High Performance Electric Trikes

Very cool.. BTW I have made a link to your site in my list of electric bicycle makers such that it will show up in http://evsearch.net and also added your blog to the http://wwwatts.net aggregation.

Question was: in the pictures the motor looked larger than I expected. I'd understood R/C parts were attractive because of small size and big power. But that motor looked larger than expected for an R/C motor, looks more like an etek. Am I missing something?

Second question: You have the normal bicycle drive train & deurailler on one side of the rear wheel, and a separate sprocket on the other side. How did you mount that second sprocket?

Thanks for all the links, that's great!

Yes you're right, the pictures are of our prototype, which uses a larger brushless Mars motor. The actual production model will use an Astro 3220 Industrial RC motor. The motor and reduction assemblies are currently being anodized and I haven't yet been able to get pictures of them on the new Cobra frame. You can get a good idea of what the motor and reduction assembly will actually look like by checking out the Photos tab on my site and looking at the picture to the bottom right of the page. The motor and drive in the picture is one that Matt did for a customer on the ES forum. Ours should look very similar.

The second sprocket can be mounted in one of a few ways. On our prototypes, we used a Shimano Saint thru-axle hub and custom machined our sprockets to fit the Shimano's odd Saint disc assembly. On the production models, we will start by using a custom-machined sprocket that bolts directly to the ISO-6 disc holes. Matt is working on an ISO-6 to 110BCD adapter that can be fitted to allow easy swapping of rear sprockets for different ratios using readily available 110BCD BMX-style sprockets. This will make it much cheaper and easier for customers to quickly change gear ratios. Lots of cool things are going on! :)

Tommy

Oh.. that's tricky. But then it means not using disk brakes on the rear, but friction brakes, yes?

Actually no brakes in the rear. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Most tadpole trikes don't even come with a rear brake. KMX added it since they are more of a stunt trike, and can be used for skidding and sliding. They do next to nothing for stopping. Even at low speed, a touch of the brake will lock it up and send it into a skid, actually kinda dangerous.

The dual front discs on these trikes have awesome stopping power and do everything you could ask for. :)

Tommy