[mattW]

I've decided to start a build thread for my electric motorcycle, to keep everyone up to date and save the more polished stuff for the blog (as more of a how to). So here are the first shots of picking up my GSXR 400, very exciting.

Andrew, who built this electric GPX-250, came with me to pick up the bike with his ute. Here's us unloading it.

The right hand side frame rail gets removed to take the engine out, you can see the juice bottle full of (yellow/brown?) coolant in the background as well as the beautifully light aluminium frame in all its glory. Removing the engine took a couple of hours of removing bolts, wiggling, unplugging and getting hands dirty. I downloaded the shop manual for the bike but Andrew seemed to know what he was doing so I just followed his lead:

The engine, sitting in the back of Andrew's ute, it wasn't in the best condition but I think he has plans for it either on a jet boat or a small race car/ go cart. This is a man with many projects.

And Voila, one engine-less motorbike (note wiring harness is intact for the headlights etc):

 

[Manntis]

Nice

question: by "in tack" do you mean intact?

 

[mattW]

Yes sir I do *thanks for spotting it.

 

[DVR]

Thanks Matt!!
Keep the pics coming
Did you get the fairing with it? What condition is it in? I can see the edge of the seat in one of the pics. Is it OK?

 

[mattW]

Yeah the seats are really good, there is a little rust on the chrome headlight mount. I got a couple of small fairing pieces but not a full one, making one might be a project after I've got it on the road. Also one of the front disks is stuck, so I have to fix that but otherwise its a near perfect donor. I was really happy with it especially for the $395 it ended up costing me!

 

[Manntis]

That's a sweet platform for an e-bike. Are gixers with blown engines fairly inexpensive?

 

[mattW]

Mine cost $495 and I sold the engine for $100, it wasn't blown it just wasn't running (no spark) and doesn't have rego, but I need an engineer to sign off on the EV part anyway so rego should be easy.

 

[mattW]

Here is an Ebay Photo showing the seats and the condition it came in:

 

[mattW]

I got the controller in the mail this week, here's what it looks like, its smaller than I expected but that's probably a good thing:

And here is my DC-DC converter (about the same size as the controller), my main contactor and the two 0-5V throttles, one for acceleration one for regen. I was a little disappointed with the quality of the throttles (mainly aesthetically, they look a bit dodgy) but I might just use the 0-5k pot I already have and use the clutch level and another pot for regen rather than these. Don't know yet.

I got a good quote for my batteries this week and confirmed they will give me the amps I wanted so that is great news. And some other guys from OZ did some performance guestimates which I was pretty happy with too. 0-100km/h (60mph) looks like somewhere around the 6 second mark. This is looking like it will end up a really decent bike.

 

[mattW]

They are just generic kelly ones, I don't know if I'm too high brow but I don't really want fake plastic chrome on my bike

 

[Manntis]

They are just generic kelly ones, I don't know if I'm too high brow but I don't really want fake plastic chrome on my bike

Could you machine metal to replace the plastic bits and rebuild the throttles?

 

[mattW]

Well the bike has been on the back burner for the past few months because of the pointy end of my college semester and moving house. But it now lives in the garage of my good friend tim and this weekend I got back on the horse and got some work done. The front brakes were seized so I took apart and cleaned the front pads and put it back together. Just need to get a brake bleeding kit, to get them working properly again. Here are a couple of photos:

Sorry about the image quality, my camera battery died so I had to take photo's on my phone.
Anyway we also set out about getting rid of the parts of the wiring harness that weren't necessary. We basically decided we'd keep everything at the handlebar end for now (lights, gauges etc) and redo all the cables from the bars to the rest of the bike (i.e the battery connection and rear brake/indicator lights). This meant we could get rid of a whole bunch of messy unnecessary wires in one big go which was nice. we'll redo the rest in a fortnight or so. Finally we gave the frame a clean to get rid of all the greasy black gunk that had built up. We got most of it with soapy water, but I'll be picking up some degreaser to get into the tricky spots. Here is the shiny washed frame: