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The Sushi Box FX Secret Society

I hope nobody minds, I'm taking a personal day this evening. My daughter got this electric scooter in the fall and she loves the look and the feel of it, but she complained that it was too slow. So now that the weather is warming up it seemed like a good time to hot rod it. I'm not much of a mechanic, but if it's electric then I can generally figure it out.

Also as you can see, my workbench is in a constant state of "I'll clean up after I finish this project."

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Well that was freaking great. So stock it has a pair of 12V lead acid batteries running in series into a 24V motor. You can usually get away with overvolting the motor a little bit at the expense of life, but this is a pretty robust one. So I ran 4x 7.4V LiPo batteries in series, fully charged my new "battery pack" measures 33.2V and it's a night and day difference in feel. The max speed is faster and it gets there way faster. My kid is going to lose her freaking mind.

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Well that was freaking great. So stock it has a pair of 12V lead acid batteries running in series into a 24V motor. You can usually get away with overvolting the motor a little bit at the expense of life, but this is a pretty robust one. So I ran 4x 7.4V LiPo batteries in series, fully charged my new "battery pack" measures 33.2V and it's a night and day difference in feel. The max speed is faster and it gets there way faster. My kid is going to lose her freaking mind.

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Better order some spare wheels now, she's gonna be lighting em up!
 
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Better order some spare wheels now, she's gonna be lighting em up!
Well first things first I need to wire it up to the charging port and get that sorted so she can charge the batteries without taking it apart. Next thing after that will absolutely be spare tires. There's no speedometer on this thing (yet, I'll get one on in a couple days) so I don't know exactly how fast it was, but my daughter weighs less than half what I do, so she is going to fly.
 
I don't know exactly how fast it was, but my daughter weighs less than half what I do, so she is going to fly.

I wouldn't install the speedo until she gets a feel for the extra power first, 'cause the gauge will be a bit of a distraction. I'm betting that she already has a good helmet, elbow and knee pads, and gloves.

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I wouldn't install the speedo until she gets a feel for the extra power first, 'cause the gauge will be a bit of a distraction. I'm betting that she already has a good helmet, elbow and knee pads, and gloves.

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The speedometer will be just for me to satisfy my curiosity, she doesn't need to know how fast she's going. It uses an OLED so it doesn't show up well in the sun anyway. It was a neat idea, I originally designed it for my jetskis when I had them, just didn't get around to perfecting the design before getting rid of the jetskis. It's GPS-based so it has a neat feature, you press a button on the base unit (which goes under the seat of the jetski) and set the "home" position, then the display will show you both your speed and how far you are from "home". I'll get pictures of it when I get it dug out of whatever box it's in.
 
Well that was freaking great. So stock it has a pair of 12V lead acid batteries running in series into a 24V motor. You can usually get away with overvolting the motor a little bit at the expense of life, but this is a pretty robust one. So I ran 4x 7.4V LiPo batteries in series, fully charged my new "battery pack" measures 33.2V and it's a night and day difference in feel. The max speed is faster and it gets there way faster. My kid is going to lose her freaking mind.

View attachment 4630368
View attachment 4630369
It's cool and all that you do this for your kid but where are the tubes?
 
Quick scooter update before I get back to your regularly scheduled programming: the max speed of my daughter's scooter went from 10mph to about 16mph. Not insane screaming speeds, but fast enough for her not to feel like she's fighting to make it go.

Doesn't look like there's a lot I can do with my scooter without completely replacing the controller, which I don't really want to do. But I did add a manual cruise control switch (it has an automatic one but it doesn't work that well) that bypasses the throttle so my thumb doesn't get tired on long rides, and I also figured out how I could connect another battery pack to extend the range.

Back to the pedal front, I'm trying to finish up a couple things in the next couple days, then I'm planning to start on the April batch this weekend. I have most of my parts orders in, just waiting on a couple refills of circuit boards and one more batch of components.
 
Just keep in mind that while you’ve increased her speed by 60%, you’ve increased her kinetic energy by 256%.
I've increased her max speed, but she's a careful kid (thus the knee pads, elbow pads, helmet, and wrist guards) and I don't expect her to fly around full throttle. She's a lot more responsible than I was at that age :P
 
I've increased her max speed, but she's a careful kid (thus the knee pads, elbow pads, helmet, and wrist guards) and I don't expect her to fly around full throttle. She's a lot more responsible than I was at that age :p
Kinda like when people worry about blowing up their cabs even though their amp has a volume control? :p
 
@Sushi Box FX Any update on the solid state version UA? Or the Tweed preamp? lol
Solid-state UA boards arrived in Illinois this morning, they'll probably show up in the next day or two. The tweed preamp is somewhere in the mess of my workbench.