KillaCycle has gotten a “little” sister (or maybe it’s a brother)! The “KillaJoule” electric streamliner motorcycle was born in our garage the past week. This 18 feet (6 meter) long baby will be piloted by me at the Bonneville Salt Flats in September. The goal for this year is to break the present electric motorcycle record of 176 MPH (282 km/h) with a good margin. The ultimate goal is to take the overall motorcycle record of 368 MPH (589 km/h), but that will take a couple of years. 
Professional frame builders Clay and Gary Gardiner came up from the Bay area this Tuesday and left Friday night. Four very long and intensive days resulted in a rolling chassis. Clay gave me a welding lesson and fine-tuned our TIG welder before they left, and with some practice I can continue to make the less critical parts of the motorcycle chassis.
By the way, Clay is the guy that gave us his brand new motor in Portland, Oregon last year when KillaCycle had burnt up one of its motors. He is a big EV enthusiast and a really, really nice guy!
Picture: I get a TIG welding lesson from professional frame builder Clay Gardiner. With some practice I can continue the building myself.
— The building process –
Here is the building process so far documented in photos.
The building started with this Suzuki GSXR 1100 -90. We needed wheels, brakes, wheel axles etc., and it turned out that buying a whole motorcycle was much cheaper than buying parts. We got the donor bike locally at Craigslist for $850. A real bargain!
Before I could take the wheels off I had to make a dolly so the bike still would stand up and be movable. The wheels on the dolly come from a tool box. When we bolted the toolbox to the floor in the race trailer, the wheels were over. The rest of the dolly is just some plywood and some wood we had hanging around. The dolly works great and the remains of the bike can easily be moved.
By the way – if you want a Suzuki engine we can give you a good deal. The seller claimed that it runs, but we have never started it.
The front and rear suspensions are designed by my dad Sven. It front is a “Springer” or “Trailing link” style suspension. It is a classic suspension but rarely used today. It is very strong and rigid and it is lower than a telescopic fork. Sven drew the suspension by hand and Bill transferred it to CAD and figured out the exact dimensions. This made it possible to print out dimensioned full-size drawings which helped a lot in the building process. By putting in batteries and motors in the drawing and sweep around a body, we could see which dimensions the chassis needed to have.
The first, and the most complicated, part to build was the front swing arm. Clay is an excellent machinist and welder and made it look very easy.
The swingarm twisted a little bit during the welding (this is almost unavoidable). By mounting it to our forklift “Clark” and use a big leverarm we managed to bend it back.
I am machining the ends for the front forks.
The front end finished! It was quite a bit of work, but it came out great.
Figuring out the height of the chassis. I have to be able to fit my knees inside and see over the body, but we still want it as low as possible to get low air resistance.
The first loop done on the roll cage.
It isn’t easy to bend 1 ¼ inch 090-wall Chrome-Moly tubing. Clay’s hydraulic tube bender really had to work.
More parts to machine! I spent most of the four days machining parts. It is really slow to machine steel, especially chrome-moly steel. Here I am making the ends for the rear swing arm. Our new rotating table came in handy.
I want to thank the machine shop manager at University of Denver, Jon Buckley, for the great machine shop class I took the past semester. It greatly improved my machining skills.
It starts to look like a chassis! Now we have to decide where (and how!) to put the rear wheel. Bill has just come home from his day job, he has to work to pay for all this fun, so he gets a big hug. (All our racing projects are just very expensive hobbies; we definitely don’t make any money on it).
It took some brain-storming, but we finally came up with a good solution for the rear end. Clay is cutting the hole for the pivot point for the rear swing arm.
We were joking all the week that we should ask Harbor Freight Discount Tools to sponsor this project, almost every tool we used came from Harbor Freight. This is simply because they give you the most bang for the buck, and bucks is something we don’t have too much of… Clay is wearing a face shield from Harbor Freight, using a cutting wheel from Harbor Freight and the machines on the bench in the background are from Harbor Freight. We also made two trips to Harbor Freight during the four days to get more tools. If you have a contact at Harbor Freight – let us know! The store at Sheridan Boulevard knows us well as “the electric racers”…
The front suspension was the most difficult part to make. Bill spent hours just machining the neck on our old lathe (also from Craigslist! 😉 and Clay really scratched his head before he figured out how to mount the front end to the rest of the frame.
All the angles have to be correct or the bike might behave really bad at high speed.
One of the beauties with CAD is that you can print out full size drawings, cut them out, tape them to the material and simply drill the holes and make the cuts. Here I am cutting out the drawing for the mounting brackets for the rear suspension.
Making the brackets that I just cut out the drawings for.
Lunch in the garage. To save some precious time, we had lunch in the garage. Clay is playing with the spot-welder he will use to build the battery pack for his own dirt dragster. Bill and I got an awesome deal on eBay on a whole pallet of spot-welding equipment. For building the frame for our streamliner, Clay and Gary got a spot-welder from us. New these spot-welders cost half a fortune.
This is the cabinet with used-up motor parts from KillaCycle. Bill explains to Clay how he should adjust the brush timing to get maximum performance.
Clay and Gary Gardiner are really great guys! Gary is Clay’s uncle, and together they have built more than 80 frames, mostly for dirt dragsters. This was the first streamliner motorcycle frame they built, but they are already thinking of the next version…
Gary is really a character! You just got to love him!
The first “test ride”.
The motorcycle stands on it wheels! It looks promising; I am convinced that it will be ready in August when the racing season starts out at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.
Flat out into the future!
// Eva