PSA: Why small hub motors overheat and fail

14Wh per mile for 285lb of cargo is really good; were you driving “fun” or “eco” ?

Edit: said “range test” nevermind

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Im not sure how much of the losses are coming from properties of the urathane itself vs the airgap that develops between the motor and the wheel vs increased resistance due to higher hub motor temp, but i think they are all big players in the losses we see in hubs. I think with good wheels and managable temps we should see hub efficiency surpass belt drives in some situations at least. Especially long rides with few stops at moderate to high speeds.

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Yeah eco’ish. Average spees at the end of the test was about 13 if I recall correctly.

Oh ok. I can pull off 15Wh/mi minimum (more like 18) riding like that but I’m 215 lbs, so yours is significantly better

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I don’t know either… but… if more thane is better why do some popular wheels have a core? it means less thane! one possible answer: wheels are suspension to a large degree on a skateboard, does the core provide a different type of attenuation/dampening that is required??? alloy cores have been tried but don’t seem superior or popular?

yeah, although I’m not sure a hub, even 4wd will be the fastest up Pikes

When I said proerties of the thane i didn’t have thane thickness in mind as much as I did properties like rebound, but thane thickness also factors in per @ChrisChaput explanation. Im just saying hub thane doesn’t roll well and feels like lots of efficiency is being lost to friction from rolling resistance.

Although Im confident that my 4wd hub boards have more than enough torque to climb pikes peak at 30mph, I wouldnt even try it. The pikes peak challenge is not a battle of efficiency or even power as I see it, its purely a battle of heat management. Any of the hubs I have would heat up within the first few miles of the climb with me on them without a doubt, even with 4wd. If I race Pikes peak it will be on the 4wd trampa with 80mm motors Ive been working on for months :wink:.

Ive never claimed that hubs have supieror heat management, they have obvious disadvantages in that area. However under low-med load cruising situations( at motor rpms within the efficincy range for its KV), where heat isnt much of a concern, the hubs should be more efficient since the motors do not have the frictional losses from the belts or from the higher motor rpm needed for a given wheel speed. I’ll do some more logs with my V3’s with whr comsumption overlaid on the video see if I can confirm this :).

Maybe @Hummie and @evoheyax longer motors will have what it takes though. Can we see expect to see those motors at the socal performance day next month at least if not Pikes peak?

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For some more stats on belt drive efficiency I get 12-13 wh/mile at high speed and can get as low as 8 wh/mile if I stay under 20 mph - this is all on flat terrain at 220-240lb (depends on what I’m carrying). This is on the freeride which uses a tensioner and the belts are run really loose.

Just went on an R2 meet-up. Here’s a shot so you can see motor size difference - even with my weight thermals have not become an issue. The low-end torque of the R2 was impressive, never felt that on a hub.

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I think there are factors impacting the range of hubs that aren’t existent in but what doesn’t make sense to me is my first board. Enertion drive kit with a r-spec 2 motor. Top speed 20 mph, but riding at 20 mph most of the time, on a 201 Wh battery, I could get 7 miles of range on my route. With hummie hubs, I went down to 5 miles with a 403 Wh battery. I never really do range tests in the sense that I find the flattest ground, and ride slow for as long as possible. It means noting to me, cause I never ride slow, ever. I’m sure if I have, I’d see those numbers go way up. For example, I already found pull 4x the amps going up the 10% grade hills. This should translate into 25% of the expected battery range is what you get, which, is about what I’ve always gotten. The question is though, how efficient can hubs get? I think very efficient. But it depends on the kv. 140 kv motor is more what I think we would like (carvon 2.5’s for example). But you sacrifice low speed torque and efficiency.

I don’t understand the gearing benefits fully, but I have seen a huge difference. Maybe these new hubs will change everything for me, we will see. Now that we have a core, we can make super nice wheels with great rebound. I road on a garbage road yesterday at around 25 mph, and hardly felt the vibrations.

What I do know is the stator in the raptor 2 is half of the size of hummies original motors. But yet, I got way better range and they stayed so much cooler.

Maybe @chaka could chime in on the details of why belt drives are more efficient than hubs at higher speeds (40-50 mph). Belt drives are his specialty, while hubs are my specialty. I agree that we can bring efficiency up though to belt drives for lower speeds. I believe these new motors will do just that.

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I will be bringing these motors everywhere I can. What I’m really excited about is the triple wide motors. We still want to bring those guys back. Hummie did simulations yesterday, and found the 12mm custom axle is 20 times stronger than a 8mm axle :stuck_out_tongue: No motor motors snapping trucks like what happened before with the triple wide motors.

You’ll see more video in the near future also. Planning on tamming mt. tamalpais as it is now. Or at least doing as much as the battery will allow me to do, lol. Want to give these motors a full range of tests. I chose a lower than desirable kv this time to get that extra bit of torque and efficiency.

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Reduction will always produce more torque than a direct drive. Anyone with a slight understanding of mechanics can see this. If someone came on these forums with a 1:1 pulley drive everyone would be pointing out their error but none seem to care when a person comes to the plate with a hub drive. I’m guessing there is too much smoke in the air.

One thing I know is nothing will beat out a rear mounted reduction drive. The size of the motors you can fit behind the trucks will dwarf anything you can fit inside a tube of polyurethane.

Those little cans we have been running on the FreeRide are nice little motors in a dual configuration but they are the absolute smallest I would ever go. We have since switched to a larger motor on the FreeRide choosing more power over weight savings.

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Thanks for chiming in!

I honestly hope you get a chance to try the raptor 2 motors the carvon 3 motors and hummies new motors. You will notice a world of difference over the small hubs that everyone else sells today and that you’ve probably tried in the past. Lower heat, lower waste, and more thane, to the point that I think it’s worth the tradeoffs for simplicity.

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I’m glad to see the progression with hubs in regards to cored urethane and bigger motors. It was inevitable. My silence on the subject doesn’t mean that I’m not watching, reading and taking note of everything that surfaces. But as archaic as y’all seem to think reduction systems are, they are superior. Yes they look like garden equipment, but they enable adjustable torque, acceleration and top speed without compromising consumption and heat production. Proof lies in the fact that we can run any size urethane and then swap out to pneumatics and run trails, grass and gravel without overheating our motors. (uphill)

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I think it’s worth the tradeoffs for simplicity.

I think novelty is the word you are looking for. Novelty is good for business but not performance. If I seem abtuse it is only because there is a lot of misinformation going around regarding hub motors in reference to reduction drives.

For me hubs do not solve any problems. The problems we faced early on in Eskate with belt slipping and poor fitting motor mounts has been solved with precision matched mounts and trucks… idlers. I don’t want to derail this thread so this all I will say on the matter.

I will say, you have pretty much answered your own question through observation. You need to double the power potential of your hubs if you want to match a 2:1 reduction drive. Eventually you will run out of space and have to accept the compromise that hub motors cannot escape unless you engineer some gear reduction into your hub. Lowering KV is fine if you have a motor large enough to take the extra turns on the stator. lowering the kv too far on a small diameter motor creates inefficiency. This is the main problem hub motors face. You don’t have the space to fit a motor large enough to be wound to a low enough KV to produce good torque without generating a lot of heat.

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Wow. I’m surprised to hear such harsh words from such an intelligent person, when you haven’t even tried the best of hubs on the market today. These hubs have changed the game. Things are not the same anymore.

It hurts to have the person you respect and admire so much rip apart the research and development that I and many have done for the past two years. These small hub motors are novelty. But even pushing these new larger hubs hard now, I can not make then overheat the same way. There’s always more to learn and more innovation to be done. If your try a pair of any of these three motors, you’ll see that we have the space to fit a stable motor into the wheel, that won’t overheat, even when pushed a bit.

I’m willing to concede and say things that aren’t in best financial interest, such as conceding that belt drives have an advantage that hubs never will be able to fully utilize. But to go as far as to say they are “novelty” is insulting and it’s clear your trying to protect your business. It’s sad, because if you tried my board, as is now, with 4wd hubs, you’d be pretty happy with the torque and the max temps the motors get to.

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I wouldn’t get too butt hurt about it, I have been pretty open about my assessment of hub motors. They are just too big a compromise for me on several levels.

Novelty is key to having a successful product so take it as an insult if you like but it does not change anything. If it were not for novelty none of the Chinese manufactures would be producing them.

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@evoheyax Until hubs are available, that ride plush, like abec 97s or 107s or can perform exactly the same as satellite set ups (trails/steeps or with pneumatics) they pretty much are a novelty. Popular yes! And if you poll it, or ask publicly the concensus for popularity is going favor hubs because of aesthetics. I suppose somebody needs to make a 70mph belted set-up to sway the masses?

Care to trade a dual set of your best hubs for one of my Dual Drive systems with 97’s? We could do a “Same Thread Forum Comparison”

15 to 20 gearing with 107mm wheels + 10s + 245kv = 75mph :wink:

It’ll take more than that, but it is doable.

I dont think this question was answered by Chaka, maybe because there is no good reason. How would a belt drive using 4.12 VESC even hit 40-50mph? With 12S voltage, a 190kv 14P motor, a 2:1 gear ratio at 85% efficiency and 90mm wheels it isnt even breaking 40mph and is already at the max recommended erpm limit of 60k.

I made the following statement.

Here’s a model that would test this idea.

Two eboards, both with 10S batteries, same vescs settings with 90mm flywheels maintaining a constant speed of 30mph. Board 1: 2:1 belt drive and a 220KV motor Board 2: 110kv Carvon V3 direct drives(not quite hubs but close enough).

@chaka Can u argue that a belt drive is more efficient under the above circumstances? Both motors are spinning at 80% of their max rpm, but belt drive has additiinal frictional losses from the belt and higher energy loss within the motor due to double the motor speed. Where is the hub motors disadvantage at cruising speed?

This reminds me of when my grandfather told me automatic transmissions would never compare to the efficiency or reliability of a manual gearbox. Now 20 years later, less than 3% of cars in the US are stick shifts.

As a general statement what you said is just plain false. U cant build build a 2000w belt drive that will match the performance of my 4000w hub board. Please do show up to performance day next month and try your luck if its worth it to you. If your 2000W board can beat my hub board in both a 50m and 100m sprint Ill pay your airfare home. Im guessing your board wont be sensored either since you said earlier this week that nobody needs them and their just another potential problem.

The only way I can see your statement above as even being close to true would be for a hub board and belt drive board with the same KV motors, but for two boards with the same topspeed your belt drive needs double the KV which cuts your torque advantage in half and increases your motors heat production as well.

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Thing is, There is nothing that states we can’t run less reduction. We can run it all the way down to 1:1 with belts. And we can change kv’s. We can make a 1.5:1 4wd build @200kv @10s on 107’s -64mph weighted/fully charged

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