Thoughts of a curly Salvadorean sailor wearing Crocs: Dismantling, cleaning, and welding CholoCycle

Hey guys, a lot has happened since our last blog post. We bought an AC-20 Motor which should arrive very soon. We also got a AC motor controller from SevCon.

When we took the engine off CholoCycle we realized several things. We had a lot of space for batteries, several anchor points to mount stuff, and sadly, one of the previous owners had tried to cut the frame :(. This meant we had to dismantle the frame so we could take it to an experienced welder who can weld aluminum. Thanks to Scott from the Central Machine Shop for helping us out!

Someone tried cutting the frame

Before

The first thing we did after taking the fairings and seat off was to make a mock-up of our motor. We conveniently found a PVC pipe that was around the same diameter as our motor.

Motor model fits pretty well

Motor model picture from top

Motor model picture from the chain side

While we were looking for the best place to mount the motor we realized how dirty the frame was. We had three options to clean the bike:
1. Bring a bucket of water and rags to the shop and wipe it down.
2. Roll it home and hose it down.
3. Roll it next door to D-Lab and shower it..... literally

Our Spanish friends are helping us wash choloCycle

Yup, it's going in the shower; Hmm, Camilo doesn't want to get his shirt wet.

Look at that Spanish ingenuity

Working hard. I should be a manager.

Squeaky Clean! :D

Now that CholoCycle is clean we cut out cardboard to make a quick model of the aluminum plate we would use to mount the ac-20.

Quick cutout of one of the motor mounts

Zip-tied motor model in place

First motor mount in place; third anchor point needed.

Much better picture of the motor mount. Oh Hai Roberto

The first two anchor points for the motor mount were not hard to find. The only problem with them is that they are not coplanar. This means we will have to make a spacer for at least one of those mounting points. More on that later! For the third mounting point we are thinking about welding a piece of c-channel (or maybe L-bracket) onto the side of the frame. We would then bolt the motor mount onto that c-channel so the mount is removable.

C-Channel welded on red square

There goes the front wheel....

Back wheel and swing arm are off too..

Time to take to the welder...

Who came up with the best way of carrying the chassis? Roberto? or...

Or me? Lol at Dgonz and Nancy in the background

After taking apart the frame we also made new battery mock-ups. We settled on two different configurations. One in which we have the two batteries mounted side by side vertically. This means we would have to cut the cross-arm that joins the two sides of the frame. The second configuration would not require us to cut off the cross-arm. We would place them on top of each other in a criss-cross pattern. We still don't know which batteries we are getting but it seems that all the batteries will have the same width and height. For this reason we think that the vertical configuration would allow us to use longer modules.