firewhell FireWheel F260

[Robertas Pes]

Hi,

I get Firewheel F260 in good looking condition, but with burned BMS and damaged battery. After disassembling I found, that IP parameters there is around 0/0, dust and water from wheel  is welcome to mainboard and battery. I make isolation, order custom new battery with LG 3,2AH cells, battery capacity I hope will be bigger up to 50percent. But I have question: its possible to get spare parts in future for this EUC? Is there anyone still use this EUC?

https://ibb.co/sQq8kjg

https://ibb.co/vm40w5v

https://ibb.co/yd2KB56

Robertas

[johnyz89]

If i were You i wouldnt risk my health riding on it and wasting money on reviving already dead unicycle. Its dangerous, risky and money wasting. Batteries are the most expensive parts of our devices so why not buying something new ?

[Robertas Pes]

New custom battery with bms is 115eur,  this EUC I get for 40 euros. I have new EUC, but in quarantine time I try repair it, like museum value with interesting design.

[esaj]

I have a Firewheel F260, in pieces, in the room next to me right now... It's a funny piece of the EUC history, but I don't see much point in reviving it, unless you have the parts handy (there were mainboards floating around at least two-three years back, I think, but finding one now might be iffy). Compared to pretty much any "modern" (released within a couple of years) wheel, the wheel itself is not that good, while not really bad either (for its own era, that is  )

 

The video's uploaded in 2014. Looks a bit flaky these days, it can barely climb the hill with the low weight rider  

The mainboards had several revision that had more or less flaky lifetime, although some would just keep on working seemingly "forever" (well, at least a couple of years, don't know if @dmethvin still rides his? ), or not, mine blew up a couple, although at least one case was probably my own fault, trying to get longer range with custom batteries, the board shorted after assembly on power up...

The motor's nominal power is 550W (that's not a typo, it's actually 550W, not 500W, we hunted the motor specs back in the day ), of course much higher in spikes, but modern wheels sport 1000-2000W nominal values, much higher in spikes.

The 260Wh battery (actually 264Wh) of F260 is miniscule by todays standards, even the largest battery-model "F799"  (it was something like 16S4P with 776Wh) isn't that big these days. Even if you don't need the range, more cell-series in parallel (the "P"-number in the battery configuration) means that there's less resistance, so more packs can dish out more current for the motor when it's needed (read: more power, torque!). The battery can't provide nowhere near as much power as the modern wheels. I'm still riding a 3 year-old KS16S, and it's already "next level" compared to the Firewheel, although it's still in the same "battery league".... But I did take the F260 slightly above 30km/h regularly (and basically risked breaking my neck all that time, heavier rider would likely have faceplanted multiple times, I weigh <60kg/130lbs). This was the time when things like "battery shunting" (bypassing the battery discharge protections) was still common, just to prevent the battery protections from causing faceplants, because we went over the limits by so much!  A "slight" possible complication with the practice was that if the batteries were short-circuited (like by a shorted mainboard), they could catch fire...

Edited May 21, 2020 by esaj