I’ve now worked out pretty well how the battery is going to come together. There will be 3 main packs in the bulk of the battery cage, and a fourth one sitting on the top. There will also be a couple of rows sitting on top of that. I made some placeholder packs out of the 18650 cell holders and a handful of cells. These placeholder packs were very useful in helping me to get the spacing right when welding together the mounting tabs and upper rail.
Each mounting tab will have a bolt through it that will pass through the entire plastic cell holder pack (through one of the gaps). I’ve 3D printed some large plastic spacers out of ABS to help properly secure the battery packs. In the bottom section (pictured below), there will be about 810 cells, or approximately 60% of the cells I intend on using.
The next step was to weld up the rail for the top layer of battery cells. This is the same size as one of the 3 packs in the bottom section, but is fitted sideways to maximise space. As you can see in the picture below, the top rail extends out the front of the main chassis a small amount. It’s pretty close to the front mud flap, but there should be enough room to avoid any problems. This top section isn’t “structural” as such, and it’s only job is to hold a small amount of batteries in place and be a convenient place to attach a sheet metal cover to enclose everything.
My Type 1 charging port arrived so I decided to mount it on the bike. Even though it’s getting a bit old and isn’t as popular, I went with a type 1 port because my Nissan Leaf uses it too. This will make it much easier to share the charger from the Leaf, etc. I ended up welding a small angled section of steel to the battery cage and used a Linisher to remove a curved section to fit around the plug socket. Once this was welded on and the holes were drilled out, I could bolt the Type 1 port onto it. The wiring attached to the Type 1 plug is long enough to reach anywhere in the bike that I’d want to put the charger so that will make it convenient to hook it up when the time comes.
That’s it for now! Stay tunes for a battery update and a little more work on the electronics side of things.
