This past Sunday, a friend had his lithium motorcycle up from Chicago to the Milwaukee area.
I got to test ride it. Wow, was that fun. His is running a 450amp/72V controller through a big permanent motor with double brushes.
I chased him around the parking lot with a video camera on the handlebars of my bike.
In other electric motorcycling news... The Pizza Rack is Back!
I really hadn't been using my cycle all that much, and then spent a good part of the summer making the new battery rack and the
instructional video.
One of my favorite things about the cycle is just hopping on and zipping into town without using a drop of gas. It's just about the ultimate errand-mobile, but it needs to be able to carry take-out food!
Previously, I had built a simple cargo rack out of some thin plywood. It worked fine, but was a little bit of a pain to put on and take off. I think I scrapped it out at the end of last summer.
Tonight, I was going to pick up a "take and bake" pizza for dinner. I certainly didn't want to start up an internal combustion engine just to do that. So, it was time to rebuild a pizza rack.
I looked around my garage to see what materials I had to work with. The best candidate was some 16" x 20" plexiglass. I had already drilled 4 holes in the corners of the plexi, when I found something even better.
A 16" aluminum pizza pan.
I had that sitting in the corner of my garage for some time. Originally, it was going to be an "aero-hub-cap", but turned out to be the wrong size for my rims.
It is, however, PERFECT to carry a 16" pizza!
I also didn't want to drill anything on the cycle frame or even mess with any type of clip. However, the grab bar on the back of the cycle is steel, which meant MAGNETS!
By setting the pizza pan on the back of the cycle, a SINGLE recycled computer hard-drive magnet will hold it in place.
Top that off with a bit of bungie net to hold the pizza on, and BAM! Pizza Rack ver. II.
The hard-drive magnet is flat, so the pizza just goes right over the top of it.