You remember in the movie Big Trouble in Little China when Egg Chen says, “I am the past come back to haunt you!”? Well, the decision to reduce the size of the drive gear is continually haunting me.
Turns out on assembly that the housings are so close to the truck pivot that it will interfere.
There was a point at which I seriously considered going back to the bigger drive gears, but after staring at the problem for a while I realized that maybe with a slight adjustment I could get it to fit…
I powered it up and detected the motors and remote, and it is working, but I can’t charge it until I get the balance leads wired up, and I can’t wire them up until I get one more of the waterproof charge connectors (I switched from 9-pin to 7-pin but I only ordered one to make sure it fit, so now I need to order another).
That arrives early next week.
Tantalizingly close but there’s still a pretty big list
put foam around the top of the battery box
put grip tape on the deck
attach the deck
cut and install deck ends (wood pieces that cover the drops at each end of the deck)
install the volt meter and wire it
wire all the balance leads
make a new balance harness for the charger
charge it
ride it
Well, from the “If It Ain’t One Thing It’s Another” department it turns out that when you attach the balance charger there’s a pretty significant capacitor discharge inrush current, which, of course, blows my balance lead fuses.
In hindsight getting fast-blow wasn’t such a good idea. And erring on the side of caution as we are doing these days I got very lightweight fuses in the first place (500mA).
So the solution is to go to slow blow, and I bumped it up to 1.5A. But now I have to wait for them to come in. But that’s ok, weather’s crap for the next 2 weeks anyway.
Overall not much forward movement:
[ ] put foam around the top of the battery box
[ ] put grip tape on the deck
[ ] attach the deck
[ ] cut and install deck ends (wood pieces that cover the drops at each end of the deck)
[x] install the volt meter and wire it
[x] wire all the balance leads
[x] make a new balance harness for the charger
[ ] charge it
[ ] ride it
Well ok, it’s not completely done, the grip tape is still in the mail, but I can ride it without, so I’m going to take it out for a test run as soon as the sun comes back.
So just to document, here is the foam surrounding the battery tub
[x] put foam around the top of the battery box
[x] attach the deck
[x] cut and install deck ends (wood pieces that cover the drops at each end of the deck)
[x] install the volt meter and wire it
[x] wire all the balance leads
[x] make a new balance harness for the charger
[x] charge it
[ ] put grip tape on the deck
[ ] ride it
It’s actually running quite well, but it just doesn’t have enough battery. I can only get a couple of miles on the beach (maybe 5 or 6?) before it poops out. Also salt water is so damn conductive that the loop key port got wet and so when I went to shut it down even after I pulled the loop the volt meter continued to show voltage.
So to fix it would require a waterproof housing for the loop key and about twice as much battery. I think it’s 10S5P of 4500mAh cells. So double that - but that is a significant weight penalty.
And it’s not as fun as you’d think because the way the wheels break away on the sand is super unpredictable, so you can be turning nicely and then out of nowhere the wheels just let go.
So all in all unless you have a really strong passion for running on the sand probably your time is spent on a really nice eMTB upgrade. Like this one (which admittedly isn’t going that well).
On the other hand it turns heads everywhere it goes Here it is on a September 2023 trip
(which admittedly isn’t going that well).
