A while back, I bought a 1963 Ural sidecar motorcycle. I figured that I would enjoy it until it broke down, and then I'd convert it to electric. Well, I didn't even make it home before it broke down, so I had to get it towed the rest of the way, and now I'm starting conversion project.
I should note that I have no particular skills in this area. I don't generally wrench on cars, I don't build little robots, an I'm not an electrical engineer. I write software for a living, and I need hobbies that balance my work. One of those hobbies is learning to play music, and starting today another is converting a motorcycle to electric.
I figured it would be good to figure out how the weight was originally distributed before I start messing with it too much. I understand that weight distribution is very important to how the bike handles, so I'm going to try to keep it reasonably close to the way it is. This might sound intimidating, but I'm pretty sure that this very simple technique works fine to get a rough approximation. All I did was bring my bathroom scale down to the garage, put one wheel on it at a time, and make note of the weights at each wheel. It turned out that ~240lbs fell on the front wheel, ~260lbs fell on the back wheel, and ~160lbs fell on the sidecar wheel, for a total vehicle weight of ~660lbs.
I took the day off from work today because my innards feel like they're moving around inside me, but I'm going to try taking the engine and transmission out, too. I'll let you know how that goes, whether you ask or not.
One last thing though: These projects usually have clever names, so clever name ideas would be appreciated. Such things have been called El Ninja (because it is an electric Ninja), the Electra Cruiser, the KillaCycle (which is the fastest electric motorcycle at 174mph and 7.89s quarter mile), and the Electrocat. Right now, all I've really thought of is eUral and the Silent Sidecar, so please leave suggestions in the comments if you have them.
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