Electritana: In The Beginning

Alright, I have begun the dream of building an electric motorcycle with the help of my cousin Luke. Our areas of expertise mesh well together. We’re like Cagney and Lacey. He handles the mechanical, I do the electrical.

We picked up a 1989 Suzuki Katana on Saturday (2010/04/24) from a couple of dudes on Craig’s list. They were very helpful and luckily had the title and most of the parts for the bike in a box. They had already removed the engine and scavenged other parts to put it in another bike. That saved us a lot of work and I don’t have to worry about selling an engine and all its accoutrements.

Thankfully, Luke’s grandfather’s has a truck and moving the bike back to my garage was simple.

On Sunday (2010/04/25) we started reattaching the components to the bike such as turn signals and front brakes. A few pieces are missing, but the previous owner may still have them sitting in a box.

The wiring is a nightmare. I first had to unwrap about a spool of electrical tape to get to the wires and then realized the complexity that lay before me.

Most of these wires aren’t needed because they are related to the original combustion engine. So, I just had to determine what was necessary. I tediously reverse engineered the purpose of as many wires as I could and labeled them one-by-one.

On Monday (2010/04/26) I spent some more time finalizing the equipment for the bike. I learned of a motor, the Agni 95-R at electricracebikes.com, which is supposedly very efficient while being small and light. I also had the moment of clarity that the batteries I had intended on purchasing, the Odyssey PC925, are only 28 amp hours. Amp hours mean how much energy the batteries can hold and 28 is not very much. After considerably more searching I found some lithium iron phosphate batteries at evcomponents.com. I went with the Thundersky 40 ah model. These ended up being more expensive than the Odyssey batteries, but ironically less per amp hour.

Luke and I continued to mess with the bike. He removed a few more pieces from the bike and thought more about fabrication. Having nothing else to do until we get parts, he setup the welder and air compressor we’ll use for the build. He also bought adapters for the compressor for cutting and grinding; these will definitely come in handy.

Determined to figure out the wiring, I looked online for a diagram. No one gives that information away for free apparently, so I just jumped back in. I began cutting and removing wires that I was sure had nothing to do with signals, brakes or dashboard lighting. Finally, by late last night I got down to a pretty minimal amount of wires. I remembered I had a 5 volt 2 amp power supply sitting around and decided to try and hook it up. Of course the bike requires a 12 volt battery, but the power supply did enough. I actually got the turn signals and brake lights to work. The head light would work unless I short circuited it from the power supply. I just don’t think there was enough juice to get it going through the whole system. Also the turn signals would blink, but that again might be due to the microcontroller being under powered.

Here are some pictures of the lights (boring).

Right turn signal.