In this video, we're going to be swapping a completely electric powertrain into a vintage minibike frame. But before you get the pitchforks out, this is actually an original electric minibike from the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Honda Z50 was taking over the minibike market. So as a response, the Taiwanese company Gemini came out with a direct competitor, the Puma A Californian company named AR Enthetic started purchasing these Puma frames and modifying them, creating what some consider to be the first production street legal electric motorcycle.

I Found this 1972 or anthetic charger minibike on Facebook a few years back and I ended up buying it out in West Texas for 300 bucks. The seller told me that it started off life in California which is why we have the original California Plate Here that shows it was last registered in 1976. It's probably sat outside for a while so it's pretty crusty and we definitely need to give it some love and attention before we can get it back on the road. So this was a street legal motorcycle back in the 70s so we have turn signals, headlights, all of those goodies we have.

We have a plug here pluged straight into your wall and there's an inverter in here that charges up your batteries. so we really like how they did the speed control on this thing. You have a normal twist grip and your throttle cable comes down to a three position switch which is connected to two DC contactors. You move your throttle, one contactor closes, and you have a full 12 volts going straight to your motor.

That'll be probably good for around 15 M hour you move your throttle more, the second contactor closes, and you get 24 volts straight to your motor and that's probably good for 25 30 mph. This is a Brush DC motor, so you're not getting a ton of torque right off the line, so it's probably not too bad to drive. But yeah, it's pretty sweet how simple they made this thing. That's everything you need to know about our 1972 or enthetic Charger electric mini bike.

Now our plans for this thing are to keep the frame as original as possible while upgrading it to a modern 72 volt drivetrain. So before we can see if this motor spins, we have to get this chain off. But this thing's been sitting for so long. The chain is one solid piece, like it.

It doesn't move between the links, so it's pretty insane. Luckily we have one broken link down here so I'll be getting the hammer out and a chiseling. We'll see if we can get this open. Nice.

There is a little bit of wiggle room, but I think this motor's probably seized and we're either going to have to do a huge rebuild or find something similar diameter that will fit inside of here. Nice. The motor is coming out I'm surprised. Obviously you should not hammer on the end of your motor, but since this one's seized and we're probably not going to reuse it, you know this is all right for me.

I Was expecting much worse. A lot more trouble plug getting this out, but here it is. So this big old thing is a stock 1 horsepower brushed DC motor. We're not too sad to see it go cuz it is completely seized.

There's no move in this so that gives us a really good reason to upgrade to a new brushless DC motor with four times the power. This is a Vivor motor we got off Amazon It's a 72v 300 watt system so it's around four horsepower and for $200 we got the motor controller, throttle key and chain and sprocket. The charger originally came with two 12vt car batteries, so we obviously had to upgrade that. Big Bar.com was kind enough to send us this Falcon 72v 28 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery which has two main advantages over lithium ion and Lipo.

These are very stable so this thing has a 10-year warranty and these are also very safe so you're not going to have to worry about burning down your garage making these perfect for for golf carts, mini bikes, and go-karts We have everything temporarily wired up, so here's a little taste of four times the horsepower. We actually got pretty lucky and these rims are really good quality Chrome coating so we just take this softer wire brush to them and it really gets rid of most of the rust and leaves just some good Chrome behind. As you all can see, we have had a major Improvement on this brake shoe. Looks really good now.

we really wanted to reuse the wheels on this just cuz they're such cool Chrome but especially this rear one. in a lot of places it's just rust held together with chrome and we don't don't have to worry about it with all this extra weight on there. So what we ended up having to do was buy a new Rim but the only readily available ones are 14 spoke designs where the stock one is a six spoke. So we had to redrill a bunch of holes and use the new Spokes and the new wheel to get this thing to work.

So now we have to Center this and get it straight and we should be in business. And here are the final results. This was my first time doing this and all these holes are hand drilled so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out good. Power Sports has these sweet looking Chrome rear shocks and these happen to be the perfect size for this mini bike.

Since we don't have a seat, we got a Honda Z50 seat. We're taking off the seat pan and since it has this red piping it looks a little cheap. we're getting rid of that and then this thing is actually going to be a pretty nice fit. Just going to bring that front down a little bit and there we go.

That's a pretty cheap custom seat for it. Not too bad. We're removing our old motor controller to mount up our new controller and our new battery, so this gives us a nice Clean Slate to see where things have to move so the new components fit. We got our gas tank off and we're expecting a bunch of cool Electronics in here, but it looks like they just had some guy cutting holes in normal stock gas tanks with a plasma cutter and then they stuffed in a horn, an ignition switch, a voltmeter, and some wires for this plug so it's really pretty empty in here.

Our new Lithium battery from Big Battery.com is a little bit larger than the two lead acid batteries that would have come in this Frame so we need to extend the battery tray a little bit to do that. we're going to chop it, extend it with some new steel, and then weld it back together with our Hobart multi- Handler 200. This welder is perfect for projects like this because it's quick and easy. there's minimal cleanup, and it leaves behind some great welds.

Hopefully we measured right? Yeah oh man. back, squeeze. All right A Dude Nice. Wow.

That looks cool at the Resto mod. Yeah, it fits pretty well. side to side. there's definitely some wiggle room, but front to back it looks really good.

Yeah, yeah. I Grab that tank. those rope handles come off too. Yeah, all right.

T Perfect Here you go. Line up. Boom Dude. Yeah, no, that's perfect packaging.

Yeah, no. I'm I'm happy with that. Boom Bik is done. That is beautiful.

That looks really good music. One More We have our motor mount all welded up. We have four spacers in the back to keep the motor from torquing around. and then we have these two tabs up front that'll keep it perfectly spaced in line with our sprocket.

All right, that is it for now. we're ready to test it. Everything's on. this bike looks great, great and we're hoping it drives great too.

We've got everything temporarily mounted up just so we can give it a made in test Voyage Before really locking everything down, it looks great. Now it's time to see how it performs. Yeah, we got the rear tire up for safety and we're on low speed. And here's high speed.

It's like you really hear the chain. Yeah I Never realized how loud chain was, but yeah, yeah, with no motor, it sounds like it's got some power. Yeah, let's go see. let's see.

So now that we know it's not going to take off, put it around the shop a little bit. Yeah, it's pretty got got some torque for sure. Some torque Wheeling Machine yeah, feels good. It's nice.

It's very smooth, just like relaxing. I Mean you're not going to win any drag races with it, but it's just like Pleasant It's a joy to Drive kind of kind of deal. All right, let's see the top speed here's the run: 31 31 Not too bad I mean I think this thing has a little bit more in it, but it's a heavy bike and this motor is four horsepower so it's definitely got more power than stock, but still just a kind of a more relaxing drive. All right guys.

Joe's going to launch it all right. Let's go all ready, get pranked, all right guys! So we had a smelly smell. Dude 260 Yesik 261 Fahrenheit Yeah, that's Fahrenheit that's well. yeah.

anyway. um, so we're definitely not recommending this motor controller just yet. Uh, one thing could be because it's inside of a metal cylinder so we're going to add a cooling fan. but we also ordered basically the same exact motor but with thicker windings so the the wires are thicker and it has thermal protection.

so with that one we're expecting it to be a little bit better. So next video we'll let you know and give you all any recommendations we have for motor and Battery setup. On the other hand, our batter is at 79.9 volts. We started out at 80.1 so that's only2 volts and we drove for like 30 45 minutes.

MH So big shout out to Big Battery.com for giving us most reliable part on this build. Absolutely! And then also thank you Go Powersports for these really cool tires and the cool shocks! So all in all we definitely have some more testing to do. Stay tuned for next video because we're going to try and make this thing Road Ready and sort out the reliability issues with this motor? Yeah! thank you guys for watching catch you in the next one! A.