally think about and get frustrated. I tried several times to get it running but.. no luck.

This afternoon I decided to wire up a controller to the motor completely bypassing the existing wiring. And.. it runs. Yay.. meaning, now that the Lectra is pretty much finished I can spend a few cycles on this trike and get it running too.

Let's see how many electric motorcycles I can own...

I made a major milestone this evening and wanted to share with y'all the status.

I'm working to rejeuvenate a Lectra motorcycle. Look back in my blog postings for previous status updates. This motorcycle is gonna be way cool when phase 2 is finished. At the moment though I'm still working on getting phase 1 finished, namely to have the motorcycle functioning and running on the road.

I had recently been posting about the DC-DC converter etc.. those questions are settled. The DC-DC converter from Powerstream is doing the job excellently. It's a 12.5 Amp unit which will be giving ample power for the light system. Then for a combination of emergency disconnect and manual contactor, I have two huge switches. One has a big red button, the other has a lever that also functions as a key. Both are rated for well over 500 Amps continuous and will be more than sufficient for this motorcycle. I haven't yet figured out exactly where they'll be mounted.

The major success this evening is the lighting system. I've been puzzling over the maze of wires as implemented in the original wiring harness... and.. while Lawrence promises me the original wiring harness was perfectly functional, I couldn't figure it out. And I could see ways to simplify the wiring harness. So... I cut the old wiring harness out, and have wired up the simplified harness for the lighting system. As of this evening the headlights, horn, and turn signals are working, and the tail/brake lights is within reach to do very quickly.

The other thing I'm working on right now is a box to hold the speedometer and paktrakr display. What I'm planning is a plexiglass box which will mount on this post between the handlebars which held the previous dashboard. The box is about halfway finished.

What's left?

Besides the dashboard... As I said, there's the issue of mounting the manual contactor. I'm thinking to make another plexiglass box, mounting it in the place which would normally have the gas tank. The contactor could be mounted on that box, and I've got a couple other meters and whatnot which can be mounted on this box. Like the keyswitch. And the wiring needs to be cleaned up, and tied down properly. And the body panels need to be remounted. And I have to get it insured, and once it's insured I need to go to the DMV to reinstate the registration.

Dang. The Lectra is still so close I can taste it.. but... The two major pieces left before it could be taken on the street is a) wiring the manual on-off switch I mentioned before, and b) getting the lights to work. I got the switch and am pondering choices on mounting it on the bike. But today I wanted to get into the lighting system.

The lighting system is a mess of wires in a wiring harness, and include in-line fuses and turn signal relays etc. Probably the existing wiring harness works but it looks like a mess and I keep thinking I want to cut it all out and start over. In any case I need to work out which parts of the harness go where etc.. at the end it might be a simple enough matter to find two wires for a 12v connection and the whole thing lights up. But so far it hasn't been that simple.

Anyway I tried connecting the lights directly to the DC-DC converter just now to make sure they're all working... and it gave me a chance to measure the amp load.

Wiring the lights directly was successful and the lights do indeed light. However....

The headlamp (a normal incandescent headlight) draws 4.6A @ 12v (or about 45 watts). The turn signal I hooked up (an LED unit) draws 0.6A in normal mode, and 1.5A in turn signal mode.

The DC-DC I have is home built from two individual DC-DC units. Each are 2.5A so the total capacity of the DC-DC is 5A. If you add up the amperages above it's well above 5A, powering the headlight and running lights will draw over 8A and close to 10A if a turn signal is on. Doesn't sound like I'll be able to put a stereo system on this bike...

Bleah.. my DC-DC doesn't have enough amps.

The options I can think of are:

1. Find an LED headlight that requires fewer A's and is still DOT approved
2. I have two more of the DC-DC units, so I could wire them in and make the total be 10A
3. Find a bigger capacity DC-DC unit.. EVPARTS has some which might work

DaveB mentioned my Lectra project, and it struck me I haven't written much of anything about it. Unfortunately I don't have pictures handy and in any case the pictures I have are just showing a frame with a mess of wires hanging all over the place.

The Lectra Motorcycle is quasi-historical. They were made by Electric Motorbike (EMB) during the 1990's and that company was later bought by ZAP. I remember seeing them listed on the ZAP website for awhile, and I remember attending a ZAP shareholder meeting where they unveiled the VR36 motorcycle. The Lectra was a 24 volt design and somehow they reworked it to be a 36 volt system. But that vehicle never reached the market, and ZAP kinda mismanaged the product to death. There were about 100 Lectra's made.

I bought it a year ago as a bare frame .. no batteries, no controller, but with a motor and the original wiring. This is a link to the evalbum entry for the previous owner of this bike You'll see batteries in the picture etc, they were Delphi 8v batteries which were basically dead, and Lawrence removed all of them along with the controller before selling me the bike.

I've bought a battery pack of Powersonic 12v 26ah SLA batteries. I chose them because of the bike's geometry. To get to a 60 volt pack there's a section just in front of the motor, where EMB had installed the controller, but into which I'm putting batteries. Those 26ah batteries are skinny enough to fit there. The pack is 10 of those batteries, wired as buddy-pairs so that it's a 60 volt 50ah pack. The pack weight is a bit over 200 lbs.

It has a 72v 400A Alltrax controller which I'm mounting under the seat. The motor is not the original Lectra motor, but an Advanced DC A89. (EVPart's listing for the A89 replacement)

What's wired right now is the batteries, controller, solenoid, throttle, a key switch, a DC-DC converter, some switches to control the keyswitch input on the controller, and the horn. What's left to wire is the headlights and turn lights. Oh, and I need to replace the solenoid because it appears to be ON all the time.

I have original Lectra body panels from Lawrence. But he also sold me something else which is really intriguing.

I've mentioned Craig Vetter and his full fairing's before. He ran a contest for several years for the highest miles/gallon rating that could be achieved with a motorcycle. The winners used a full fairing around the motorcycle, as well as pulling a few tricks like using a "small" (250cc) motorcycle with a motor jimmied for high mileage.

Leaning against my garage wall is one of those fairings. The idea is to cut the plastic bubble to the desired fairing shape and bolt it into place on the motorcycle frame.

So this is rather exciting really. Some portion of that high miles/gallon rating came from the fairing. Motorcycles are, after all, horrible at being streamlined. Having the Lectra streamlined should make for great range improvements.

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Entry for September 3, 2006

step one get a bike to start with this is a 1978 gs1000, the bike is in good shape and runs

next step, take out all the stuff not needed, if any one wants a 1978 gs1000 motor, pipes, tank, etc... let me know.

next step go shoping for parts: battery, motor, etc... pictured here is some trojan t105 6 volt battery, one of the best batteries for the price, if you have the room to fit 8 to 12 or more on your bike, however i think i will use the trojan t1275 12 volt club car battery, since this is a mid-size bike, i hope to make another larger bike, with t105s. if i can fit 16 of them on a bike with a trany that keeps the amps low, it should have a range of 350+ miles

check out my blog at:

http://geocities.com/hendersonmotorcycles/blog.html

Electric Motorcycles @ 7gen.com