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E-Motorcycle Battery Design (Patreon)

Published:
2026-06-12 22:01:44
Imported:
2026-10

Content

After a loooooot of research and planning, I'm happy to say that I'm 95% done with the battery design and fabrication has begun!

The Final Specs:

72 Volts

260 Lithium Cells (Panasonic 18650)

20 Series 13 Parallel

~38 amp hours

~30 miles of range

130 amp continuous output

The only thing I haven't figured out 100% is the routing for the temperature sensors. But do I really need those? If it's on fire, it's too hot. If it's not on fire, it's not too hot.

This is about the size and shape of the final thing! The plan is to build the main case surrounding the battery pack out of fiberglass-reinforced plastic with aluminum sheet metal as the left and right cover panels.

After 13 excruciating years with my home-built 3D printer, I finally bit the bullet and purchased a new and much larger machine that is actually capable of printing engineering-grade filaments. This is ASA, which is heat resistant and very strong!

I designed these pieces to be printed without support material, which speeds things up and makes for little to no post-processing! There's still things like brass threaded inserts to add though.

I have about 150 more hours of printing to do and then a loooot of spot welding, but the next update should be a completely assembled battery!

Files

Comments

Phillip Kovalev

Legend. Curious what was the most intensive part of research for designing the battery and biggest challenge to overcome?

Jeremie

You could probably reach out to Ethan from Grind Hard Plumbing Co for some ideas on how to do the temp sensors or Will from BUM since he's been doing a bit of electric stuff lately as well

Andrew Abrahamson

Awesome work! Looking forward to a deep dive on this stuff. I've been wanting to do something similar to this!

LokiBeat

Not the expert, but the lay question that comes to mind is are you happy with a 30 mile range? I'm sure you'll explain the constraints you're juggling. Obviously this is not a bike for road trips, but heck, you can't even take a round trip to Houston with that range. It strikes me that would be great as a city bike, but you don't live in a city. How did you plan to use the bike? Not a critique, just a thought. I would love to have that bike but I *do* live central in a big city. But my concern would be vandalism and theft.

S0wndman

Great job! That’s a pretty solid system for monitoring temperature. Sensors are over rated and will just add weight and reduce the range 0.00001%

Craig Miller

What make and model 3D printer did you buy Ron? Are you happy with it?

Ronald Finger

I’ve got a pretty good idea for what to do, I just been putting off actually taking the time to do it 😩

Ronald Finger

Honestly didn’t even consider the weight savings… into the trash they go 🗑️

Ronald Finger

Ohh good question! Two things: 1)The sheer amount of materials, methods, and connectors to choose from was paralyzing honestly. I spent 2 days just trying to figure out what thickness of copper I should use for the bus connections. 2)It was super difficult to find a balance of “what will simply work?” and “how would it be done if it were actually being manufactured for production?” I’ve seen countless battery builds with hot glue and heat shrink covering everything, which work!! but I really wanted the challenge of designing for manufacturing, even though it’s going to be a 1 of 1 😅

Ronald Finger

The original range was close to 40 miles before I had to pull more and more cells out to actually fit the thing in the frame 😞 But honestly it should be more than enough for me! All of the shops, restaurants, and cafes I frequent are within a 5 mile radius of my home. I also don’t trust this thing at all at highway speeds. It has cable actuated drum brakes, so it’s basically a glorified bicycle 😭

Ronald Finger

I’m happier than I could have ever possibly imaged. So much tech has improved in the past 13 year it’s insane. I got the Bambu H2S. I would’ve preferred the H2D for dual nozzle printing, but that version has a slightly smaller usable build plate, so I got the single nozzle version. Truthfully, Bambu has done some pretty shitty things to the 3D printing community and I was very averse to buying from them, however the quality of their machines are so much above the rest, especially for the price and for the engineering-grade filament capabilities.

Xander

he's backkkkkkk!!!!!

Dylan

This whole concept reminds me of @chris_doel on youtube. He collected a sh*t ton of vapes that were disposed and utilized the lithium batterys in them to make a battery bank and filmed the whole process. Hes currently also working on making a battery for an E-Bike. Thought that was super neat!

Dominic Isherwood

Couple of notes on the battery pack. From my experience with vehicle battery packs, the busbars are where a lot of your heat will concentrate. We found that even small defects/ridges on busbars from stampings/pressings could contribute to heat concentration point, which in turn could overheat a nearby cell. It's relatively easily to keep on top of, would just recommend flattening down any ridges/spot welds etc so you don't get heat spots. We also wrapped our busbars in Mica, a heat protective material, either as tape or plate. The plate was harder to find, but I remember us tactically placing it around certain HV busbars that were higher risk. When you set the motors to full load and the battery needed to do a lot of power delivery, these mica sheets and tapes were critical in protecting the pack & user. This was based on a ton of battery testing. We also had a thermal regulation material in between the cells, which would help even out temperatures across the pack. Think ours was specifically a phase-change type, where it went in as solid but would convert to liquid if the battery got hot and helped it cool down. If you have any questions then feel free to send me a message.