I had a really interesting visit today with Chris Ravana, of Blindspot Cycles, with him showing me a couple of his homemade electric motorcycles.
The way Chris does it there’s nothing magical, or even particularly high-tech, about building an electric bike. He goes to a salvage yard and buys an old junk motorcycle body, picks up a few necessary parts, and then puts an electric motor in it. The motor runs off a stack of standard automotive-type batteries, although they are of the deep-cycle variety that can stand to be deeply discharged before being charged again.
And there’s nothing all that special about the motor. It’s just a basic industrial-type electric motor.
The whole business couldn’t be much more straightforward. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because I’ll be writing a lot more about Chris and his bikes for RumBum.com and Examiner.com, but, as always, I wanted to tell you the backstory here.
I just ran across an article about Chris and what he’s doing by chance, somewhere on the web, and it turned out he lives just up north in Fort Collins. I emailed him about getting together but didn’t hear anything back, so I called. He apologized for not replying but told me his wife had just had a baby the day before. So he’s been a little, shall we say, busy. Oh yeah, some excuse.
Today was a beautiful and warm day so I jumped on the Kawi and headed up there but along the way it got very cold. I was glad I had my electric vest. We talked about his bikes why he does all this, as well as the other things he does, and then it was time to ride.
Chris had two bikes prepped for us and off we went. This is not the first time I’ve ridden electric motorcycles but it’s still a kick. They’re silent when you’re sitting still, but twist that throttle and you absolutely do go forward, as in right now. Then you can cruise along side by side and talk, because there’s no engine noise. Not shout, talk.
What can I say? It was a lot of fun. He’s an interesting guy.
And then, just to show you how fickle the weather in Colorado can be, I headed back to Denver and rode back into sunshine and warmth. I knew there had been a beautiful day somewhere around here.
Biker Quote for Today
If motorcycles are not allowed in heaven then I’ll ride mine to hell.
At least it better be, I paid more than $400 for a new stator and rotor. That’s after having it in once before where they cleaned the contacts and thought that was all that was needed. At this point I’ve paid almost as much in repairs this year as I’d judge the bike to be worth if I were to sell it.
Basically, if you set goals and review your progress toward those goals periodically you are much more apt to take the steps necessary to accomplish them. On the other hand, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
Joel, who runs Mountain Thunder Motorsports, my shop, tells me the issue is a burned out rotor, which is on order. It’s been on order for six weeks now.