Everyone needs an uncle Scott!

Last weekend I made a trip down to St. George to see my Uncle Scott he agreed to help me out with the welding and I could not be happier of how things turned out! He has a natural talent for building things and has created many a contraption over the years and this was just one more to add to the list. We started out with the motor mount, the one that I had designed previously is not going to work without doing some serious and dangerous modification to the swing arm so I moved the location to up underneath. Normally this would not have been a big deal but doing so caused me to loose a spot for the batteries and it has taken me quite some time to come up with a design to still get all 6 batteries to fit.

It started with just a 3/16" aluminum plate with the holes drilled to match the motor, it was done in 2 pieces 1 for the bottom and 1 for the top.


The bottom piece was fairly easy because there was plenty to weld to but the top piece was a bit more tricky. We had to add a plate so we could have something to weld to on the top side.


We also left a flange coming off the top piece to give some added support.


As well as with the front side, we added a corner piece to increase the strength so to be able to support the weight of the motor.


This is the finished mount for the motor I forgot to take a picture with the motor mounted but you can see where it goes.


It is kinda hard to see but we took a notch out in the bottom right corner to give a little more chain clearance to allow for the swing arm travel to keep the chain from rubbing.


Now for the batteries! to start it off we dropped one of the batteries down as low as we could get it without loosing any ground clearance, This will also help to get a lower center of gravity to improve handling. To protect the battery we enclosed it in an aluminum box to prevent any damage to it in the case of any accidental contact with something like a speed bump or a big dip in the road.


You can see the finished box here and we started on the next level of battery racks.


Again for more support and to have something to weld to we added a plate so we could have a arm for the back side of the battery. This back side will actually be bolted on rather then welded doing so will allow for removal of the bottom battery should the situation call for it.


The front side of the rack is welded with the idea of just inserting the batteries from the back and just sliding them over.


Front side view.


Back side view, sorry you have to turn your head to see it.


Just getting this far took quite a lot of time so it is going to take one more trip down to St. George to finish but it is well worth the expert help, Scott is a perfectionist and everything will defiantly be done right and work in the end. So the rest of the pictures is just to show how the rest of the batteries will fit. They are AGM batteries and have 180 degrees of rotation so having them on their side like this won't be an issue. We forgot about that in the beginning and were having trouble getting things to fit because of the posts on top of the batteries, but turning them on their side gave us that little extra room that we needed.


Gas tank fit perfectly with no problems even have plenty of room to spare to mount the controller and possible even the charger.


The fairings even fit as well so I am pretty excited about that too! The project is coming right along I can't wait for the first test drive! It'll probably be a few weeks before I can make a trip back down to St. George, but there is not much left to do till then.

Volt Blochers

I finally got my kit for the cell balancing circuits to add to each battery and I think they are going to work out just dandy. I got them from www.voltblocher.com it is a great place to go and they are fairly inexpensive and easy to put together. In all it took me about 5 hours to solder them all together, if you don't feel like soldering you can purchase them assembled as well.

They simply just attach between the posts of each battery and make it so that the batteries do not get over charged while waiting for the rest of the batteries in the pack to come to a full charge.
I have ended up having to make some major changes to the design of the project. I am not going to mount the motor on the swing arm anymore to do so would require removing to much of the inside of the swing arm to provide for adequate clearance for the chain. I am going to mount the motor underneath now which I think will be better overall being that the balance of the bike will not be thrown off anymore without the 35 lb motor hanging off the side. Moving the battery to underneath has caused me to have to rethink and rearrange the placement of the batteries. I think that I have come up with a way that I will still be able to fit all 6. At least this time I had the actual batteries to size things up with rather then having to fight with just the cardboard mock ups of the battery size. I am going to have a little less ground clearance but it still shouldn't be any less then the original ground clearance with the fairings on the bike.