October 25, 2006
Last week I purchased an old street bike on eBay; a 1986 Kawasaki Ninja ZX 900. The bike had a bad engine with a hole about the size of a quarter in the crankcase. It had been sitting outside for several years. The guy who owned it worked at a cycle shop in Las Vegas. It had been partially disassembled, the starter had been removed, so had the oil filter and a couple of other small items. It had about 18,000 miles on it.

The good thing was that it had almost new tires and the frame and suspension all looked straight. The shocks and brakes seemed to work okay. I could care less about the engine and the things I did care about seemed fixable.

What I did not know until later was that all of the plastic parts were sun backed and brittle. Most of the fairings had a corner missing or broken tab. Some were cracked in numerous places and had been repaired numerous times. High power sport bikes tend to be ridden hard and dropped often.

Parked outside also means the electrical switches were corroded and most of them had to be replaced. Also the wheel bearings were junk and had to be replaced, same with the rubber parts and seals in the forks.

The purchase price of $500 on the eBay buy-it now option seemed like a good idea at the time. The next bike I convert will be a newer bike and hopefully one that is still running, so that I can test drive it and find all the other little things that were wrong.

The plan is to do an EV conversion on it like the El Ninja at www.21wheels.com. The instruction book that I bought from that site has lots of detail in it. (The Secrets of El Ninja by John Bidwell - $39.95 + shipping). This winter I find out how accurate it is. It should be a fun project.

November 2, 2006
This week has been interesting. I now have a Kawasaki street bike in the garage. The engine has been removed and an electric engine and batteries are soon to take its place. The old gas tank had about 1 gallon of sour gas in it. I tried to drain it out, but that just stunk up the work area real bad. It may take a few days to air out now. :(

Have found all the new parts needed to put this back together again. The only thing now is waiting for a few payday's to roll by. The taxes are due on the house next month, so that will slow us down for a couple of weeks.

Anyhow I will keep you posted on the electric Ninja as it happens :)

December 9, 2006
I have been working on the electric Ninja this week. Right now I am building cardboard templates that are same size as the batteries. I will use this to plan how to build the mounting brackets in the bike.

March 13, 2007
Saturday I put together my new wire feed welder and did practice beads on some old scrap iron I had in the shop. The new miller welder works very well and I enjoyed the playtime.

The electric Ninja is progressing. I now have all of the major parts to make it work and my son, James, has been helping me figure out how to put all together. I still have a lot of work to do, but it feels good at this point.

Parts bought so far include
1) Electric Motor
2) Motor Controller
3) Throttle Potbox
4) Charge Controller
5) 12 Feet #2 Copper Cable
6) Motor Sprocket
7) Drive Chain.

Parts yet to be acquired:
1) Rear wheel sprocket
2) DC to DC converter for the 72 to 12 volt circuit
3) DC Breaker

April 3, 2007
Tonight I worked on wiring the battery pack on the Ninja. The pack is now all hooked together and the on-board charger is topping the batteries off to 72 volts. Nice to see at least one of my components works like the book says.

All the other major components are now mounted except for the electric motor. I called Doug Taylor, a local welding wizard, tonight and he is going to come by this weekend to help with the motor mount. The mount needs to be built out of aluminum and welding that is out of my range of skills.

April 7, 2007
This week we finished the high voltage wiring. Everything is mounted now except for the motor. The main breaker is only mounted with masking tape for the moment. When the new bracket arrives that will change.

The goal this week was to test the high voltage wiring and the motor. That was done but the results were not as I had hoped.

When everything was hooked up I energized the system and it seemed fine at first. The controller blinked and the led green light was on. I then twisted the throttle and the motor started to turn; that was so cool.

A few seconds later smoke and sparks started spewing out of the control box.

I shut the system down and double-checked all wiring to the diagram. It all looked good. Test 2 had same bad results. At this time I shut down for the night.

The next day I called Alltrax support and triple-checked the wiring diagram. It all looked good. I sketched the wiring diagram and sent it to Jeff at Electric Vehicles. When I talked to him on the phone, we reviewed the wiring and it still sounded correct.

Today when I was taking the pictures I was removing the connections from the motor and I found the problem. The lugs I used in the PMG 132 motor were too large to fit properly. I had covered the lugs with clear heat shrink insulation, but when I tightened down the screw on the negative cable it came in contact with a screw head on the positive plate.

I could not see any of this until I removed the cover and removed the negative lead. Then I could see a small black spot on the screw head under the cable. See the pictures below.

This resulted in a full plus to minus short and that blew the controller. An expensive lesson learned. Next week will be the fix.

April 9, 2007
I’ve been getting questions about performance numbers. Here are a few from the EL Ninja book I bought on the www.21wheels.com web site.

Range: 40 - 50 miles
Top Speed: 60 mph

The numbers vary on terrain, vehicle weight, battery quality, motor used. So, yes, the numbers could change, but by how much I do not know. As soon as I can test drive it, I will let you and the rest of the world know.

The batteries I am using are Costco deep-cycle marine batteries. They may not be the highest quality, but I wanted to try the cheapest ones first and then test Optima's and Trojans. I think the Trojans may be the best for the money right now. All this is also guess work and I really look forward to some real world testing and recording the numbers.

The motor Bidwell used in his bike was the e-tek motor. I used the more expensive PMG 132 motor. The power output is supposed to be about 50% more at peak settings. I hope that is correct and not just sales talk. If the PMG has more power than the e-tek I may get 70 MPH. I did buy a couple of different sprockets to test the gearing.

My cost so far is about $2,800 for the EV parts and $500 for the original bike. I have since found a couple of motorcycle salvage yards and so maybe, if this one works, I can do another with different batteries soon. On the other hand, I may just weld a new battery pack onto the bike I have.

Now that summer is here I would really like to put some solar panels on the roof. I did some calculations on PV systems the other day. Grid electricity is cheap here in Utah. I could only get about a 50-year payback on solar PV for house power. However, if I used solar PV to displace gasoline consumption, then my payback time dropped to about 5 years. That is something that even a cheap-o like me can justify.

April 26, 2007
Yesterday I got the motor mount welded onto the EL Ninja and it turned out great. Got home at 4:30 and by 7:00 PM I was doing test runs around the neighborhood. It runs great. Last night the batteries were not fully charged and top speed was only about 45 or 50. This is a guess because the speedometer is still under the work bench.

Last night I fully charged the batteries and this morning I did another test run. I am still guessing but I think the top speed is close to 60 mph, just like the book said it would be. I am very pleased with the performance.

May 7, 2007
This past week we mounted the motor on Ninja and did some testing. The first long test was from Sugarhouse to Riverton. This is approximately 25 miles and the bike used 3 Kwh of electricity. That comes out to 120 watts per mile. This PMG motor is very efficient. The E-max scooter that I used to ride to work used 100 watts per mile and it was very slow. The Ninja right now tops out at 45 mph. The countershaft sprocket is only a 12-tooth. Next week we will try a 14-tooth, then the week after that we will try a 16-tooth and evaluate all the sizes to find the most efficient size.

This week the goal is get a safety inspection and new tags.

May 13, 2007
Today I changed the motor sprocket on the Ninja. Top speed went from 45 to 51 mph. The going up hills still seems very strong.

Before I changed the sprocket I did a simple 10-mile loop around the city and back home. I did this with the small E-max scooter, then did it again with the Ninja. I measured the electricity in both cases. I used about 40% more electricity in the Ninja. The speed is so much better with the Ninja that the cost factor for the energy used is okay by me.

After changing the sprocket, I ran the 10-mile loop again with the Ninja, then measured the electricity. It was very close to the same. It was so close that I think the difference is within the margin of error in my test case if you factor in the number of red lights, then number of cars that I pass, blah, blah.

Anyhow after the second charge up on the batteries, I went up Emigration Canyon to see how it would handle climbing hills. The top speed of 51 mph was a good place to be. The road is narrow and there are people on bikes, so I would slow down to go around them.

When the road was clear, I held the throttle wide open and even going up the grade all the way, the top speed seemed very close to what it was on level ground. The motor is very torquey for sure. There was a guy following me on a big touring bike; I’m not sure what brand. I gave him plenty of room to pass me if he wanted too, but he followed me all the way up the canyon and never tried to pass.

When I stopped at the top I checked the motor temperature and I could still put my hand on the case of the motor without getting burned. That’s a good sign, that temps are okay.

Plan for now is ride it to work this week and have fun.

May 26, 2007
We now have some new solar panels and components. The system will have 4 panels 130 watts each (520 watts total). It will be configured as a 48 volt system. The great thing about the outback controllers is that the panels can be 48 volts and the battery bank can be 12 or 24 or 48 volts. My system will be 12 volts for now with 2 batteries 6 volts each. This should be enough juice to power the motorcycle and a bit extra for the shop lights or whatever.