FAYETTEVILLE — Julian Santa-Rita just wanted a cheap way to get to work, but the electric motorcycle he fabricated in the garage of his Fayetteville home draws double-takes from other riders.
“It’s an old Honda that was in somebody’s yard,” Santa-Rita said. “I added a 48-volt motor.
It’s just kind of a bunch of different pieces from different suppliers. A lot of the parts are ready made off of the shelf, the kinds of things that they make for golf carts or personal mobility scooters and things like that.”
Alan Mantooth, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas, has spent more than a decade helping students build electricpowered boats for the SolarSplash race, a competition between teams of college engineering students. Mantooth said there’s always been a part of the American spirit that makes some people look at what’s available and believe they can do better.
“There’s just some of us that like to tinker with that sort of thing, who like to see if we can do it and prove it to ourselves,” Mantooth said. “But, when you start having to pay $3 and $4-plus for gas and know that you’ll be doing it again someday, that just kind of gets hard to swallow. Then it gets a whole lot more convenient to start thinking about things like notonly is this going to be good for the environment, it’s going to save me money.”
Spurred by a time when gasoline approached $4 a gallon, Santa-Rita set a goal of creating a low-cost, high-tech prototype bike that performed well and didn’t look much different from a normal, gas-powered motorcycle. But his limited budget meant getting parts together took awhile.
“I got the bike first. It took about a year to for me to even get it to the point where I could do anything to it. It took me another six months on top of that to get the rest of the money I needed to get theparts together,” Santa-Rita said.
“Once everything was gathered the drive train went together in a matter of a few hours, maybe a full day. From there there were just a bunch of little things to sort out like turn signals and tail lights.”
The bike, which will run up to 55 miles per hour and go 12 miles between charges, isn’t as fast but, given the cost, still compares favorably with commercial electric bikes costing thousands of dollars more, Santa-Rita said.
“That’s another part of the cost thing. Right now, I’m using about $400 worth of batteries. To compare, the commercially available versions use about a $7,000 or $8,000 pack of batteries and they usually go about 60 to 100 miles,” Santa-Rita said.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Lawless Electric Drag Bike, custom built by Orange County Choppers, set the quarter-mile record last month for an electric motorcycle at 7.46 seconds and 177 miles per hour. That bike, featured on the television program “American Choppers,” uses a 363-volt motor and puts out more than 600 horsepower. The team hopes to take a crack at the land speed record for an electric motorcycle, which is currently 179 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats in northwestern Utah.
Santa-Rita, a 29-year-old information technology specialist for McGoodwin, Williams and Yates, a civil engineering firm, has made or adapted several hightech features normally found on high-dollar, highend, professionally built customs. The lights are powered by rechargeable battery packs and are wirelessly controlled. The brake light automatically comes on whenever the bike starts to slow, making other motorists aware, And, it utilizes regeneration, where motion from the rear wheel is used to generate electricity, which is then used to partially recharge the batteries while coasting. It also has reverse.
“I think my favorite thing is pulling up next to a chopper,” Santa-Rita said. “Usually, there’s the dismissive part on their face where they look and they’re like, OK, I’m next to a motorcycle and then they notice that something is weird. Either they realize that it’s too quiet or they realize that there are no tail pipes. A moment of confusion replaces the expression on their face.”
It’s whisper quiet, which has caused a few problems, Santa-Rita said.
“I’ve had trouble sneaking up on people where I’ll be sort of invisible until I’m in their peripheral vision and suddenly, boom, there’s something there,” Santa-Rita said. “This one woman got frightened and picked up her dog.”
Santa-Rita wanted the bike to pass as a regular vehicle and for the most part it does.
“The coolest thing about it is a lot of the time when people see it, they don’t realize it’s electric before they make some comment about liking it. I think that that’s really nice, that it’s sort of under the radar unless you are a motorcycle guy,” Santa-Rita said. Then, your interest is even greater because you’re trying to figure out what’s going on there.”
The project has given Santa-Rita and his wife a way to spend time together.
“One of the things that’s been pretty cool is I’ve built this bike with Lori this whole time and she’s had a really big hand in turning wrenches and deciding how it’s going to look,” Santa-Rita said.
Building the bike has taken Santa-Rita on a voyage of hands-on learning and it has shown him there is a place for electric-powered vehicles.
“There’s no way the university could offer me a program that would teach me how to do this, in the way that I have done it,” Santa-Rita said. “The fact that it exists shows there is a potential to fill this void between walking and SUVs with something that is quiet and clean and low maintenance and, generally, just fun to use.”
While ingenuity is required, Santa-Rita found you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to build an electric vehicle.
“There are hobbyists who do this kind of thing, and they’re usually fabricators or engineers and I’m neither,” Santa-Rita said. “I wouldn’t mind being either one, but I’m far from it. I have a degree in painting.”
News, Pages 1 on 10/25/2010