3Faze - the Electric Fazer

3Faze is my electric motorbike. I built it out of a Yamaha FZS-600 "Fazer", a four-cylinder petrol motorbike.

This page attempts to document the build itself, some of the technical challenges and how I overcame them, and also talk about building electric vehicles.

Why?

Why did I built the motorbike? Several reasons:

I was looking at upgrading my bike - my trusty Suzuki GS-500 was still going strong but I wanted something different.
I started to get interested in electric vehicles, because they're cheaper to run and because they're interesting new technology.
I wanted a larger project to work on - upgrading my gaming machine or buying new CDs is amusing but not something you can really show off to people.
When I worked out how much it would cost, it was affordable and comparable to buying a reasonable second-hand motorbike. My electric motorbike conversion cost about $12,000 in parts.

Why not?

It's important to be realistic about building an electric vehicle:

Electric vehicles are not cheaper to build than normal vehicles. Though the price has come down, and continues to lessen, a reasonable car conversion will set you back over $20,000. Most of that is on the battery.
Electric vehicle performance is still not fully comparable to petrol vehicles. If you go as fast, you won't go as long; if you go the same distance, you will be slower. This basically comes down to energy density - petrol still stores considerably more power per cubic centimetre, and per kilogram, than the best lithium cells.
Knowing a bit about electricity and electrical engineering helps. You can get by without knowing what resistor colour codes mean, or why voltage is proportional to motor speed, but you do need to know what not to touch, how it's going to connect together, and what to do if things go wrong.

However, don't let these things put you off building one altogether. The technology that goes into electric vehicles are rapidly improving, and a lot of research and development is going into new motor controllers, new types of motor, and (most importantly) battery technology. I confidently predict that we will see an order of magnitude improvement in electrical energy storage within five years - we've almost seen that much in the last.

To put that in perspective: at the moment most electric motorbikes can do a hundred to maybe two hundred kilometres on a charge. Now imagine if you could do one thousand kilometres on a charge. That's the kind of improvement I'm predicting, and I think it's quite realistic. When that happens, buying an electric motorbike won't sound like a crazy idea - it'll be a no-brainer.

How?

Fundamentally you need three things for an electric vehicle:

A motor.
A battery.
A controller that turns the battery power into motor power based on the inputs from the driver (and the vehicle).

You do also need a bunch of other things if you want to have more than just a go-kart:

A DC-DC converter to charge the auxiliary 12V battery from the traction battery. You'll be running the traction system at considerably higher voltages, you won't have an alternator, and you need some way of powering all those indicators and stop lights.
A battery charger - unless you want to run it once.
A battery management system, to turn the charger off when the battery is full and tell the controller when the battery is nearing empty.
For cars, you'll also need to remember heating and/or cooling, which now have to be run off the electrical system rather than the combustion engine.

What?

So what did I put in my bike? Well, there's a simple description at my webpage on EV Album, but here it is in more detail:

Frame: a 1999 Yamaha FZS-600 'Fazer'. I originally bought this from a wrecker, since I didn't want to take a registered motorbike off the road. Repairable write-offs are cheaper, too.

Motor: an Enertrac MHM-602. This is a hub motor - the motor sits entirely in the rear wheel. Rated for 30KW peak, 10KW continuous.

Battery: 38 Thunder-Sky 60AH batteries. That was what I could find at the time (pouch cells weren't really available to end users then). Rated to 3C, so they'll do 180A (3 * 60) continuous.

Controller: Kelly KBL-12401I brushless DC motor controller. 120V, 400A peak (200A continuous), regenerative braking.

DC-DC converter: bought from PowerBox Australia. 150W at 12.5V. It would be better to output 13.8V so it ran a 12V lead-acid battery at the correct charge.

Battery management: a Lithiumate Lite made by eLithion. It's a full-featured digital monitoring system where you can see each cell's state of charge, for the price of an analogue system with no information. I like having lots of information.

Battery monitoring: the TBS Electronics E-Xpert Pro. It's a nice, simple monitor that I've mounted flush onto the top of the ~~fuel tank~~ controller cover.

More! I demand more!

Well, you can read my page on how to build an electric vehicle. This covers the general principles and tries to explain how you get from the idea to the execution.

And now there's a page with a bunch of pictures - still being added to.