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Again, not much physical progress has happened, partly because in the last two months I've only worked enough to keep up with the cost of life and not enough to buy more toys and maybe that is for the best because a few days ago I was at the meeting of the local electric vehicle club and one of the members offered to sell me 36v worth of GBS lithium batteries, 100 amp hour cells that can handle 300 amps discharge continues and 1,000 amps for 10 seconds, the club did a group buy of these batteries so my cost would be $1,215 for the 36v bundle, I'd like it to be 48V so I need to see if anyone else who was part of the group buy has any spares as well, otherwise I can pay full retail and get more GBS cells, at the group buy cost lithium batteries would cost me $1,620 just for the cells and after adding up the cost of a new charger, battery management system that can communicate with the charger and has a screen that gives you a battery gauge with an amp meter as well, the total cost is still pretty reasonable at $2356 for a whole 48v lithium battery setup, compare that with $900 for lead acid batteries plus $530 for a low cost ElCon charger $365 for a PakTrakr gauge with amp meter pickup and at that point I'm still using lead acid batteries without that much of a cost savings!
Now I know I said that part of my goal was to keep this motorcycles cost as low as possible, but my other goal was to have it be something that can be upgraded to perform better, so I still want to try it out with a good lead acid battery pack and see how it would work on the low budget end, or I might even stick with my 8 year old lead acid batteries and just toss a few more on for higher voltage, after all I only paid $20 each for them.
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