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I haven't been able to find anything online, nor here.  Lots of car battery teardowns though.

Tl; dr: went to top off one of my packs and found it dead and bloated, considering teardown before recycling.

I bought my '13 FX pretty early, taking delivery in October of that year (VIN ends in 0197, not sure if that makes mine the 197th, 97th, or indeterminate), and bought 2 spare packs at the same time.  In 2015 I yardsaled the bike pretty hard at Hollister, bending a fork and shattering the dash (and the key cylinder, fortunately it stayed in "ON"!)  Limping back several miles with a locked up fork (and a very sore leg and mouth) was less than fun!  I had a few other issues with bent body mounts and broken (nonstructural) welds, so I decided to tear it all the way down and make a project of it.  Of course then three years went by and it's still in a series of Rubbermaid bins!  Still planning to build it into something, original plan was a cafe racer, current aspiration is to see if I can cram it into a proper dirt bike frame, though other uses have occured to me.  Lots of potentially interesting uses for a portable 44HP motor with 10 (now 7.5) kWh of juice...

Since then I've given all the packs a charge with my two 1kW offboard chargers every four months or so.  Yesterday I did the same and found one of them made the charger give an error.  Verified it wasn't a charger problem and then noticed one of the large flat sides was visibly bulging!  Glad Zero uses conservative battery chemistry as these were stored in my very flammable workshop under the house all this time!  It's now sitting outside on gravel just in case.  So poof, there went $2500.  Definitely outside warranty at this point of course.  It's SOP for me to tear down anything before I trash it (whether it's a remote control, deskjet printer, ) to either find the failure or just learn how it works, so I'm planning the same for this.  Haven't looked into battery recycling options yet, whether through Zero or otherwise.  Any idea whether Zero or others would refuse to accept a battery that's been opened?

Are there any publicly visible teardowns of this battery pack that I failed to find?  If not, that tilts me hard towards doing it and sharing the results.  If so I might do it anyway to see if there's any interesting bits to play with, and potentially learn something from fiddling with the BMS that could be applied to my good packs for my future project.  I work for an EV OEM so I have access to good advice and a discharge box, and know enough to ziptie my wrist to my back belt loop...

In other news I have a bunch of FX parts to sell.  Haven't gone to the trouble of listing anything yet, but I have a good stock rear shock, and upgraded one, and the upgraded fork internals may be salvagable.  Good wheels (stock and Hollywood SM upgrade w/ brake spacer), seat, some bodywork, etc.  Keeping all the electronics.  I'll list all this up one of these days.

I ride my FX off road as well as on and was tired or tearing off rear indicators and their lenses.  They hold up astonishingly well to abuse, even dragging across rocks, but ultimately do get destroyed.  I also replaced the taillight, front indicators, and headlight with LED to avoid broken filaments.  This is a quick and dirty install so I might go back and redo it more cleanly eventually but it's alright for now.

Here's the bracket, made from some thin steel strip I had around, riveted together and screwed into the lens.  I had this amber LED strip on hand too so this was a free upgrade for me.  When I redo this I want to be a bit more clever about making the LED strip look more continuous and clean.


Not sure what to do with the holes left behind from the removed indicators.  Might take the Dremel to it and cut some of the bodywork away.


From the beginning I've always mounted my plate from the bottom holes which cleans up the tail a ton.


It looks washed out by the taillight in photos but in person they're very bright and distinct, even with the brakes on.  Very happy with the result!

Good idea, I'm without a press at the moment but my big vice might have the reach.

Rebuilt the Y today but didn't test due to the power being out for going on 24hrs.  Ah, mountain living.  Good thing I bought two generators to charge the Zero on overnight camping trips!

What a difference 2mm makes, hope this does the trick:

Yes, those are the ones I mean.  I'm building it based on the pinout of the Quiq's cable, which only has one of these PowerMod pins connected (P2).  So in each branch of the Y that goes to the chargers I have a socket in S2, which go to the P2 pin in the "trunk" of the Y which goes to the bike.  I think I've discovered my problem:  no socket-to-pin contact.  I bought the "standard length 7.7mm" parts but it seems like the "Pre-mate" 8.5mm or 9.3mm must be what I need.  Here goes another multi-week wait for an order from Anderson!

Also, the different keyings are due to the brown housings being intended for 96V use, vs. 80V use for the black ones.  Don't think there's any actual difference between them, just to prevent accidents in a situation where both standards are in use.

Having already bought Zero's Y-cable for fast-charging back in 2013, spending another $250 when I lost it was just unpalatable!  Now that I'm building my two Quiq chargers and J1772 adapter into my FX's Givi top box, it was time to go the DIY route.  Turns out, the parts from Anderson added up to a mere ~$15!  Roughly $3 per housing (x3) and a bit over $1 per pin (x6).  I bought both 6AWG and smaller 10AWG pins and ended up using 12AWG speaker wire which I already had around.  I would've gone large but there was no pin that could hold large wire doubled-up (maybe 10AWG in the 6AWG pin but no larger).  Using the two-component speaker wire also negated any need for a wire loom/wrap.  I also used one cable clamp but with the zip ties and heatshrink I think it's not strictly necessary.  Lastly, I already had the anvil-crimper from making welding cable battery cables for a car.  I highly recommend it, but soldering's also an option.  My ratchet crimper could barely dent the pins!  I'll post about the charging top box when there's something to show.  Still figuring out how I want to pass the cable out, waterproof or otherwise.

One problem before I can test it, they seem to be keyed differently, see last image.  What's that about?!  I'll just dremel it off if there's not some reason not to.

Good stuff, I've been wanting to undo the loss of top speed that came with the smaller diameter supermoto tire.  Don't really care in the dirt as I always turn the torque down to ~60% anyway.  Maybe that's just the lack of traction in dusty drought-stricken CA!

How could there be significant chain slack variation when the motor is coaxial with the swingarm pivot?! I always thought that was a nice engineering advantage over most bikes.


With my DID ZVM2 (if I recall correctly) the chain is definitely the loudest part of the bike but I wouldn't call it obnoxious, just a "zzzzzz...." with speed.

And the FX will easily bonk into its 89mph speed limit.  I used to commute on the bike daily and spent a lot of time there.  I've never ridden on one battery on the street to test that top speed, just a few times on the dirt and once Supermoto.  It just starts losing power way too quickly (faster than the half capacity would lead you to expect) and even seems to overheat faster.  Maybe if you're MXing and only doing a few laps.  The weight saving is nice.

Here's the first few lines of one I sent myself back in January.  The date stamp at the beginning may be a born-on date as I received it in October last year.  I'd forgotten it was a legible as it is.  Not sure if it goes back to the beginning of time or starts dumping the early stuff at some point.  The last ~2/3 of the file is just a string of "ÿ"s.  I'll ask my firmware pro buddy what he thinks of it and I'll let you all know if I hear anything from Zero about it.

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