Figured I owe you guys an update: Batteries:
Last couple months have been battery charging and capacity testing 24/7 on both chargers. I now have around 1800 cells capacity tested and marked (~2.5 milk crates worth) and still another, oh, 700 or so still to process. Of the 1800, 200 are a larger form factor I'll use on a moped, and at least another 2-300 are 33% lower than the rest (just older and that's as good as they made them back then), so I'll drop those out. I need to make some cardboard mockups of the batteries and start measuring the frame to find out where I'm going to put all of them, but, roughly speaking I think there's only room for 1200 cells on the bike at most. That's around 10,000 watt-hours. At 150 watt-hours per mile at highway speed, that's 66 miles range. When I started this project I was hoping for 15 miles, so, things are lookin' good. Throttle: I ordered 4 different electronic throttles from China. 2 of them showed up. 1 of them works. Perfect, all told under $15 shipping included from the various sellers. I'm getting the hang of this "parts from overseas" thing. As they say in sailing "If you can't tie knots, tie lots." Controller: Until I get around to figuring out how to mount and stuff all the batteries in, I need to figure out the controller. It's my next real bottleneck. I have 3 forklift controllers and one golf cart controller, but all of them are lower voltage than I want (24-36v max). Some of them have decent amp abilities (100-200 amps), but that combined is still only around 5000 watts. That's enough for moped speeds, but not highway speeds and not hills. I can buy (*spit*) a DC motor controller for $1000, or a DIY kit for $600, but I'd ideally build one myself or find something junky I can use. I'm keeping my eye on some electrical vehicle forums, but, damned things are trendy nowadays. I don't really want to build the battery packs until I know the size of the controllers I'm using, since it'll probably eat up 10% of the battery pack size. ... That's about all that's new with me. While stumped, I'm fixing up an electric moped and building it a new (used to be lead-acid) lithium pack which I figure will be good practice for the Nighthawk when I'm done. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Nighthawk Motorcycle Lovers!" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nighthawk_lovers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to nighthawk_lovers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/nighthawk_lovers. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
