is geardrive wear-in a thing with completes?

How-Tos & Esk8 mechanics
#1

hi there, thanks for all the help on here, some might have noticed I went balls deep with bioboards since about 2 years, so I got the plutonium 1 with 4 motors and did 4500km since may 2021, what a blast it was. more than anything I am a range-yunkie, and I noticed something weird with a plutonium 2 dual motor setup: well, rolling resistance is slightly higher, how come? rolling down the same hills, the v2 almost decelerates, while the quad v1 accelerates wile idling. also, I remember vaguely that initially the quad v1 had surprisingly high freeroll resistance initially, and I thought this would be normal, definitely more than 4k km later, and arguably more than 500 to 1k km in. so, should I leave things how they are and wait for the system to “break-in” or should i mess with the gear backlash, as right now it is clearly noticeable when turning the drivetrain manually.

wait or change?

one more side-note to give the experience some numbers: with my best effort in energy saving, doing the same first 400 meters from my home to the point where a super nice bike-path starts, which I usually try to do as economical as possible (yeah, some ADD there) can manage to have davega show as little as below 10wh/km with 4k+km 4wd plut v1, can’t get below 15wh/km with the 2wd 250km total plut v2 at the same point. if I don’t care about lowest possible wh/km but still look at the screen at said point, I usually get around 12wh/km with v1 and up to massive 20wh/km with v2.

so a couple things to consider here: is a 4wd more efficient than a 2wd in a region with rather big inclines and declines? does the electrical system waste more energy when under heavy load (2wd) compared to 4wd? I managed to squeeze 80km out of my plut v1 already, it was messy and my legs hurt, doing an average of about20 kmh…the patience, but I can’t see how I can get 100km out of the v2 right now, the free-roll resistance is too high it seems. or the new motor type or esc suck more energy per km than the prior combo. what gives? ideas?

cheers!

TLDR: my first geardrive complete used to roll way worse than after 500 or 1000km ridden, then energy consumption went down, my second one is rather new and uses more energy than a quad motor oldie, so is geardrive-wear in a thing?

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#2

Yes. Always. The same is true for bearings and really any two touching parts that are new and rub against each other. Surfaces always have little imperfections in them, and as they rub against their mating surface those imperfections get slowly “ironed out”.

New moving mechanical components always require a burn in period.

#3

Perhaps it could be a difference of gear drive and backlash?

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#4

Wearing in is for sure a thing but that’s a drastic change.

How many km you think you have on the new one?

Do you have any telemetry data that shows your Wh/km consumption?

Final question, can you upload a video or 2 of you hand spinning drive wheels on both boards like in this thread?

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#5

How many km you think you have on the new one?
exactly 275km, so far the average wh/km is 17.6 and avg kph is 23.3.

Final question, can you upload a video or 2 of you hand spinning drive wheels on both boards like in this thread?

will likely do sometime soon, I just know they give quite a bit more resistance when turned than the v1 ones, the reason I hesitate opening the geardrives and adjusting backlash is cause I think this could be intentional intended, thus once the “burn-in” phase is complete, they should be setup optimally. this is why I wondered whether vendors do intentionally set up the backlash to be very narrow to allow for thermal extension to push everything in place. also I remember vaguely that the v1 gears would be much tougher to turn after all this distance travelled. I think I remember it would barely go down a slight slope whereas other boards clearly accelerated, now it accelerates there as well.

so I guess I will check back here after I have done a couple extensive tours with this, 500km should be behind me at least, right? oh and if anyone wonders, the psi in the tires should not be an issue, they are the same 3.5 bar on both, albeit the new board has fresh new wheels which could make a difference as well, so, who knows.

so I guess my question is whether the slight overtightening of geardrives is intentional for new complete boards. I clearly hear them “clacking” in place when moving slowly, and the resistance until one tooth moves to the next is clearly felt as well as heard. maybe it’s also a sound thing, as the board sounds like some fancy racecar with those geardrives, especially at high speeds.

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#6

You shouldn’t have a lot of resistance, contact bioboards via email, send them a video of you hand spinning the wheels, I havnt seen the v2 plutoniums to have alot of resistance

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#7

I’d double check all bearings. Had almost the same thing happen to me and one of the wheel bearings was crapping out. Dissecting logs for separate motor current figures usually is a dead giveaway. Or just spinning each wheel to check rolling resistance.

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#8

it’s brand new, so this should not be the issue, I opened one geardrive, the one which gives the most resistance, and guess what, it’s the motor itself. it has a lot of resistance going from one position of the magnets, to the next one, not sure about the physics of this. is this bc the motor is bigger than the last one? I am sitting at 20wh/km right now, would have definitely loved more range from the subtantially bigger battery and the step back to 2wd, but with this I merely get the same range as with plutonium v1 (4wd). want to chime in on this @mackann?

#9

Please send a video to info@bioboards.se. You should not have alot of resistance. But 20 wh/km sounds good, that will be around 60km range.

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#10

sent you a mail with a link to two hi-res videos of the issue

starting to think this is an ESC setting-thing, given that when mine arrived I first had to put it in sensored mode, the shipping probably messed it up, or who knows what. this much resistance from the motor is not normal, is it? 20wh is too much on flat roads. also why don’t you give me a scientific explanation to why my 2wd v2 should have way more resistance to my v1? 20wh does not sound “good” to me at all. 8wh would sound normal to me. at least less than my v1 4wd… jesus…

edit: the unit is like in the previous posts: wh/km

#11

8wh is like low powered hub motors territory…

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#12

I’m at 7-9Wh/km average on my hub motors.

I’m at 17-19Wh/km average on my 8" pneumatics on belts

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#13

Please add a per distance unit for data’s sake!

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#14

Now i know why it felt so odd.

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#15

What speed do you average? I haven’t recorded more than 15Wh/km on my 8" build and that was pushing hard on a short track, averaging maybe 28kph? My settings aren’t exactly low either, at 80A/75A. I feel a lot of drivetrain drag, yet my consumption has always been lower than expected compared to other people’s numbers and I have no idea why. My only theory now is less aerodynamic losses from a slower average speed.

#16

well I hope this settles in still. the v1 plutonium feels like it has unusually little drag, I rode it a lot, if the davega is to be trusted 3000+km (I had to replace it once which from what I remember reset the total km recorded, so I might have done 5000km already on this). all the bearings are rather loud (lost their oils?) but they give surprisingly little resistance. all I want to know is if this is the reason, and that even the free roll resistance of motors becomes less over time. just did a test today with this spot not far from home where I keep watching the stats, and it showed 10.2wh/km with the v1 today. I can’t get below 15wh/km with the v2 yet. also, the v2 clearly rolls down small declines slower or not at all (without throttle) than all my other boards, and the v1 is really close to a belt-driven 105mm-thane evolve gtx, or a cloudwheel (120mm) direct-drive onsra blackcarve2 - so the real question is: can excessive use really bring down the free roll resostance of a quad driven board from 17-20wh/km (when new) to about 10wh/km? if so, what a waste on behalf of new boards, what a waste of energy. with my oldie but goldie 4wd v1 (on a deteriorating battery) I can currently get exactly as far as with a brand new 2wd plutonium v2, which has 30+% bigger battery, this just feels wrong and I’d love some reasonable explanations to this. so currently there is little reason to take the v2 over the v1 as the v1 gets me just as far and charges a lot quicker with the same 10A charger, and on the few stretched inclines on my trips, the v1 does never overheat, the v2 does, and thus throttles and I need to help by kickpushing. so again I feel like something is off here. or the oils in the bearings really cause this much drag. cause frankly, there are no more oils in the bearings (be it motor or wheels) of my v1, as I put it through hell and back, and it held up pretty nicely, except for the geardrive mounts which got loose over time. if you don’t believe me, I’ll show you a slight decline on a road, starting on the same patch, with 0 impulse in any direction, the v1 will start accelerating (albeit slowly) with no throttle applied and finish the whole stretch (about 400m) and the v2 will barely accelerate and stop at a rough patch in the middle at 150m or something. I mean I can live with this if I know why it’s happening, and if you read my first post, I speculate that when the v1 was new, I had exactly the same behaviour and drag, but I thought this was normal. guess it all depends on what we accept as normal, don’t we? :wink:

but then again: this time I opened the geardrives, and noticed that all the drag comes from the motor itself, moving it from one position to the next (not sure how to call this, stator displacement or something) there is lots of resistance, as if this was a super big motor, and in fact it is rather big, isn’t it - so is the answer my motors are so big, and this is normal for those? I remember vaguely that a guy I know switched motors on an evolve, what he ended up with was more motor drag as the new ones would not idle anymore - oh, idle what? this makes me wonder if there is an ESC setting (metr setting) for idle behaviour, this setting might have gotten botched along with a few other settings in my case, which we have seen in this threat: stationary (non moving) start just makes the board jerk around - so anyone, what do I need to look for? it really seems like the esc is braking or applying some voltage which prevents free rotation of the motors when no throttle is applied.

#17

Lol i get 20wh/km on thane :sweat_smile: you doing good.

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#18

How many cartons you carrying?

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#19

All of them

#20

Gears shouldn’t need much time to “wear-in” but rubber seals will definitely soften and wear over time. This counts for both main seals if your drive has them as well as rubber bearing shields.

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