Isle of Man - Day 2 - assembly

Today was a boring day for spectators (and I imagine for blog readers). We didn't make it out to the test track since the timing didn't work out and we wanted to recondition the motors.

Allan had a racers meeting and sign-on session at the start/finish early this afternoon, so we're all signed up with three team pit passes. We'll get some more team passes just for the paddock area, but are limited to three people in the pits with the bike (and fire-retardant overalls).

The morning started with mounting battery modules numbers 3 and 4. We had to undo some of our work a couple of times to re-route cables, but it all came together in the end.

This is the mess of cables that we have to fit to, around and through our various electronics, batteries and frame.

Lennon and Radu mounting electronics.

Radu is really getting into the whole English tea-drinking thing.

We sent our tools and lots of spare parts along with the bike so that we have everything here. But, of course, there's always something we still need (luckily we have two more team members traveling from the US next week).

Checking the battery voltage (and making sure we don't have any potential going to other electronics or to the frame) before plugging in the batteries for the first time.

Radu spent a lot of time getting the motors reconditioned, from blowing out dust to sanding down the commutators. Here are the brushes, just about ready to go back into the motors and get seated.


I spent a bit of time building a flashing LED assembly for the rear of the bike.

Lennon working on some programming.

Comparing the current draw of each motor to make sure they're not fighting each other.

A small piece of excitement happened during the day... Lennon blew up an American power strip when he plugged it into a wall here. The switch on it apparently can't take 220V. :-)

-Mark