Unfortunately, the scooter did not survive its journey unscathed. The packaged seemed to confuse the Portland UPS office, and it spent a day going in an out of the city. By the time I got the package, the box was very sad looking. It had no real form left, and looked more like thick, slightly torn wrapping papper than a box. More sadness appeared when I opened the box.
The first casualty was the metal brake cable noodle, which had been completely crushed:
Also barely visible in the picture above is that the two corners of the rear suspension arm are bent inwards. Somehow UPS managed to bend 1/4" aluminum plate in the shipping process.
The deck of the scooter must have taken some serious knocks during shipping as well, as in two spots the polycarbonate top layer of the deck managed to de-laminate from the carbon fiber bottom layer. Functionally, this doesn't make a difference, but it doesn't look good and can't really be fixed without completely separating the two pieces and re-gluing them. It's a good thing I did make the polycarbonate extend beyond the edges of the carbon fiber, or the carbon fiber would surely have been cracked.
I brought the scooter to MITERS to do some repairs:
I got a new brake noodle from Cambridge Bikes, across the street from MITERS, and replaced the crushed one:
In the process of fixing the scooter, I found a few more things that had been damaged. Somehow, the plastic guard and carbon fiber at the front of the deck got huge gouges in them, and the carbon fiber was split at the edge:
Also, one corner of the battery box was skewed, as can be seen below. I may end up just plating the entire outside of the box in aluminum, to give the batteries a bit more protection.
Finally, here's an abridged version of a loop I did around most of campus. Sorry about the earthquake:
No comments:
Post a Comment