Electric Motorcycle Conversion

[newguyintown]

Thanks for your response Ryland,
My friend does have the title for it, but good thinking on that part.

The controller at goldenmotor says it does Regen breaking which means it has to give power to the pack some how, I was thinking that it could be used to charge the batteries, but now I'm not sure.

Yeah I think I'm gonna bolt the pack together, I ordered some of the batteries, so I'll do a small scale and test them to make sure they live up to the advertised specs.

I had no idea that golf cart motors were any different than other motors, thanks for telling me. If you get that problem figured out please tell me how you solved it.

[puddleglum]

Regen. braking is not the same as charging. Regen. just puts a little back in on deceleration. You still need a charger, and as Ryland said, a good BMS to make sure everything is even. That's why I suggested the e-bike packs. They come with a charger and a BMS included in the price. Hope your plan works out okay though.

[newguyintown]

Thanks for the info puddleglum. I didn't know how that worked. Do you still wire the charger through the controller, or is it wired separately, and how would you do that, if you're hooking up your cables from the battery pack to the controller? I might have to take a second look at those e-bike packs. How does a BMS work? Can you hook one up to any old battery pack, or do you have to do some specialty wiring to get it to function properly?

[Ryland]

The charger gets wired to the battery pack, so does the controller.
controllers that allow regen breaking are charging the battery pack in a very simple crude manner by allowing the still spinning motor to act as a generator and because it's going about the right speed to produce the right voltage for the pack it's output doesn't need to be converted, just throttled so you don't lock the wheel up, so it's pretty basic and crude, because unless you lived at the top of a long mouton you would never risk over charging from braking.
a charger on the other hand is taking power from the wall and converting it to the voltage that the pack needs and giving it a steady amperage for proper charging while monitoring the pack voltage to tell when it's getting close to full so it can start to taper it off.

BMS/Battery Management System's should be matched to the battery pack that they are being used for, there are a few generic ones out there that will work for a small range of battery packs but they need to be sized for the cells that you are using, the nice ones I've seen connect to the whole pack so they have a wire going to each cell in the pack, one of that design should be able to balance cells as they are charging by taking power from one cell and shunting it to another, there are also cheap ones that connect to each battery and are isolated there and those basically shunt power around the cell as it is charging once it is charged, extra energy is turned in to heat, this seems like a bad idea to most people because as the pack is reaching it's fullest state the weakest cell is the only one getting a charge and the rest of them are being shorted out, it's just a waste of energy altho it does work.

[puddleglum]

Originally Posted by MPaulHolmes

The silver chair is my favorite book, Puddleglum.

I like it a lot too. My son gave me the nickname after reading the Narnia series.

[mrchips47]

newguy -
I just finished a motorcycle conversion. It is documented at this website. Google --

sites.google.com/site/wattshappeninkz650/

[newguyintown]

Thanks mrchips47! That looks great, the range and top speed would be more than sufficient for what I'm doing. I'll probably use a lot of similar pieces for mine.

Update: I now have the bike moved, and should be able to get pictures if my camera works.