After lurking on these forums for a while I decided on my first build.
The base is a freebord that has been sitting unused for a while.
I got the mechanical kit for 1 motor here [1] and a 6374 190kv sensored here [2]
I’ve started putting together the kit (which sadly comes with no instructions whatsoever), and I’m already hitting some issues.
It looks like the tolerances between the belt and the motor mount are very small, and I’m worried about it catching.
The tolerance between the motor pinion and the wheel is pretty tight too.
Is it something I should be concerned about, and try to space the motor mount more from the pulley ?
I have a set of the torqueboards motor mounts, they work great but i had to really torque them down to the trucks to stop them from moving. I’d recommend flipping 3/8" bracket that tightens down to the trucks to the other side of the motor mount bracket. Doing that should allow you to flip the motor pulley around and allow it to sit further on the motor shaft. Here is a pic for reference from the site.
I salvaged the 18650 out of laptops, they're mostly all good. The reds don't seem as good, but I built a 10s3p for ~$60 including a BMS, can't be too picky
I thought 18650 were robust enough to rarely explode, no matter their provenance.
Can I play it safe with VESC settings ? Like limiting battery amps to 25A, regen to -12A
Charging is done via a BMS and I’ll monitor the amps carefully on the input. I think that should help.
Eventually I want to ditch my chinese BMS and do charging / monitoring system as described here [1]
ps. there seem to be a number of people using laptop batteries throughout these forums, and youtube videos.
You’d have to limit battery amps to maybe 5A per cell - that will be no fun ride.
Sure a lot of people are using them - but in much larger parallel configurations like 6P and up.
18650 don’t explode like Lipos but they do vent - I would not want this happen to me at home or next to my expensive VESC.
That’s a good point, thank you for that. Can I find more info on the science behind why a 6p would be better than a 3p for my “unknown cells” ?
At this point I feel like I just need to plow through with what I have and have hope in my odds. I’ve already invested all my budget for this, and a fair amount of time.
In parallel you basically add the discharge current of your individual cells to get your true pack output current (in your case maybe 3x5A=15A) similar to what you do with voltage when you do series connections.
