Landed

It's happening! Lennon, Radu and I made it to the Isle of Man, and we're assembling the eSuperbike tonight. We have a lot of catching up to do in the story though, so I'm going to try to give some background through the next few posts while also updating on our current progress.

HISTORY...
I only arrived at MIT in January, so I'll start from there. At that point we had the frame of a BMW S1000RR, custom-designed battery pack from A123 Systems, two motors and almost all of the electric components to make them run, and an assembled-but-not-welded aluminum plate frame to hold everything together:

We also had a full CAD model of what our bike would look like
and a drive shaft custom-designed, analyzed and built by Radu (this is the finite element analysis of his design).
We could spin the motors with the motorcycle up on a stand, and even had our maiden crawl down the hallway outside our lab/workshop.
Maiden Crawl Video

But the plate frame wasn't welded, so we took the bike apart (note: taking the bike apart will be a recurring theme in this story).

and had it welded up.

With the bike back together, we ran it on the dyno...
Dyno Test Video

...and blew up a motor.

But more on that later. =-)

-Mark