Cruising in Style
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- My son took the 3 wheeler out for a spin around the neighborhood. This was a great chance to see my Morgan Grand Prix - inspired cyclecar in action, so I filmed it for posterity. He had so much fun he drove for half an hour!
He kept the speed down so I could stay up with him on my bicycle. It can go quite a bit faster. I've had it up to 40 mph and still accelerating on a test run. I would need an open track to see what it will really do!
I have had battery issues beginning about a year ago that have kept me off the road until recently. When the battery was new, I would drive for about 45 minutes at 20-30 mph and still have power to spare. I never hit the limit anywhere I drove it. Then, a year ago, it started shutting down on me after just a minute or two under load, or after about 5 minutes running with no load on the test stand.
I did a little research and learned that I had not been charging it properly. The battery came with a charger that has a LED light on it that is red when charging. I was unplugging it as soon as the light went green. It turns out that this doesn't evenly charge the cells in the battery. I should have been leaving it on the charger for several hours after it turned green so that it would even out the cells. Apparently, red means full charge and green is a trickle charge.
Anyway, I've been trying to bring the battery back around by leaving it on the charger for longer periods after each run. As is evidenced by this video, it is getting better. Now I can get it to last about 15 minutes for me or about 30 minutes for my considerably lighter son. My goal is to enjoy it tooling around the neighborhood and to eventually get a "shockingly" expensive replacement battery!
This video is unedited so you can hear how quiet it is. It is great for sneaking up on wildlife or carrying on a conversation while driving. Watch out for squirrels!
What are the specs on the motor and battery?
The battery is the NBPOWER 72V 20AH Electric Bicycle Lithium Battery, with 80A BMS and 72V 5A Charger for 2000W-3000W Ebike kits. I found it on Amazon. I have a mixed opinion on it. The battery was fine for the first year but now the range has dropped very noticeably. This is probably due to the cheap charger and BMS. The charge indicator light on the charger goes green long before the battery is fully charged. This should apparently be interpreted to mean that it is switching from fast charging to slow charging. I didn't know this and regularly disconnected it as soon as it went green. I think this created a situation where some cells aren't fully charging anymore as the system isn't sophisticated enough to balance the charge across all the cells. In its present state the battery will go for about 15 minutes with me in it or 30 minutes with the kids. I don't know how long it went when new, as I never ran out of juice in the neighborhood, but it was a heck of a lot longer than that.
The hub motor is a NBPOWER 3000W 80A kit. It works great and will take the 3-wheeler up over 40 mph.