So you are thinking about buying an electric scooter. Well before you spend your hard-earned money you may want to think about it for a moment. Most commercially made electric scooters and not the best quality. They use small underpowered motors, cheap low quality batteries that don’t last very long and have low amperage controllers that barely put out enough power to get you up small hills. There are a few electric scooters that are better quality and use lithium batteries (usually the lowest quality ones available) but they can cost many thousands of dollars and still seem underpowered and don’t come close to getting the range the manufacturer promised.
To save yourself some money and get a high quality, fast and powerful scooter with a decent range you are much better to build one yourself. By building it yourself you can hand-pick all the parts you need to meet your exact specifications for what you want the scooter to do. Maybe you want a scooter will a really high top speed, or maybe you want to be able to ride up a mountain so you need a high torque motor or perhaps you want to travel a very long distance. By building your electric scooter yourself you can customized it any way you want.
The best part about building your own electric scooter is you can actually use a heavy-duty bicycle frame as the platform. You can pick up a high quality used mountain bike frame off craigslist for very a reasonable price. Using a bicycle frame has several advantages over using a scooter frame. In most places you do not have to license or insure an electric bicycle, which can save you thousands of dollars a year alone. You can also ride an electric bicycle on designated bike routes and paths. On an electric scooter you are obligated to obey the same rules as a car so you are stuck waiting in traffic with every other vehicle. A bicycle also weighs much less than a scooter chassis, which means it will require less power to move it. This translates to a more efficient vehicle that can use a smaller (therefore cheaper) battery pack to travel the same distance. This makes a high quality battery pack that is capable of discharging a lot of current much more affordable. One final advantage of a bicycle is you can lock it up to a bike rack instead wasting even more money paying for a parking spot.
Source by Greg Davey
