An Electric Scooter Community on a Mission to Stamp out Transportation Mediocrity.

Micro mobility projects built using electric scooter components.
#20364
I've posted this to BikeForums, but I have a feeling those here will appreciate this one - it's a former dockless vehicle, after all!

Back in December of last year, I was able to get in touch with Spin, who donated about 500 of their retired Gen 2 and Gen 3 bicycles (pedal bicycles) through my Bike Share Museum. With the help of many community organizations and a volunteer, we were able to distribute the retired bikes all around town to those in need (I've documented half of the story here: https://bikesharemuseum.com/saving-the-spins/).

My inspiration to contact Spin started with one particular Gen 2 - #7723417 - which showed up near a friends house. It later surfaced during the donation. It needed TLC, so I set it aside and decided to make it my 3-speed office commuter, with a few special touches. This is the way it looked last month:

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Now, I'm also a sucker for pedal assist bikes. Jump's 5.0 introduced me to pedelecs, and I'd love to have one in the Museum (no luck with Jump yet, though). At any rate, I was cruising eVilbay last month and found an older 24V 8FUN (Bafang) brushless hub motor so cheap that it was under a Benjamin with shipping.

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That electrical tape on the hub was hiding a disaster waiting to happen. I'm surprised I didn't get sparks when I did a test run of the hub.

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Thankfully, no evidence of burny-burny, so I soldered it up and replaced the missing grommet with a 3D printed piece:

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The original controller was a six or seven pin integrated deal with a small Velcro button as a full on / full off throttle. I wanted pedal assist only, so I found a replacement Brainpower controller on Amazon for all of $10 and change:

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Some more eBay searching turned up a used PAS sensor and Bafang brake levers for a deal. PAS sensor fit fairly well, but I did have to install a 3mm longer Shimano UN55 bottom bracket so the sensor wheel would clear. I also changed the orientation of the magnetic pickup after this picture was taken, and also found I had to flip the sensor wheel from the direction you see it here:

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...and it hides REALLY well behind the factory 32t crankset:

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I used some silicone-insulated 15AWG/3 wire to hook up the motor (note that it has no hall or temp sensors). Perhaps a bit overkill, but it fits well. The three-wire run gave me the freedom of using simple MT60 connectors.

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The cockpit also received a refresh, with some aftermarket grips (cut to length), some James Bond Buttons™ ("Whatever you do, don't touch them." "Why?" "They're not hooked up yet, 007!"), and a Sturmey DLS30 trigger shifter to do away with that PITA gripshift design. Still waiting on smaller diameter spiral wire organizer to tidy up the last bit of it.

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Which brings it to it's current state - which, thanks to stuffing the cables through the original frame routing - doesn't make it appear that much different than before:

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I'm now at the point of batteries. I happen to have a whole lot of matching 18650 cells recovered from 20 Spin locks, but most of them don't hold a charge. Not sure if they can be brought back (it'd be rather novel to power a retired Spin on retired Spin lock batteries), and since I had the eBay pack on hand, I figured I'd try the easy route first.

The barcode and serial numbers resulted in zip, so I had to commit to removing the shrink wrapping to find out what I'm working with.

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21 Samsung 18650's with an unknown BMS with even more part numbers that the internet doesn't know about. I'm not keen on what I've heard about the volatility of ICR Li-Ion chemistry, and I think I feel safer building a bigger pack with the more stable INR's from the Spin locks.

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I've already run a few tests on the motor though, if you'd like to see:

https://twitter.com/bikesharemuseum/sta ... 3295464449

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