Elixxer- An Electric Motorcycle is Born
I have been researching Electric Cars since
September last
year, in that time period I have gone through many plans and thrashed out
many budgets as I worked out how a student could make a satisfactory EV. I have
planned an RX7, CRX or Civic and pick-up conversion, even to the point of being
outbid on eBay for a donor. I started my
own mini EV project as documented on this Blog, but since it was going to be
just a toy, that I couldn’t fit in and didn’t feel comfortable giving away
without testing, I decided it wasn’t worth putting money into and donated the
peddle car to family friends. But recently I’ve been planning a project that
was easier to do well, while on a budget but was useful enough to be worth
investing in… An Electric motorcycle. And two weeks ago I became the proud
owner of this 1984 Suzuki GSXR 400 off Ebay for the grand price of $495.
I'm going to nickname this bike the Elixxer, since the GSXR is often called a gixxer and this is the electric version, I guess it is a working title but I like it so far. As a current update I have picked up the motorbike, removed and sold the motor and am waiting on my parts to arrive from the US, but to keep the content flowing I'm going to start off the blogs with this introduction followed by a guide to planning an EV so that the content doesn't dry up in the middle fiddly stage and to keep you in suspense. My goals for this project are a 60-80km range (~40-50 miles), a top speed of 80-100km/h (50-60mph) and the performance of a 250cc bike. Perhaps the best inspiration/proof of concept for this build is emoto's bike pictured below. My budget is around $8000 Australian, the majority of which will be taken up by batteries, I will be going out on rather uncharted waters with a LIFEPO4 battery pack. It all should be good fun, and a great learning experience that I will document as much as I can. I won't be doing it alone, and will be enlisting the help of as many skilled friends as possible to get this bike on the road. So if you are interested in electric motorcycles or EVs in general and would like to see one come together live, then pull up a chair, subscribe to this RSS feed and watch me make mistakes so you don't have to.
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