Impressions of my eRider thunder 5000w

What is your method for adding/subtracting fork oil?

Klas, as for the charger only blinking red: rejoyce, as at least it is still showing a sign of life :-) Mine died completely, and I still have not been able to figure out WHAT exactly died :-( At least a replacement EMC72-10 charger has now taken it's place and is doing it's job again.
But your problem is possibly caused by the BMS. I believe you have the same balancer-based BMS that my bike has? It will disconnect the battery from the charger in order to let balancers do their job, and this disconnection means (I suspect a relay) could have gone bust. You should be able to get at the T-shaped connector from charger to the BMS/battery after taking the rear farings off, but it might be necessary to take the center console off too.
After disconnecting that connector you should be able to measure 72..82V on the battery side there. If not the charger is only telling you it is not seeing the battery, and you will possibley have to strip your Thunder even more to get at the BMS. However, what to do about that I do not know (yet...).

Ah, OK, the OC-syndrome, I know it too! With me it always happens after I ride in stormy rainy weather. Usually one day later when I plug in to charge the OC LED comes on in the BMS Box and the charger says "no battery" with it's blinking red LED. The cause is moisture that somehow befalls one or several of the balancer boards. I then place my Thunder in the garage and let my electric heater blow into the front grill behind the front wheel for several hours. This throughly heats the whole battery area and causes moisture to evaporate. After that I can once again charge. It has happend twice to me already, and I have now placed a big rubber matt behind that grill in hopes of keeping the battery area clear of moisture even when stormy winds try to blow rain and water spray in there. Since then I have not yet encountered such conditions but will report my findings when I do.

So, just make sure the balancer boards thorougly dry and you should be OK to charge again.

Overcharge, I also found that rather amusing with my half empty battery :-)

Oh, and you can see now that it might be a better idea to place the BMS box such that you can see it's two LED's without having to take half the bike apart. Here is a pic of where my (former) dealer put it:

The LED's are at the top right corner of the BMS box. I can see them through the window visible just above and to the right of the BMS. On your Thunder I think the BMS box is mounted in front of the underseat compartment, so you also might be able to drill a big hole in the right place in order to see the LED's?

Now that is getting me a little worried, as you already have the rubber matt over the battery that was supposed to fix this moisture problem, but apparently it may have not.
Let us know if some active drying in the battery bay reactivates the BMS.

By the way, I have ordered 2 new sets of front shocks for me and Klas from Mountain, should be on their way soon...

I got a new set installed still by my former dealer, but it was not yet the new Taiwanese type that Mountain claims it is now. Please report if you notice any substantial differences.

Dried AND cleaned? Anyway, if you have tested that cell's voltage to be below about 3.7V then the "overcharged" output of the balancer board is truly wrong. You could test it's function with a regulated power supply.
And by the way, is that tiny LED ON on that balancer board? I found one little LED to be on that board but have never seen one light up that LED...

Short update on my Fury Thunder: this late afternoon, on may way home, in a traffic jam, I was slowly lumbering along at minmal "throttle", but when I wanted to accelerate more the motor suddenly jerked and ran extremely rough, hardly getting the bike above 10km/h with just 4 to 5A trickling through the CA-shunt. I crept home, and every few seconds a big thump from the motor. I called the E-Sprit techician and let him listen to the noises my motor was making, and he immediately diagnosed a defective hall sensor. As our motor has two sets of hall sensors I then undressed the rear end of my thunder and searched for the hall sensor connector. I unplugged it and stuck in the other identical connector that comes out of the motor cable, and everything worked fine again. If one of the second set fails (and I am fairly certain it WILL in the not-too-distant future!) my motor will be relegated to being a doorstop :-(

It was interesting to watch the Kelly lament with it's red LED, and it flashed 4,4, meaning "Motor locked rotor". I thus assume one hall sensor of the first batch suddenly quit working (at least most of the time), thus leading the controller to believe in a locked rotor, which of course it wasn't, and the controller knew that because it still partly commutated by using the other two working hall sensor signals. But apparently the Kelly reduces phase current to 90% of the previous value in locked rotor state, and if it does that at every commutation it would be down to 0A quite fast, but somehow it lingered around 5A. Every few seconds probably the defective sensor briefly started working again, which immediately made the Kelly pump the current requested by the throttle position into the motor, which caused the big thumps, but immediately the sensor would fail again and the controller cut back the current.

Not good...

I can relate to you MEroller. I lost my first set of hall sensors (around 1500km) when entering my driveway (tiny bump) at maybe 3 km/h, my LED flashed 11 times - Hall Sensor fault (PDT MANUAL). So I then swapped to the 2nd set.

Then, similar to you, I was travelling 70km/h and saw red light ahead so I let go of throttle which gave normal full regen, then about 20km/h regen STOPPED!! so I had to use brakes! I saw the red led on scooter flash but the traffic lights went green so I turned scooter off and on and all was well, until I got back up to about 60km/h then I just lost all power so I pulled over. The rear wheel would "judder" whilst on the center stand but didn't have enough torque to even pull the bike without me on it. But If I waited a few minutes, it would carry me for 3m then stop again. So I got a tow truck to take me back home and ODDLY enough, it worked when I got home. That was at 6034km. I now have around 6900km and haven't had a problem since??

Just came back from a 40km ride to the city and my scooter actually feels relatively comfortable, even at 90km+.
Might be the taiwanese rear shock absorbers and a better tuned front fork.

Will be interesting to see if the new front absorbers will make the ride even more comfortable when they arrive.

I´m really happy so far, we rode 2 people on the scooter these 40km and it worked really fine!

Good to hear at least your Thunder is behaving rather well, Johnny :-)
In between my various troubles mine also behaves rather well, but I would greatly prefer these stints of well-behavedness to last longer and longer...

OK, now my motor has gone for good. But first things first: the replacement charger I got (apparently the same Elite Power Solutions / GBS EMC72-10 charger as was in there originally) only starts charging at all with idle pack voltages below about 78V, immediately goes into 10A bulk charge, and at 81.something V shuts down as immediately as it started out and pretends to have charged 100% full. Which of course it hasn't, by far not. So in the end I could only charge after three consecutive rides, but the last ride ended with me pushing for the last 2 km home, after only 25Ah discharge and 27km overall ride distance, still 74V under 20 to 40 A load, but the BMS signalled over discharge and shut off the controller. Because the new charger never even came close to 87V my pack seems to be badly out of balance. And due to the non-starting of the charger above 78V I decided I would take a tour-de-force around the neighborhood, with hard acceleration and hard decceleration, but no luck. So I committed the blunder of the day, set my front wheel against a wall and gently gave my Thunder full "throttle". Strangely the Kelly left 50A going through the static motor, and I did that for 2 x 30 seconds, after wheich the charger finally agreed to continue charging, but a bad smell let me examine the motor and it's cables more closely. The motor was only slighty warm, but the cables were so hot I had to let go after about 10 seconds. Checking further I found the rear wheel to be extremely hard to turn, and it would only attempt to do a few commutations under horrendous clatter and then would budge no more.
So it is now going back to the importer for a through checkup and a new motor, hopefully the 2011 or 2012 model with slightly thicker leads and harder axle material. And hopefully a charger that works properly again!
We will be brought a pallette in two days to strap the bike to, and it will be picked up on Thursday. By a logistics company calling themselves "Zufall" - "by chance" :-)

Sorry to hear this, but it seems logical that around 3800W of heat for one minute will damage something...could it be the windings?

As the motor still tries to turn but can't due to excessive friciton I rather suspect that part of the cable insulation through the axle melted inside and partially jammed the bearings. The heat inside the axle must have been really excessive because the two phases carrying the 50A are VERY close together there. The windings on the other hand are spaced out VERY far around the 13 inch rim so the heat could be absorbed by far more material out there than through the axle. But that doesn't really matter - the motor is completely dead now, outside AND inside.

Oh well, "By Chance" was true to it's name and yesterday sent us only the crate but lacking packaging material and straps. The truck driver agreed to leave us straps from his truck so we could load up my Fury-Thunder onto the crate for him to pick up today. I decided to come home early to do this, but my wife was gone for about half an hour, and when I arrived home there was NO crate on our parking lot, and my wife arrived shortly after and stood there dumbfounded. Someone must have stolen the crate from our parking lot!!!
We called the local shipper who had brought the crate and finally got a boss on the line who said we had rejected the delivery due to the straps missing, and they had picked up the crate again?! Without even leaving a message that they had done so!!! Even though my wife signed the invoice...
So, two blunders led to a complete failure... Today both crate AND packaging material and straps arrived together, and my wife did a great job of strapping my lame horse with digestive trouble into the crate. I came home at the normal time today so I actually got to see it, because right then the local shiper was just backing into our courtyard and loaded the patient on board. Why it didn't work the first time around we will probably never know.
Let's just hope my ride gets "There and back again" in one piece, without Leftiebiker-type horror-experiences rendering it a complete wreck in the process...

I hope so too. So you think a hall sensor failure eventually caused to motor to produce so much heat that the axle got 'spot welded' to a bearing or two with melted metal? Yikes.

So you think a hall sensor failure eventually caused to motor to produce so much heat that the axle got 'spot welded' to a bearing or two with melted metal? Yikes.

No no, no hall sensor failure this time. I was simply trying to lower the battery voltage enough for the not-so-healthy replacment charger to start charging the at least still 70% discharged battery - by placing the front wheel to a wall and simply rolling on full throttle. The controller let loose a lock current of 50A which I applied 2 x 30 seconds. It was me, myself and I who gave my already injured motor the final - in this case thermal - blow :-(
And no, I strongly assume some plastic cable insulation to have melted and locked up the bearings. Metal would feel VERY different!

And no, I strongly assume some plastic cable insulation to have melted and locked up the bearings. Metal would feel VERY different!

its more likely the loss of insulation has caused a short circuit between two or more windings on one phase

it doesn't take much to increase the cogging effect

Matt

Yes, the cogging was EXTREMELY pronounced, but I reckon for this extreme effect there must have been more than just a shorted phase, more along the lines of an excentric displacement of rotor vs. stator with a few poles coming by the magnets in the region of a few micrometers, with the stator poles almost getting magnetically stuck. Even the slowest of turning effort was met with STRONG resistance, so it cannot just have been an electromagnetical phenomenon, as induction does need a certain speed to become so effective as to produce such "drag". Let's see what the techies find, though I strongly assume they will not delve into it too deeply as there is heaps of other work to do also...
Every two days now cost me €9,90 for bus tickets plus approximately one hour less free time due to the longer transit and waiting times - and I really miss the everyday thrill of riding my E-Thunder to work and back again :-(

Well, this morning my Thunder-Fury arrived at the importer's technical center safely, so I am in good spirits that it may be put right in a speedy and efficient manner :-)

Here the mods I have been informed of so far:
- new motor (with the tire I wanted on it :-)
- new charger, hopefully doing a proper job now
- old chinese no-name BMS out, new Slowenian Emsiso BMS in
- New larger gauge cable harness
- top of battery bay sealed to stop water mist from entering when riding through heavy and stormy downpours
- Controller tweaked to allow up to ~ 200A between 30..50km/h, while simultaneously appealing to my common sense of making sure via Cycle Analyst I don't pull more than 120A up longer slopes :-)

Tomorrow should see my e-horse on the dynamometer doing a controlled discharge test, both to test the correct operation and settings of the new Emsiso BMS and to count the Ah and distance covered with the CA in order to give me an excellent range estimation basis for the future :-)
Hopefully Friday this week it should be sent on it's way back to my stable - yeehah!

The death cause of the original motor: probably my dealer had slipped an outer insulation tube around the motor connection harness, right into the motor housing, the material of which was not up to the harness temperatures. Bit by bit it had melted, and my not really hefty 2 x 30 seconds of 50A stall current in the end had simply melted the rest (which almost completely locked up the bearings) and also shorted one of the phases, as the surrounding tubing had also kept the wire temperatures inside too high for the wire insulation to survive this...

Yeeha, hurray, my Thunder is back in business :-) That bigger cable harness is HUGE!!! But apperently my CA shunt was transplanted from battery minus to controller minus. It completely ignores DC/DC converter current as well as charging current :-(
But I can at least ride again :-) More later...

I changed to the new front shocks today and yes, the scooter rides much nicer!
I didn´t have the opportunity to try it at really high speeds, but at low and medium speeds they swallow uneven stuff much better.

When I have them loose I compared them by pushing them in by hand and the old one only felt like a spring.
The new one had noticeable damping when let go? Is that normal?

Klas, I am sorry I haven´t had the time to send the new ones to you yet, will try next week. :-)