bottpower

The bike is almost finished, we only need the final bodywork, it will take some weeks to be ready.

Meanwhile, here you have two photos that show the current aspect of the bike. If we compare with the photos that we published 3 months ago, we will see that there are many differences: we added the brakes, exhaust, electrical wiring, the airbox intake, display, chain, telemetry sensors, fueltank cover (this is already part of the final bodywork), quickshifter, etc.

After the two tests we have done, it seems that we won’t need to make any significant change in the bike design, it is working very well as it is now, so for the rest of the season the target is to continue accumulating miles and continue working on the bike set-up.
But of course it is always possible to improve things, so from a design point of view we do not relax and we are already working on a series of improvements for the BOTT M211, the bike we will race next year. We will show you this changes as we have them more developed.

As always I recommend you to visit our Flickr gallery, where you will find these photos with higher resolution.

Finally! Today the BOTT M210 lapped for the first time at Cheste (Valencia, Spain) circuit, with Alex Martinez at the controls.

This first test was made with the sole intention of riding a few laps to make sure everything was OK and that the bike had no problems. In fact we went to the circuit without timers, without pitboard, and the intention of not working in the bike setup, not even adjust one click of the suspensions. Before heading of to the track we had some worries, because our friend Murphy is always lurking around so you never know what will happen.

Fortunately everything went well. Alex was running smoothly, rode a total of 30 laps in batches of 5. Personally I was surprised (and a little worried) about how quickly and surely he was lapping the circuit. Overall Alex was very happy with the BOTT M210, enjoying the ride and having a good feeling about the bike.

And with something like that, logically the whole Bottpower team left Cheste with a smile from ear to ear, and with renewed courage to continue working hard to make our bike competitive. From now on we will train as much as possible to achieve an optimal level as soon as possible with the intention of running in one of the last races of this year’s CEV (Spanish Championship).

We do not have the final fairing yet, so we went to the track with a CBR fairing and a tail that somebody lend us. The exhaust pipe is also not the final one.

Finally here’s a little video that shows the M210 the first time it comes alive.

Bott M210 first test from Bottpower on Vimeo.

We will keep you informed!

When designing the BOTT M210, we have tried to use solutions that facilitate the work of the mechanics. The most important aspect of a race bike is beeing fast on the track, but it is also very important that the mechanics can work on the bike quickly and safely. Good race bikes are full of small details that can greatly facilitate the work inside of the box. In that sense I feel very fortunate to work closely with Jose Contreras, who has several years of experience in Motogp and now we can implement much of that experience in our Moto2.
Let’s see some of the BOTT M210 detais, in this case in the rear wheel axle area.

The head of the rear wheel shaft has a bell that helps to center the spanner cup. Ducati uses this solution in their MotoGP bikes.
The piece that serves to clamp the brake caliper is also used to hold the rear wheel speed sensor. This sensor reads impulses from a sheetmetal part that gives 24 signals per each wheel revolution.  The cable from the sensor makes a loop shape to avoid tension when changing the wheelbase.
The sliders used to tighten the chain have a small platform (not seen in these pictures because they are on the inner face) that keep the wheel in position so that when we remove the wheel shaft, the wheel keeps in place. This is a great help when you change the wheel, you let it fall between the two arms of the swingarm and it is always perfectly aligned with the sliders so you only have to worry about pushing the shaft.
The anchor for the bike stand is located behind the swingarm, in that way you have more room to work in the brake caliper if necessary.
The quick connector of the rear brake line has a black rubber around it to avoid friction with the swingarm.

On the left side of the bike you can see that the nut is screwed to the slider, in that way we don’t need to worry about holding it when we remove the wheel axle. You can also see that the shaft is tapered to facilitate it’s placement on the wheel.

Many of these ideas come from endurance bikes and nowadays are used by the best road racing bikes because they allow to work more quickly and safely in the qualifying sessions.

You will find bigger pictures in our Flickr gallery.

If we don’t find an unexpected problem, we will start testing the M210 in two weeks. We are anxious to see the bike on the track!

Meanwhile we continue working in a lot of details that are necessary to finish completely the bike. For example the instalation of all the data adquisition sensors, which require the design of small parts to locate each sensor in its position, in order to make it work properly and allowing an easy replacement.
For example, next picture shows the linear potentiometer of the rear shock. Fortunately the K-tech shock we are using has already threaded holes to clamp the sensor brackets. This makes the work much easier.

Last week we visited Totimport, one of our technical sponsors. They built for us the braking lines under our specifications. The lines are from English brand HEL, and have been designed for using quick couplings and pressure sensors. Quick couplings allow a quick and leak proof disconnection of the brake calipers from the rest of the hidraulic system.

The two orange connectors are for the front brakes, the red one is for the rear brake. Next picture shows a coupling connected and another one disconnected.

As always you will find bigger pictures in our Flickr gallery.

We will keep informing!!

Motorrad (the most important motorbikes magazine in Germany) published in their printed (paper) edition a small article about the BOTT M210.

We already have the airbox conduit with us, in 3 days we went from a drawing in the screen to a real part ready to assembly on the bike.

I want to thank Ineo for supporting our project working in a very fast and professional way.

Your can see a bigger photo in our Flickr gallery.

The airbox intake is one of the M210 parts that was not designed yet. In most race bikes this part is made using carbon fiber (CF). By the moment we have designed it to be fabricated using  Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). Fortunately for this task we have the support of Ineo, a Spanish company specialized in rapid prototyping.

Using SLS technique allows us to have the part fabricated in a few hours, without having to make moulds like it happens with CF. Another advantage of SLS is that we have a lot of design freedom because we can design the part adding details and forms that would be impossible to fabricate even using a CNC milling machine.

In this way it is easier to design the part so that it can serve several functions:

- Introduce fresh air into the airbox.
- Hold the bottles for the leftover water and fuel.
- Provide a solid clamping point for the nose of the fairing.
- Provide multiple clamping points for the electrical cables.
- Provide adequate clamping for the connector that is used to download telemetry data. The same connector is used also to manage the engine maps and electronic strategies of the bike.
- Provide a platform to clamp the display bracket and the spider that holds the fairing around the windscreen.

The overall geometry of this part was determined some months ago based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) studies.

Using finite element analysis we can design the part to minimize its weight, we can also use a variable thickness to put the material only where is necesary, we can add ribs, etc.
In this way it is possible to design a part that has a weight very similar to a CF part, specially if we consider that in the CF part we should add several inserts and small pieces to clamp the various elements that are around it.

For the part that supports the display (pink colour) we studied two different designs. We must decide which design we want to use and then send an email to Ineo with the geometry of the part, in that way we will have the part ready to assembly on the bike in a few days.

This is the first design:

This is the second design, a hollow part with ribs inside.

Next week I hope to show you pictures of these parts already manufactured.

The Bott M210 photos that we published recently in bottpower.com had quite repercussion on internet. Hell for Leather (a very interesting blog I usually read, for example they are doing a great monitoring of electric bikes/races) published a post called “Bott M210: the sexiest CBR600RR ever“.

In Italy, Motoblog.it published an article called “Moto2: Bottpower M210, the Spanish challenge“. Other sites like Motocorse.com or Omnimoto.it also published articles about the M210.

In Holland Nieuwsmotor.nl talked about the bike, in Germany it was Motojournal, in Taiwan Autonet.com, Moto-svet.cz in the Czech Republic or Motocafe.ru in Russia.

For those of you more interested in technical questions, Peter Jones from Reynolds (like you know they are a technical sponsor of our project) has published an article in English magazine Moto Tech (we already talked about Moto Tech in this blog) about the return of Reynolds into the motorcycle industry. The article talks quite a lot about the Bott M210.

Yesterday we received the front brake calipers for the M210. They are last generation Brembo calipers, aluminium/lithium cnc machined from a solid block (if you look at the photo in big size you can see the machining grooves).

When you take them in your hand you really appreciate how light they are. And when you look at them for a while words like “piece of art” or “piece of jewerly” come to your mind.
In short, if we don’t achieve good lap times it won’t be because the brakes..  :-)

I want to say thank you to Yann Demazieres, the boss of Totimport (one of our main technical sponsors) for believing in our project and for supporting us to make it true.
Totimport provides us with a lot of the components we use in our bike (like brakes, clip-ons, footrests, levers, bike stands, etc) and Yann always looks for the way of achieving the exact component we need in a really short time. It is a pleasure to work with people like him.

As I wrote in the last post, right now we are working building the bike. Although we still must receive some components (we still need the bodywork, exhaust, brakes, air intake conduit, display, etc) we couldn’t avoid to take some photos.

Following Bottpower’s “tradition” we painted the chassis orange. The bike looks much better with the chassis painted.

We are very close to the first test of the bike, we are really anxious to start working on the track. We know that to design and build the bike is the easiest part of the project, from now on we will start the second phase, which is the most difficult: to make this bike competitive.

Of course we will keep telling the story through this blog. I think it is going to be funny!  :-)

I recommend you to take a look at the Flickr gallery to see the photos with higher resolution.