meepmeepmayer

Yep, why is there no 18SL? Put the new 18(X)L board and motor in there, that can't be so complicated.

You could ask @Jason McNeil (or any other bigger shop, really) to order you one with his next shipment. Surely that can't be a big problem. At least one Euro dealer does this, you can order on demand: https://eunicycles.eu/en/18-inch-wheels/37-king-song-ks-18s-sports-black-1680wh.html Or even contact Kingsong directly.

I don't store my wheel at 100%. Most of the time it sits at 90% (83V cutoff on my charge doctor) and I just plug the charger in overnight for potential riding days. But your experience shows batteries are much more robust than people think.

European link to a fast charger with some cut-off functionality like the charge doctor: https://eunicycles.eu/en/chargers/83-smart-charger-300w-gotway-84v.html

Why would that be? The battery management system will stop any overcharging, even if the charger somehow fails to do it. I've been charging my batteries to 100% with the standard Gotway charger to get every last km of range for the last 6000km

Awesome, thanks. I'm surprised the difference is so big just due to the environmental temperature. It looks like the 18XL just has bad heat dissipation in comparison, your first video wasn't an outlier Can't wait for your Nikola and 16X videos and overheating test! This is where it gets interesting for me Especially how torque-y they feel compared to the 18 inchers, and whether the Nikola tire is 16 or 17 inches. Have you ever considered testing wheels on the hill your ACM fried? That would be the ultimate comparison.

I always figured wheels should have protective brushes to prevent bigger stuff from getting in and potentially blocking the wheel well. They'd also scrape mud from the tire if it's to much. Basically just a very stiff brush 2 millimeters off the tire where the tire enters/exits the wheel well.

I had two stock CST tires on my Gotway ACM for 5k kilometers (about 2.5k km each). I switched to the Chao Yang tire a few days ago because it was available. The Chao Yang feels notably softer and more rubbery and more conforming to the ground when riding. It also felt more bump-absorbing than the CST, which is really hard when pumped up fully (but the CST seems to lose a bit of air and thankfully get a bit softer a week after pumping it up and stays that way - no air loss otherwise, I only had to reinflate every few months). The CY feels more like an asphalt racer than the more treaded CST. Not sure how big the difference would be for bigger bumps like your 1 inch curbs instead of the usual ground imperfections. But in regular riding, the CY feels notably softer as far as I can tell. But I havent ridden it for long, and switched from an offroad tire, so I have no comparison going directly from the CST to the Chao Yang.

Some more photos of the place from today's ride. Nicely painted houses. There's a rhyme on it: "Das schönste im Leben das Gott kann geben ist ein zufriedenes Heim um darin glücklich zu sein." - The nicest thing in life that God can give is a contented/happy home to happily live in." And another one. "Haschl's guest house". The inscription says "tavern inn since the 14th century". @Smoother And here's the wooden mystery box. It's hollow and you can continually rotate the "dial" to have these wooden hammers hit it. "Donated by sacristan Sepp Englberger" It's hollow. Hammers and dial. By the way, ass man is Saint Florian, and apparently there's another town where he's baring it (Image from Wikipedia).

This is actually great, it motivates me to visit a random area that I'd never seen otherwise. Exactly what every EUC rider needs (besides bigger batteries)

It's a small world! This is too far for even a one-way ride, but maybe I'll do a ride in the area if it makes sense one day.

Let me think about it... hmmm... NO! I should know, but I don't. Looks like a loom. I'll likely pass it later today so I can have a closer look at it.

This one? The left end point of the route is where I live. So not too far. Around 30 minutes to the mountains. One could definitely make some really nice tour videos in the area, I'm aware of that. Maybe one day... Or you visit and make videos yourself. Plenty of rides to do here Yep The buns and the murder picture in some random meadow were unexpected surprises. You expect mountains and stuff, but this can't be predicted, which is always cool.

57 km altogether. You can do a round tour of the interesting stuff (minus Aschau) in half the distance.

Sorry for picture spam Today's glorious, glorious ride! Join me for a tour through some south Bavarian scenery. The first location is the town of Aschau im Chiemgau. This is the river Prien running through it and the Hohenaschau castle. The rocky mountain ridge in the background on the left is the rather famous Kampenwand mountain. Leaving the town, you see its idyllic location surrounded by mountains. Don't look at real estate prices here Following the river bike path downriver... The second location is the Samerberg area, a plateau at the foot of the mountains, a few hundred meters above the flat land level. It offers wonderful scenery and therefore lots (LOTS) of tourists and tourist stuff. Slowly but bravely (with two cooling breaks) my ACM climbed up there. The roads up there are perfect and super smooth and, together with the sights, make for pure riding joy. Here's the first glance after coming up. View of some far away mountains. If you're wondering what that roofed post is, I was. Turns out, is is a small painting behind a grate. Who would have expected that? "Hier wurde Simon Schmid, Mesner von Grainbach, am 18. Juli 1704 von den Kroaten gehäutet." Here Simon Schmid, sacristan of Grainbach, was skinned by the Croats on July 18th, 1704. I'm not sure about the history of what happened there. Click the image to see the bloody details. You can find a new sight, view or other interesting thing like this behind every corner in this area of undulating hills, roads, and hiking paths. Just lovely. In the village you saw three pictures above. A bit further along the way. Animals got a nice view. Wondering what I was doing. Turn a corner for another glorious view. The dog on the left was so chill I didn't even notice it at first. Nearly every farm here has tourist rooms or, like this one, offers "vacation on the farm" where the kids can meet the farm animals and so on. An impression of the verticality (always so hard to show in pictures). Can't move 50 meters without another great new view! Continuing on my route, one beautiful spot after the other. Here we're descending back down to flat land level. This is the Inn river valley, that's why there are mountains on the other side. The valley exits the Alps to the right (North). On the way down What else can I say? A cool old farm sitting on the steep mountainside, has its own small chapel. Easier than walking down to the valley for every prayer, I guess. Note how you come through a tunnel between the house and barn (on the left) on the way down, that is awesome. They have a view! Just a few seconds further down. Jesus effigy, the steep path down, and you can see the snowy Central Alps further into the Inn valley. A public swimming lake next to the river shines in the sunlight. All the apple trees (or whatever those are) are blooming this time of the year. Now we're down in the valley and one or two kilometers further. Location #3 is the small town of Neubeuern. They've got a serious castle there. There are a ton of castles along the Inn river. Nothing better than to plop down one somewhere, call yourself a Lord, and demand duties from the trade on and along the river, that was the idea. If they don't pay up, you blockade them until they do. Too many complainers or an army marching through, hide behind your wall. Such is life as a medieval entrepreneur The marketplace to the foot of the castle is a veritable elevated keep. One road goes through it, you enter through a gateway in a wall, exit through a gateway, the church and other buildings and steep embankments form a protective wall all around. Nicely defensible. And it's not even the castle itself yet. On the market place. Nicely painted buildings, and people enjoying the sun on various restaurant terraces. A fountain and the church with a distinctive tower you can see on the picture taken from below. View into the distance through a gap between buildings. I think this is the only entrance/exit besides the two archways. The inscription on the fountain commemorates and thanks a lord of the castle. It sounds a bit sycophantic. I didn't find out who the statue on the fountain depicts. Also check out the nicely painted buildings. The exit archway and some more painted buildings. Dude's showing some ass. Maybe it is indeed the castle lord, and the inscription is highly sarcastic? Probably it is related to the water of the river, who knows. Ass in front of the castle. Some more painted detail before I leave the place. Finally, on the way home, a nice farm house. The route. Starts on the right. Hope you enjoyed.

Maybe a broken charger? Do you have a multimeter to test its voltage?

How many Watts do all these lights draw?

It's getting warmer every day.

Nice work! Some tiny tiny stuff: There's no 84.2V. It's either 67.2V or 84V (16x4.2V or 20x4.2V). 16S has 64 cells (4*16). Monster has no handle in any version. Incline grade is mostly a nonsensical stat and should be removed from any serious comparison. What works depends on rider weight and for how long you ride that grade. Every wheel can do 100% for a few seconds. If you assume there is a definitive authoritative "source" for true stats, you're out of luck. Even ewheel charts have some errors, the max weight stats are from "a customer had a crash that made me think he was too heavy for the wheel", and the manufacturers basically make stuff up after doing some random testing. Best info comes right from wheel owners on this forum here. Nah. Higher speed = higher wind resistance = higher battery usage/less range. That's all. All motors and batteries are pretty much identical in terms of efficiency. Some wheels (18XL) get a little higher range for the same battery size because they empty the batteries further than others (Gotway).

That's funny. Exactly what figured out today: the typical EUC ride is too fast to look at everything without hitting something. You really have to force your eyes back on the road (or stop every minute).

Today Into the mountains... Found a nice little swimming lake between rock faces. Further in. Panorama. You can see the distinctive pyramid-like mountain from the first picture on the left (right of the valley gap) and the rock face above the lake on the very left.

I figured the worn out and broken off plastic screw holes deserved a stronger replacement, hence the duct tape

This afternoon. The point of return, a church on a hill with a view. The way I came in the foreground, and the view. The rolling hills and mountains in the distance offer some nice scenes on the way back.

Just to be clear for everyone reading here, this isn't about how steep a hill a wheel can do. Pretty much any wheel can do extremely steep hills for a short time. My weak-cabled ACM that would certainly fry on Marty's hill can easily do 100% inclines for a few shorter moments, it definitely has the power to get up there. This is about continuous power draw. Doesn't matter if that comes from hill incline, rider weight, whatever else. A steep hill can get you a high power draw, but the hill also has to be long enough (minutes of riding up) to make the power draw continuous in a meaningful way. The questions are: What's the highest continuous power draw that a certain wheel can do permanently (= without overheating or hardware failure, until the battery is empty, and forever with an infinite battery)? For higher continuous power draws than that: How long can the wheel keep up a certain power draw, and what happens then (overheating, or in the worst case hardware damage)? (Thirdly, but not that important: What the highest continuous power draw the wheel can do at all? This is limited by the battery and so crazy high with big batteries that it doesn't matter in practice.) If I had too much money, I'd buy one of each wheel, and get one of these machines that are used to test a car's or motorcycle's braking strength. A German dealer did something like this with one of @US69's wheels (see here), and some Russians also did a lot of tests like that. Lock each wheel in there, and simulate different rolling resistances to get arbitrary constant power draws. Then you can answer these questions for every wheel and make a diagram for each wheel how fast it overheats (or dies for extreme stresses, ideally it always overheats or warns first) at different power draws. We don't have these diagrams, but we've got some isolated data points, for example: @EUC GUY pushed a car with his MSX (extremely high power draw) for about 6 minutes (if I remember correctly) before it fried (motor cables melted from the strong current, didn't even have time to overheat). He also rode up a pretty gnarly steep hill and the MSX overheated after like 13 minutes. Marty rode up the overheat hill with his MSX and it cooly and easily did that. He could probably have continued like this for 3 or 5 times the length. Marty rode up the overheat hill with his 18XL and it overheated after 80 seconds, didn't make it to the top. (Both riders here are about normal weight and not super light or heavy, so these are quite representative rides.) The higher the power draw/current is, the less environmental conditions (outside temperature) matter (because the heat can't dissipate fast enough either way) and the more the wheel's electronics' design/construction matters (they must not get hot quickly in the first place). - Long story short, the 18XL seems to overheat much faster (if it does overheat, not that easy to achieve) than the MSX. Which is not what I expected, I thought it would be as good. That's why I'm also wondering about the 16X (and Nikola!) now, if newer wheels aren't automatically better like I hoped. I was thinking (hoping) the result is due to Marty's 18XL being a earlier prototype model, but after @Seba's comment there don't seem to be many differences that could make this the explanation. Looking forward to the next test! Maybe switch wheels so we also get Marty behavior on a production wheel.

Yes, this is only about a) protecting your ankles b) in the initial learning phase That's all.