Daniel Schmidt

I have a bus ticket to arrive 7am on the 2nd. I'm trying to pare down what I have to carry so I'm not beating myself up. I can always have more tools and stuff shipped up at a later date. I have a lot of inherited tools with no home to go to. Hoping to feed the tool monster at some point.

I was told boots were being accepted on the first Sunday of the month in the bootcamp thread yesterday. I would have to travel in the heat today for 5 hours round trip by trike if I needed to cough up another $100. I was just trying to avoid an extra trip like that if possible. Thanks!

paul wheaton wrote:i think i found it ...

ten years ago ...  

something about "paid for by sister"?

yes this is it. I've been hunting around for hours on mobile and been completely lost. I think things were split up because this wasn't a wiki back then. There was some deal to "dine with the duke of permaculture" with a cabin rental to hustle up funds when your neck was really bad. I got my bus ticket. Thanks for the help!

paul wheaton wrote:I think I understand the question. So the answer is: if a person does the Sepper  program, it is as if they have paid the gapper fee. So when their stay is complete, they could choose to stay on longer as a gapper. Or, they could go home and return later as a gapper - the $100 gapper fee would be waived because they already know the lay of the land. Just as no gapper pays the fee more than once.

I don't know if I or anyone has record of me sending in money to rent a cabin back when you had a deal when your neck was injured. I don't care about the rental, I just want to know if I have to hunt down another $100 to pay my bootcamp fee. If you need the Paypal address used I can get that and pm it.

Are you still targeting the first Sunday of the month? Are spots still available? I'm pretty certain going one man army on my land is futile and sharing my electrical and other skills would be one way of providing value to something I want to see in this world - a better foundation for future boots.

I made certain to list as many things as I could to get them all knocked out of the way while shopping for my mother, and since this is what people want, it made the list!

I'm only going down the road of trikes because of very particular circumstances. I will have to turn this in to a separate thread with pictures at some point (If I haven't made a new thread by next week, feel free to ask about it, I've largely written up a bunch of posts and moved projects along, but I'm the worst with pictures). My post above explains how I feel -

Daniel Schmidt wrote:I wish there were easier ways to quantify how unstable 'delta' style trikes are

The front wheel does not contact the ground in a way that is conducive to steering if you can't lean. Finding out as the thing plows you forward in to an accident is too late. There are a dozen of other issues (did you test the brakes before plowing in to a turn?), which make them unfit if you are doing this because of mobility limitations. The seat moves much, much more than a bike seat and you must move before the trike shifts, or all of the weight will shift at once and lifts one or more wheels.

I nearly blacked out from complications with my head injury while riding the fatbike in March. I've also had seizures in the past. That on top of the flat tires and already having the trike on hand pushed me in to using it. The new trike will perform mostly better, but every change makes a more significant handling challenge than on a bike in my experience.

It's been two years since my last blog post here, and this has sat without updates for too long. I've decided to start investing more effort in documenting some of the stuff I'm doing. I've gotten the trike in to a rideable state. I hadn't used it much until this month, but it helped a lot when I was moving out of my old house, and it's been used for dozens of runs to the grocery store. I'm now using it to make 70 mile round trips between St. Augustine and Jacksonville to do shopping for my mother.

The motor to axle part is fine, and the tensioner I made works very well. Given how short the chain is, I wasn't sure how loose would be too loose. I'm guessing having the motor pull the chain on the bottom works out for the best. When I hit the brake and the chain is tight on top, it is a little shy of hitting the bottom guard I put on the axle housing. Going tighter than this just seems to bend the motor frame over time and the chain sag gets right back to where it wants to be. I need to shim the axle sprocket, but it only makes noise under very specific throttle conditions while turning right. And speaking of turning right, being one wheel drive on the left side means it naturally wants to turn right. It can be hard to start on an incline because it wants to pull a wheelie and go hard right. I temporarily strapped my tool bag up front and need to give this thing a front box like the old cruiser to hold my emergency kit. The next trike will hopefully have a lot of these problems mitigated.

There is an intermediate shaft of sorts made from a 3 speed hub shifter that came with the trike. I wanted to reuse it, which lead to the crazy rear motor design, and it probably wasn't worth it. A lot of RWD trikes mount the motor in that spot and I can see why. It isn't necessary to have 3 speeds, so the other blue trike I have is probably getting one of my direct drive hub motors in that spot. I took the intermediate chain off to figure out where some noises were coming from, and have been making the last few trips completely with battery power. The motor chain seems to be holding up a lot better than I imagined it would.

The 13mph of my '36V' batteries ends up at 20mph with a newer '52V' battery, which is right at the legal limit and plenty fast. The right side wheel sits on bearings and provides no braking or acceleration. The one wheel acceleration has also caused difficulty with traction. The two wheel braking is remarkably good, even with the 80+ pounds of battery weight I'm carrying on long trips. I've lost about 3/4 of that much weight, so I guess that counteracts things a bit. Most of my trips are eventless 2 1/2 hour journeys mostly down bike lanes. I had been using my fatbike, but with the need to carry more weight, and construction littering the road with sharp debris, the flat tires were killing me. Rear tire, every time. I don't have to flip the trike over to fix a wheel. Between the thicker tires and weight distribution across two rear wheels it just works out better. I plan on riding this thing hard until the next trike is ready.

John Weiland wrote: When regarding just the cells themselves, can a single BMS be configured to control both series connected cells and parallel connected cells within one battery?

A BMS is sold by the number of series cells it can control, and an amperage output rating. They never know how many parallel cells there are (short of fancy high end ones that ask you to punch in numbers, they don't *know* otherwise) and have no way of controlling them. The post earlier talking about the BMS "knowing" the battery state of charge must be talking about a particular model with a coulomb counter and some sort of display or Bluetooth connection to give a percentage. Most cheap BMSs don't have any of that.

Because they don't know any better you can configure numerous packs In to one large logical pack. With high output cells it's common to use some sort of cell to cell fusing so one bad cell doesn't take the rest of the parallel string with it.

Part of the reason you tend to see overkill connects on battery builds is usually because people are trying to push their build to extremes. Your wiring only has to be as heavy as your largest load demands, and fusing appropriate for the wire. If you only used very light loads, the voltage drop is extremely low, and you won't end up with much difference even if you added a few cables 10x longer than needed. At that point the cost per length is a factor. A heavy enough load will cause more voltage drop and could cause more drift between cells if one or more of the connections convert energy in to heat. Then there is managing cell drift once it occurs.

I have the original battery to my e bike which I got cheap because the tide came in at the beach and messed things up. The cell configuration went down one side then up the other, with cells at the bottom (pack middle) corroded. I lopped off 3 sets of cells (6P) to convert it from 13S to 10S, used thicker wire to bridge the gap, and mostly use it on lower power draw stuff like my hedge clippers or DIY slow cooker. A lot can be done with creative thinking if your goals aren't too demanding.

Catie George wrote:


12) If required,  repeat steps 1-11, because you discover that things didn't dry soon enough  (especially if drying indoors) and things became musty smelling, so you need to rewash!

I had seen this in the past. When I started hand washing last year, I tried adding a tiny pinch of baking soda to the final rinse and it no longer got musty. It may be different depending on your water, and too much will make your clothes stiff. In my situation it made sense to use the radiant heat from the sun to dry clothes while avoiding getting rained on, and some days that would take a while. With the baking soda I never had to rewash.

I definitely noticed the machines are so wild these days with settings that don't necessarily function the way the manuals marketing describes. Plus sometimes not programmed well at all causing errors and generally not cleaning all that well. I feel like the old washing machine idea is flawed and maybe there are better solutions to the way it can be done.

I'm not sure why I didn't see it this way sooner, but that clothes press looks a bit like a board thickness planer. You could possibly buy a used one really cheap and use that as a base to build one if you can't afford a new one. A planer sled with clothes coming out would look really funny, but it could work!