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Project Owner: Scott
I first made a car starter motor power electric bike in 1997.
It was during university holidays and my uber-exciting job at weta work shop had just ended abruptly. I had recently changed engines in my trusty ford lazer and had a spare engine and starter motor lying around. I had the flywheel machined to have the same internal thread as what a standard wind-on (cheapie) bike cluster+freewheel has.
I then made up a set of brackets to clamp the starter motor and battery to the bike. The original bike used the pull-solenoid of the starter motor as the switching element, and while the motor wasn't energised the pinion retracted and the bike coasted ok.
The second version of the bike (pictured here), I really only made to encourage myself and get a bit of motivation going to hurry up and do some work on my proper electric bike. I got hold of an old steel bike frame, which allowed me to make the battery and motor brackets permanently welded to the frame (stronger and more reliable).
The switching element on the new bike is a kilovac 'czonka' type contactor - some partially damaged stock recovered from my work.
The battery on the bike is a hawker genesis 42Ah UPS battery. These are some of the angriest batteries you can get.
When the bike made its first debut at my work, there was a terrible accident suffered by one of my colleagues. Due to a front brake malfunction, Nick was catapulted over the handlebars and had a sudden encounter with the road at about 40km/h. The deceleration force caused the front forks to collapse.
See the awesome video of this bike below
Sorry about all these pictures, they were taken before digital cameras were invented and scanned at very low resolution.
