3 kW e-Kickboard brings tears to your eyes

IMG_20140104_165009Since exco is not big on baking cookies for Christmas, he invested his time in a project he was thinking about doing for some time: Building an electrified kickboard.

The ingredients are:

A first try to build a belt tensioning mechanism by sliding the motor mount looked nice enough but didn’t manage to hold up to the torque and had to be re-designed.

Once that was sorted out it was time for a test ride. Impromptu as always the two battery packs went into his trouser pockets (don’t try this at home) and were connected via a long Y-cable to the motor controller. He’s currently in the process of building a new battery pack from used Makita battery packs with 18650 cells.

Check out the video of the first test drive:

If you’re planning to built your own e-something, Maedler has a nice online calculator for dimensioning the drive train.

For this build the no-load RPM was measured at 1285 rpm which would yield a theoretical maximum speed of 26.85 km/h. Actual measured speed was 22 km/h using 6S Li-Po cells or around 25 km/h using 7S cells.
Mind you, on a kickboard this is scary fast and quite literally brings tears to your eyes from the cold winter wind draft.

There’s also a more detailed build log over at the Endless Sphere forum and a whole bunch of extra photos.