It looks great in this photo, but it's only worth being destroyed to the bone in order to reuse some essential parts for a new life on our kart's frame. The batteries are pretty much dead, being abused while in stock for too long. We can run for about 500 meters on a night's charge, easily going up to 45 kilometers per hour. But after that, the batteries have already run out of juice.
We'll go and get some new batteries with great amp hours, duct-tape them to the rack at the back of the scooter, and run it again to see whether we get everything good to go out of the scooter and onto the kart. This is quite a remarkable adventure, as the brakes on the scooter are out of order - not that they were any good when we started - but we broke them taking apart the scooter for the first time.
We're trying to get a naked scooter now. We're tearing off cheap plastic panels to access the wiring and electric parts. We're shortcutting useless stuff (like the brakes, heh) and trying to determine the importance of the (few) parts that we need to get a kart running on electricity.
Our first try at really getting an understanding of the scooter's mysterious internals, was to take the back wheel out, which contains the motor, and see how destructive we could get on it. We nearly killed it doing so ... But shortly after forcibly putting the metal parts back together with a hammer, we were riding our brakeless scooter, until the batteries kept dying on us again.
Again, we learned plenty new things. And we're ready for the next step.
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To be honest I've had some experience with scooter dissassembly and seriously most of them are this crappy ;). Apart from the breaks that did need some maintenance and/or replacement the basic frame and plastic parts are equal to what you find on a standard booster (or camino in my younger days ;) ).
ReplyDeleteSince we now understand the inner workings. It will be a peace of cake to take an old 'gasoline' scooter and convert it to electric. Actually it is easier than the e-kart since we don't need to make gears or a motor mount (or should I say motorwheel mount ;) ).
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