Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

The electric motorbike is - was - very close. I had cut the bottom out of the fuel tank to fit around the controller and battery management system, wired everything into the 12V system, got the traction battery charging, received the replacement for the cell that had died, hooked that in without frying a BMS board, and made a mock-up of the crash protection for the traction battery. So I put the bike on the trailer on a frosty Monday morning, to take it to a couple of welding and fabrication places for quotes.

All unsuspecting.

As an aside, a friend of my brother-in-law came over to have a look at it on Sunday and suggested a polycarbonate battery case, with solid bars to hold it in position. The roll bar system I'd made up, while structurally good, would stick out quite wide, reducing my cornering angle; the mountings for the polycarbonate would be closer in. And the polycarbonate would reduce weight, would resist abrasion and rebound from an impact rather than bending permanently, and not catch fire if something catastrophic was to go wrong (the acrylic sheeting I had in mind for the covering actually burns quite well).

So after the quote from the engineering company to get the roll bars made came in about five times the price that I'd expected it to be, I went and saw a plastics company who said they could do a polycarbonate shell for more like the price I was expecting. Still, a small crowd had gathered to ask questions at the engineering company - I can definitely hear the attitude change between two years ago ("it'll never be as good") to now ("hey, that looks pretty cool!") in the questions from the greater public.

Likewise, when I took it to the Canberra Riders group meeting that afternoon there were lots of questions and lots of ... enthusiasm is too strong, but certainly a level of appreciation for the project. And, since I wanted to give the battery a bit of a work-out and generally show the project as nearly finished, I took it off the trailer and rode it around the car park a bit, then took it for a ride down a nearby disused road.

It's easy, at this point, to think about what I should have done. Should have had an escort, should have noticed my lights weren't too bright and my visibility was down. Was the controller cutting out on me as I started to accelerate because it could secretly predict the future? Unlikely. As it was, I rode the bike up the road a bit, through the two chicanes I knew were there, and started to accelerate into the main stretch.

And found the big traffic island that had been put in the road, at somewhere between 40km/hr and 60km/hr.

The trope here is one's life flashing before one's eyes. That doesn't happen for me. All I recall is seeing the traffic island, thinking "Oh no", and then being on the ground three or four seconds later. I picked the bike up and started both assessing the damage and cursing my foolhardy stupidity. I checked myself over - everything seemed to still work, no broken bones - and started picking up the pieces of the bike - the left mirror broken off, the windscreen cracked, the indicator dangling, the left handlebar control cluster broken beyond repair. A new dent in the fuel tank, just where I'd beaten out the previous one and found the repair from the one before that...

At this point two of the Canberra Riders came looking for me, probaby because I'd been gone for some time. They made sure I was OK, then one stayed with the bike while the other took me back to the car. Then a couple more riders followed me down and helped me lift the bike onto the trailer. Actually, they did the lifting, because my left shoulder really wasn't up to bearing weight. And the front wheel wasn't turning either. They tied it down, made sure I was OK, and followed me some of the way home. Those guys - I don't know their names, and I only vaguely remember their faces - helped me out when I most needed it without being asked or expecting reward. That's what motorbike riders do.

The rest is mainly painful. Three fractured ribs, a non-dislocated fractured collarbone, and some grazes to my knees. A worse-for-wear helmet, jacket and gloves. A lot of guilt and self-blame for being such a stupid, overconfident, unthoughtful idiot. A lot of thanks to luck for my injuries being that minor. Care from a beautiful, kind, thoughtful woman who never once reiterated what my conscience was already beating into me. Several days of rest, not being able to lie easily or get up simply. Another three to six weeks of healing before the shoulder knits together.

I can cope with the financial outlay. I can cope with the pain. We all do stupid things, and we move on from them. I don't dwell on it, really. I'm really more inclined to look at the things that somehow, amazingly, survived. Me, basically intact, with no ambulances or surgery. The battery, with not a single scratch or BMS board damaged. The rest of the bike is still sound. The bike actually worked. It's a temporary set back - life still goes on.

And only today I got an email from a guy doing an electric motorbike conversion in Sydney wanting to know some details about the project. Yep, life still goes on :-)