Strolling Amok

Pops goes on tour.

Archive for the tag “Evelo Aurora battery”

27 Jan 2018
4 Comments

It’s All About the Electrons

As the song goes, “…You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone…”

While the Four Wheel Camper’s batteries and functionality depend on the sun, so does the Evelo Aurora e-bike’s battery – once I’m out on tour. It siphons power off the Four Wheel’s house pack to keep itself charged. All good things come to an end, and the original Evelo 48V 10Ah battery that shipped with the bike has now cycled enough times that it is no longer very useful for anything but the shortest, easiest errands. It actually began to sag a year ago, so this is a belated replacement. The spare battery that I ordered with the bike immediately showed signs of swelling and proved defective, so Evelo replaced it. That replacement broke an internal wire right after its warranty had expired, right at a place that was not possible for me to repair.

Evelo sells its replacements at $700 per – almost three times the market cost of this battery voltage and capacity. They are nice batteries, since they come with a marginal-quality spring carrier rack on top of the case, and they are well-protected against weather except when their spring-loaded charging port covers refuse to stay closed. The Aurora’s frame carries its battery case in a steel tube perimeter hoop, which gives it some protection in a crash and allows it to be key-locked in place, a useful trait in urban environments. It’s a well-integrated system that allows the battery case to be buried halfway down into the hoop, which allows a seatpost carrier to be installed above it if need be. But an average of $233/year for e-bike batteries, especially at this minimal capacity level, is simply not acceptable to me. Time for a change. Many e-cyclists would toss the whole thing and start over with a vintage bike and a gas engine drive kit, which is much cheaper and faster on the level. They don’t do so well at inching up steep, rough trails and I’m not yet ready to start packing cans of gasoline. But it’s a choice.

The Evelo battery with a seatpost-mount carrier above it, which is used to hold a basket.

Since I’m not really conversant in e-bike geekdom, all I knew was that how the battery cells were wired up together was referred to Read more…

Posted in E-Bike Pack Mule, Mod Squad and tagged ,
10 Dec 2017
3 Comments

The Busy Bee Syndrome

In the same way that a 1960 Cadillac is a motorcar, this vintage Holiday Rambler Aluma-Lite travel trailer brings a touch of magnificence to the concept of Wretched Excess. I’ll have to ask what length and year it is, but it looks like 33′ at perhaps 10,000 pounds loaded. Unlike the prestige nameplates of today, in its prime the quality of Holiday Rambler materials and construction was high, and upscale meant more than gewgaws posing as “amenities”. The brand has since been bought and sold a few times, and the current owner manufactures only motorhomes now.

It really has been an activity scramble here, more so than upon arrival “home” in past years. I’ve been reviewing what has and hasn’t worked out well on the road, then researching each area and addressing it in some fashion. That review ranges from rig hardware, devices and software, to myself. The Four Wheel pop-up truck camper itself was notable for its pronounced absence of issues and inconveniences. The solar system I added on worked, yet didn’t perform as hoped for. I’ll detail that once I physically fix the problem.

The Corsair Voyager Slider X1. Read speeds are okay, but God help you when you need to write data to it. And this is the replacement I received when the original scrambled and went unreadable two weeks in.

My laptop, used among other things to edit and store photos and videos, was positively glacial in how fast it could call up, process and transfer data files. That was my doing, because I’d been having to rely on using an external USB3 thumb drive as the hardest working drive, the internal drive being very fast but too small in capacity to hold all that’s needed. The USB drive proved fine for simple file transfers, but when thrashed hard while programs pulled and pushed data to “live” libraries, it suffered constipation (not to mention abdominal cramping and gas) from the get-go. Simply closing or quitting my photo editing program took minutes for it to button itself up, instead of seconds. Sorting through some halfway affordable solutions took quite some time, as did the “how-to” of replacing a main drive with no risk of losing anything. (Hint: always have a Plan B available for when Murphy’s Law kicks in.) Updating the operating system in a majorly way sometimes causes one or two third-party programs to Read more…

Posted in Miscellania, Mod Squad, Navel Gazing and tagged , , , ,

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