Re-Lectra Success, and so fracking close it's not funny

Submitted by reikiman on Sun, 11/25/2007 - 19:42

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.

Topics:

Electric Motorcycles

Lectra

Lectra Motorcycle

Lectra Conversion Diary

reikiman's blog
Log in or register to post comments

Comments

Re: Re-Lectra Success, and so fracking close it's not funny

Permalink Submitted by davew on Sun, 11/25/2007 - 20:27.

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.

I approach other people's code like this. "Hmm. This seems way too complicated for the job it's doing. I'll just rip it out and rewrite it." Frequently the result is simpler. Sometimes, embarrassingly often, I figure out what all the original code was for. :-)

Congrats on the lights!

"we must be the change we wish to see in the world"

Re: Re-Lectra Success, and so fracking close it's not funny

Permalink Submitted by reikiman on Sun, 11/25/2007 - 21:14.

I approach other people's code like this. "Hmm. This seems way too complicated for the job it's doing. I'll just rip it out and rewrite it."

Yah... I've done that too. And, now that you mention it, this is exactly the same. So.. the time I did this the best - I worked for Credence Semiconductor for awhile, debugging software for a semiconductor test machine. I didn't understand a thing about how the test machine worked, but they wanted me to fix bugs anyway, and I was looking at this code which printed test results and it was horrendously complex. I was drawing pictures with boxes and arrows and on and on, and I found some dead code, and eventually I talked with some people about some features of the code which were going to be very hard to maintain and learned they didn't even want that feature... so I ripped everything out, rewrite it completely, much simpler etc, and they were happy. But I still never figured out how that machine tested semiconductors, even though I fixed the code that printed the report.

Sometimes, embarrassingly often, I figure out what all the original code was for.

Ah.. yup. With this wiring harness, I built a pair of cables to go into the new wiring harness and went to install them. And.. found that the existing cables which I woulda been replacing were perfectly fine, and I ended up continuing to use those two specific cables. Wish I'd found that before building the replacement cables!

- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki