Newsletter of January 2020

Nobody in the current team had any experience riding a motorcyle. Therefore we had a nice activity trying a motorcycle for the first time! We also got to meet our new powertrain engineer Dennis! He will start working fulltime in February!

Our first month of the year has started and already a lot has happened. The chassis team has succeeded in hitting the design freeze deadline! For us this means that the design of the motorcycle is now finished.

The team has had two weeks in the Christmas break to rest after this achievement. The final week has been especially hard, working late and waking up early really takes its toll. However, hitting the deadline has made it more than worth it.

We are now fully underway in the production phase. At this point members of the team are either working on making parts, transporting material or getting our workshop ready to build. As time goes by more and more components will arrive and soon we can see the motorcycle take shape.

For the second year in a row, Aalberts supports us as Pole Position partner! Aalberts engineers mission-critical technologies for ground-breaking industries and everyday life.

Anne-Lize van Dusseldorp, Aalberts director sustainability & relations: “Again, we are proud Pole Position partner. We see a great match between Aalberts and the Electric Superbike team. We nurture entrepreneurship, and our technologies enable us to focus on sustainable transportation.

Alongside financial backing, Aalberts also offers the team access to their knowledge and mission-critical technologies. Flamco, part of Aalberts hydronic flow control played a role in the production of the Eclipse-GP and VSH, part of Aalberts integrated piping systems, contributed by milling complex metal parts.
The partnership is continuously evolving and we work closely together. We will be present at the Bedrijvendagen of the University of Twente together and we will be organising a lunch lecture for the Mechanical Engineering students!”

We are very excited to apply Aalberts' expertise again this year and look forward to further developing the partnership!

We finished 'matching' all of the Li-Po battery cells that will be used in our battery pack. Since we are using so many cells, it is essential that we connect the right cells in parallel and in series, in order to get the optimal result. Even though the process took us a long time it is surely worth the effort!

For the powertrain team this month was all about wrapping up the design phase. As you are reading this, our last week at Prodrive has just finished. The couple of months that we worked at Prodrive were useful for the team but also for our own personal development. For 12 weeks, 4 days a week, we had access to a lot of resources and expertise.

The experiences Niek and I got from working at Prodrive are priceless and prepared us for working at a company later in life. We had to be assertive and planned tons of meetings with engineers from Prodrive to achieve our goals. This resulted in 3 redesigned PCBs and one completely new design by only 2 people! Without Prodrive this would not have been possible.

Now that the designs are finished, the PCBs will be made in China and will be delivered to us in a couple of weeks. Until then, we will be busy with all the wires between the components and how to place them efficiently in the bike.