Merry Christmas (and a Happy New Year too)

To everyone who reads my blog, here is wishing you a Merry Christmas

and my fervent hope for a Happy New Year

Scooters in Retrospective (where are we going)

... and indeed where am I going?

Back in 2009 I worked in an office which was a significant walk from the train station, and as it happened largely down hill (mostly gentle, mostly). I decided to buy a kick scooter to get from home to station and station to office. I wanted something with decent diameter wheels (200mm) and got this little fella for €50

it served me well and I used it for quite some time with no issues (even solved the wet and grit throw-up at the back with some duct tape)

Then just this year, I started back at an  office where I wanted to "shorten the walk" and a scooter immediately came to mind, I bought this little fella which was more or less identical and for about the same money AU$70.

but perhaps has less heavy duty "everything" because the bearings collapsed after less than a week of my usual scooter treatment. Certainly the spokes look less substantial and the PU "tyre" feels harder than I recall the other being.

Anyway, I promptly replaced the bearings, but (due to a knee ligament injury on a trampoline (don't ask)) began considering something I didn't have to kick and soon settled on the Mercane 500W single motor (although seriously considered the dual motor 1000W version, which I subsequently ended up buying...) pictured here beside my little kick scooter.

Quite a difference in so many ways (including price).

Much nicer tyres, which are a composite of foam and a pliant grippy rubber, and some suspension too to help reduce the impacts to critcal things like bearings, axles (which are hollow on electric scooters with hub motors) and perhaps even you.

I notice now that people are King Wang'ing on about "comfort" (as if these things were like luxury cars). Probably these people have never ridden a kick scooter (or have forgotten what it feels like with actually solid tyres).

I had to move my (sadly now disused) little black kick scooter and thought how small it looked. Picking it up I nearly laughed at how light it is. Quite the contrast in relation to my 1000W dual motor Mercane.

So while my little kick scoot would comfortably fit into an overhead rack on an intercity train my dual motor Mercane would certainly not (and something may well get broken were I to try shoving it up there).

Recently I've started serious investigation into buying a Zero 10x ... which is even heavier than any of these scooters. It goes like this:

• Evo = 5kg ($60)
• Mercane 500W = 19kg ($1000)
• Mercane 1000W = 23kg ($1400)
• Zero 10x = 36kg (for the 24Ah model) ($2700)

*(prices in Australian Dollars)

It was not that long ago at all when electric scooters were like this:

*(wikipedia image)

So, what else can I do with $2700 (or more), well actually I could buy a pretty decent 500cc motorcyle with low kilometers on it for less than the price of the Zero, like say one of these:

Which will do many thousands of kilometers, last for many years (my Yamaha is already 12 years old with 125,000km on it) and be able to take you out all day, tour, commute and carry a friend too.

Better yet there is another sort of safety in motorcycles; rego and insurance (which the kiddies will squeal and shriek about), which is mandatory on motorcycles and cars. While this may seem like an "unnecessary expense", it will mean that if you're in some sort of accident (it won't happen to you right, err, unless you're one of the kiddies justifying a full face MTB helmet, elbow pads, body armour and other cos play wankery, then its inevitable) then you'll probably find that the $200 per year you paid in insurance is cheaper than forking out for that multi-thousand dollar car door repair (which you'll be blamed for because the cars insurance company will sniff out you are not in a good position to defend that) or worse yet, you hurt a person and be liable for hundreds of thousands for personal injury.

Doesn't sound cheap to me (and is the reason we have laws around vehicles to prevent cheap scates from leaving people at a loss) ...

All this has me wondering where I'm going with this and if I'm trying to make the Electric Scoot into something more like a motorcycle, and indeed if it actually even is?

Myself I think the sweet spot is somewhere around the zone between Xiaomi 365 and my Mercane.

Dunno ... I'll keep you posted on what I choose to do.

PS: I found this review of a Zero 10x on Reddit, this guy seems to think like me.

two types of scooter users

It seems that in todays polarised world there can only be the extreme users, however I'd like to put forward the case for Electric Scooters as being a practical daily transport which you can rely upon to quickly get you to places which while you could walk you'd be nearly tempted to take a car.

Case in Point

My local shops, its not far (about a kilometer) which if I walked there and back would be just under half an hour. Its mainly flat, so no major impediment there, but when its hot (as Australia can be)

the thought of walking up to the shops in high UV as well as high heat is of less appeal than you might think.

In contrast a quick scoot there and back (probably in not much different time to starting the car, backing it out and so on) with the air flowing past cooling one down a little (sweating is cooling) seems down right appealing.

Its a role like this that a lighter weight 500W single motor scooter (not a beast with 3,500W) makes for a simple and pleasant trip. I did just that this morning and thought I'd share with you the results and perhaps use it to discuss some aspects. This is my trip out to the shops

and you can see its pretty flat, took just over 2 minutes (including fumbling around turning the GPS off) and despite what the GPS thinks (I suspect accuracy issues with it just being started up) there wasn't a big climb at the start. Important stuff is average speed moving and average speed ... so more or less I spent most of my time at 24kmh, that's probably as fast as most people would call a brisk cycle on a bicycle (but without the sweating). Importantly I forgot to start the GPS on the way out, I was 500 meters from home

The way back was similar:

which reflects that the slight long down hill back here does makes it that little faster. Note I've selected distance there not duration because not moving does not show distance and looks weird on the duration view.

Discussion

On various forums you'll get the spakko kiddies and adventure adrenaline junkies telling you you need a 3500W monster and that scooters are safe, however with those higher speed higher power monsters falling off (going fast) can result in stuff like this:

Which brings me to why I like my Mercane Single motor 500W scooter ... its easy to ride, stable and feels safe.

Sure I could fall off it too and hurt myself as bad, hell I could slip in the supermarket too ... but the point of this post is to say this:

Not everyone needs or wants a speed demon, they might just want to get to work and get to the shops. 

Impact forces increase with a square of the speed, so while the time taken to get to the shops may be 40 seconds more, its still much faster than walking and on a scooter you're pretty much as exposed as a pedestrian ...

Best Wishes and Happy Scooting

brake mods on the Mercane (or Don Quixote does brakes)

upfront

Myself I'm not interested in this mod, I'm more the Sancho Panza and fundamentally the brakes on the Mercane are quite sufficient, have good lever feel and operate nicely (if you spend a little time tuning them). If you think they don't for then this most likely means either:

• you have a faulty caliper (so just replace it) or 
• it needs adjustment (and I've got descriptions of that here). 

Now pardon me being blunt, but if you are of such meagre mechanical aptitude (and unwilling to learn) then I think you should know right now that you won't be able to fit the (somehow) popular X TECH caliper ... because really that's going to require far far more work than just spending a bit of time unbolting the existing caliper, exploring it (and seeing how it works) then adjusting it.

Lastly there is a lot of misconception by people who just don't seem to have the faintest clue about how brakes work. The standard Mercane brake has two pads one on each side of the caliper but only one piston which pushes in. It relies on the flexing of the (its only 2mm for gods sake) disc to operate and push against the inside pad. So adjustment requires that inside pad to be kept in close (almost touching) to the disc; because it doesn't move.

Now naturally there are those who just like to mod for the challenge ... I used to do that, and for those folks, this is here.

The nuts and bolts

This is the XTECH beside the existing caliper ...

its should be immediately apparent that its bigger (and not clear here, but will be soon) its a lot fatter too. Now, if you're still enthusiastic you'll notice that there are two variants, a Front and a Back, they are different only in the supplied bracket (I bought the front)...

because it looked lower to the mounts and that looked like what I'd need. Take a moment to compare the center of the pistion and its relationship to the mounts with the center of the OEM part and its mounts ... the black one is too high and back ... but that's not where the problems end.

Next lets have a look at a quick video (sorry is vertical, but its easier to compare them one above the other like this).

So assuming you watched that, what it results in is that the extra bulk comes VERY close to the rim

less than millimeters in fact...

and as you can see also, I still don't have it in a place on the mounts.

Which sort of mirrors the configurations of the posts on Reddit where people have tried to mount this caliper ... always with odd angles and very small clearances (meaning rim or caliper damage is likely).

Now part of the problem is also that the mounting bracket will need to be shaved a few millimeters to allow that caliper to move further to the outside, which may allow it to clear the rim, but that's going to mean the disc will need to move out too (as here its actually seated on the disc).

Here I've bolted the caliper bracket onto the swingarm mount points and you can see how little clearance there is between this and the disc...

So not enough to move that caliper out without shaving that bracket. There is room to shave 2 or so mm off the outside of the bracket without compromising strength though if you're keen (and reports mentioned below suggest other users needed to do that too).

Of course to move that out, you'd also have to move out the disc, which would mean packing that out with (say) some 2mm washers. To be able to do that you may find its easier to take the wheel off ... but I think it can be done without removal.

Lastly you may have noticed that the bracket is not "even" or regular in shape:

with one side being higher than the other ... which means you can have some room for altering which tilt works best for the caliper by mounting it one way:

or the other

So if after this you've seen enough to energize yourself into getting one, please leave a comment on how you got it mounted and (better yet) what your long term finding of it was in terms of:

• pad life
• going spongey (can't be bled as its sealed)
• adjustment as the pads wear (should just be take up on the threaded adjuster)

I am in no rush to do mine, but as I have also bought some spare discs may make a project to add front brakes (which I'm also in no rush to do because I don't think front brakes will be a "good idea" on the scooter.

Lastly some reddit posts:

• one
• two
• three

Bottom line:
ultimately I could get this going if I was so inclined ... but for what? My brakes work fine with less time spent than modifying the brackets and I have not had to weaken anything or add more bolts into the mix.

A final point as yet un-mentioned is how much much heavier these calipers are ... compared to either the standard Mercane or the hydraulic ones on my MTB

because there has to be both master and slave cylinder built into one (just for starters).

HTH