Scooter Visions

We started to shift some of our attention back to the scooter for some temporary fixes and planning out what other modifications we wanted to attempt.  It was fun riding it the other night, but in our video there was still clearly the problem of not having any underglow lighting.  That means we're back to blue lights on white paint once again!

The scooter has much less clearance than the trike, so I wanted to start off by mounting the LED strips inside of the battery box to protect them.  The box has a funny shape on the bottom with a groove down the middle that allows it to straddle the bar it rests on as it sits in the scooter frame:

The plan was to cut the elevated parts on the bottom of the box off and replace them with clear plastic all the way across, giving it a flat bottom.  This way, the lights could be mounted within the box, below the batteries, and shine down through the plastic.  This prevents the lights from being damaged when driving over curbs and other objects that scrape the bottom of the low-clearance frame of the scooter.  

Nick's Bandsaw Work

Once the plastic was sized up for the base of the box, we glued it in place, hopefully still in a sufficiently water-tight manner!  Then we took it back to the room and finally fixed it up with some lights.

The LEDs fit nicely on each side of the inside of the battery box where we intended for them to go, and they didn't interfere with the batteries or anything else packed in the box.  I also threw some more lights on the back of the frame around the rear wheel to put some more light on the ground.  We temporarily just taped up a little switch on the handlebars and wired the lights into the batteries, and now we have another glowing vehicle.

Moving Forward

I've been thinking about some nice projects to do with the scooter frame.  To this point, it's still pretty much just a stock Razor scooter without the seat, despite new paint and lights.  I like trying to make things a bit more unique than that.

I was thinking about cutting the frame at the down tube equivalent, and replacing the front wheel with another big 26" hub motor wheel.  With the two 16" wheels and no suspension, the ride gets pretty bumpy at times, especially in cases such as crossing railroad tracks.  I figure it could be a cool type of throwback to the old fashioned penny-farthing bicycles, and maybe get it going a little bit faster with the hub motor.

I drew up some designs and then checked online, and I actually found some similar things that people had made on instructables.  

http://www.instructables.com/id/Mountain-Bike-Scooter/all/?lang=pt

Ideally, I'd want to go with something along the lines of this one:

http://lawrence-ks.americanlisted.com/kids-products-toys/big-kick-scooter-75-25-miles-s-of-topeka_20249469.html

That design has 24" in the front and 14.5" in the back, but that's roughly how ours would look with the 26/16 combo.  I'm still working on drawing it up, so we'll see if this one takes form.  The only problem is that I'm still pretty reluctant to cut up the Razor, just because the frame is nice and sturdy as it is, and I've grown to like the way it looks with the paint and lights...