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At the start of my winter break nearly a month ago, I bundled a small assortment of my belongings in the car and began the long drive down to New Orleans alongside my good friend Liam. Together we worked closely with Matt at Nightshift to design and fabricate a working prototype electric bike over the span of three weeks. We began with an old beat up Katrina-flooded BMW R75/5 from 1973 and reworked the bike with a Nissan Leif Battery pack and a large 10KW rear hub motor. Many of the parts for this build were lifted from Matt’s previous Leafy Savage build since this iteration was only intended as a minimum viable prototype. We also purchased two 18650 Tesla battery pack modules consisting of 444 cells each, which we intend to use in the final build. Weekly progress posts can be seen here, here, and here. A final gallery of our prototype is available here. Many thanks to Matt, a gracious host and a gifted educator. Higher quality photos of the project are available on the DriveTribe but I put together a smaller (lo-res) gallery below as well.


 

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Pulling the bike from storage
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Stripping down to the chassis was a messy ordeal
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The two interns!
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Soldering components onto our acrylic mockups
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Battery mounted
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Checking out the local moto scene…
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Right
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Left
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Rear

 

Published by nadavhendel

Born in Santa Cruz, CA, raised in Ithaca, NY. Currently studying Physics and Mathematics at Vassar College and Engineering at Dartmouth College. My interests include sculpture, digital music composition, bicycles, and sustainable design.

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