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Does anyone own an electric bicycle?
- Thread starter tokie
- Start date
- Status
nanette1985
Diamond Member
Check your state laws. I know several folks who have them. But they're not legal in NJ. Folks with electric bicycles here get lots of tickets.
Red Storm
Lifer
Wtf, why aren't they legal? 😵
I think the concept is pretty neat. I don't live in a city to make use of one though.
BrunoPuntzJones
Lifer
They are their own class. Not a bicycle, not a vehicle. Each state has their own laws. And in some you have to have a license.
tokie
Golden Member
Except that you don't need a drivers license and don't need to pay for insurance or parking.
It is effectively a bike that you can use bike storage with, use bike lanes, etc.
mmntech
Lifer
Bike lanes, not necessarily. Some jurisdictions don't want them in bike lanes. A lot of cyclists don't like them ripping up through them because they're faster than a pedal bike.
tokie
Golden Member
Well those cyclists are pussies. What, is Lance Armstrong banned from bike lanes too?
BrunoPuntzJones
Lifer
Some states require both insurance and a license to operate.
tokie
Golden Member
Not everyone lives in America.
In the EU they are legal up to 15mph and classified the same as a bicycle.
Evadman
Administrator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
One of the things I miss is being able to ride a bike all over the place. As a kid, I used to go everywhere on a bike. The freedom to go as far as you wanted to pedal was liberating. But now that I am older (and lazier) I tend to go everywhere in a car. This gets expensive quickly, and isn't as much fun. There's not really a chance to take in the scenery.
Since I am a geek, and enjoy building my own solutions to problems, I was going to try building a motor powered bike. However, when pricing out parts for a proposed solution, I came to an unfortunately very high price for something that wouldn't have a guaranteed chance of working. While I am all for a challenge, I have enough of those right now. To solve my problem, there are several kits out there that can give the satisfaction of building your own, while still being on the inexpensive side. The kits range from a low of about $300 to well over $2k depending on lots of factors.
I read lots of reviews and did a bunch of research before buying a kit. Since I was looking for more proof of concept than anything else, I decided upon the low end of the spectrum, a $300 kit from Currie. This kit comes with a motor and rim combo, one 10 amp/hr 24v lead-acid battery, controller, and the associated hardware. The kit is designed to be put on a non-suspension 26" mountain bike or a comfort/hybrid (front suspension only) bike. The shipping weight is nearly 50 lbs, so it adds some serious weight to the bike. It also puts out 450 watts, which is 3/5ths of a horsepower, and a published range of 11 miles. A normal human can generate spikes of 1.2hp or sustain about 1/10th of a hp, so 3/5ths is a large gain. This seemed like a kit that wouldn't go any faster than my maximum speed pedaling, and be able to help on those long trips at the expense of extra weight. It seemed like a good tradeoff.
I ordered the kit from Amazon. It arrived looking like it was run over by the UPS truck. The box was in shambles, and it looked like it had been repacked several times on it's journey. But a quick glance inside appeared to show everything in working order. I found out later that wasn't the case.
After I laid out everything on my workbench, I started making an additional parts list. The Currie kit requires you to use the 7 speed gear (freewheel), tube and tire from the existing bike that the kit is going on. Personally, I think this is a big oversight by Currie as a freewheel is only about $10 while the tool to take off a freewheel is $8 plus a chain whip which is $11. The tools are not needed to put the flywheel back on. So the difference to a consumer is actually $-9. A freewheel should have been included instead of requiring one be taken off the donor rim.
I was planning on putting the kit on a full suspension mountain bike, which I knew would require some modifications. I picked up the GMC Topkick mountain bike, but when I received it I found that the description and pics on Amazon is incorrect. the Topkick has front and rear disks, not just front, so the Currie kit will not work. I could have retrofitted rim brakes on the rear, but when pricing it out, it would have cost almost 1/2 of what another bike would cost. Since I had already assembled the Topkick and tossed the shipping box, I decided against returning it, and would keep the Topkick as a regular bike.
That left me without a suspension bike to put the kit on. Since I was aiming for proof of concept, I decided to put the kit on my old Huffy mountain bike that I used in college. That bike had seen more abuse than anything you could think of. I rode it all over the place to get to/from class and around town. This included going down stairs and off ledges that were a few feet tall. The rims were beat to heck and bent, and the frame was very 'tweaked', but it still road decently, though steering was more of a suggestion than anything else.
Since I knew this wasn't going to be the final bike the kit was going to be on, I decided against taking the freewheel, tube and tire off the huffy. I ordered a 7 speed freewheel, chain whip and freewheel socket (the last 2 were 'just in case') from Amazon to put on the Currie kit, and a cheap tire and tube from a trip to Wal-Mart. The freewheel spun on with no problem with no tool (the freewheel tightens when you ride, so it doesn’t have to be tightened with a tool) and the tire and tube were no problem. Fitting the new rear wheel assembly on the huffy was no problem either, even though I went from a 5 speed freewheel (original on the huffy) to a 7 speed freewheel.
When I went to start assembling the kit is when I ran into the first thing that Currie needs to improve. The instructions are very bad, as in they are not complete. They state to 'remove the old freewheel'. Ok, how do I do that? I had no idea what a freewheel was until I downloaded the instruction PDF before purchase and looked up a bunch of the terms online. Then, I had to find instructions on how to remove the freewheel. It was annoying. Same thing with all the bolts and connections. The instructions assume you know exactly what you are doing, and say things like 'bolt the rack to the bike' instead of what I would expect, such as, 'use the 10mm diameter 30mm long screws to attach the bike rack to the mounting points by the rear sprocket/freewheel'. The instructions were ambiguous, and incomplete. If you haven't worked on bikes for a long time, and done your own maintenance, expect the kit to take a while to assemble, or have a shop do it for you.
When I put the rear wheel on the Huffy I ran into the first mechanical problem. The Currie rim was bent. It was still usable, but it was off by a good 1/4 inch at one point. This meant it rubbed on the brakes when the rim passed the brake shoe every revolution. I would have to take it to a bike shop to be straightened after testing. Once the wheel was on, I mounted the battery and controller holder, which takes the shape of a rear rack. This is where I ran into another problem, though this time with the Huffy itself. The rack mount holes in the Huffy were not tapped for bolts. I tapped them for the bolts that came with the Currie kit using a Craftsman tap. There was enough room to do this with the rear wheel still on the bike. Once those bolts were in, I attached the down bars to the rear frame under the seat, and the rack was now completed.
the next step was to attach the throttle. Here I ran into another problem, the throttle was also cracked. It was obvious at this point that I would need some replacement parts from Amazon. I disassembled the throttle controller, and re-soldered on 2 of the 4 LED's that indicated the power level in the battery so I could still test, and fixed 2 broken traces on the cracked PCB. I then mounted the controller to the right hand handlebar. When routing the wire back tot he rear of the bike, I found that the lead wire is shorter than would be expected. The wire loom needs to be at least 6 inches longer. As it is, I had to route the throttle loom in a non-optimal location (the absolute shortest route possible) in order for the loom to have enough length to connect to the controller in the rear rack.
The final step was to connect the power feed from the bottom of the rack to the top where the controller is. This strikes me as a poor design. Why have wires on the outside of the bike, especially 2 wires? Why not use a common ground and 1 wire inside the frame of the rear rack? That will keep the wires from being in the way, reduce cost (copper is expensive) and reduce assembly time.
Now that my bike was assembled, it was time to try it out. Unfortunately, when putting the battery into the rack, I found that the case was cracked. It wasn't leaking or anything, but the case is what held the battery on the bike. I had some reservations about disassembling the case to try to fix it, so some duct tape held it together, just in case. I rode around a little without a battery to make sure that the brakes worked, and I wasn't going to run into a tree or something. Once I was happy with the handling, I put in the battery and rode around without turning on the kit. You could definitely feel the extra weight (the battery is about 17 lbs) but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I would estimate it at about 10% more effort with the battery on the bike).
Finally, I enabled the battery and used light power. I was extremely surprised at the amount of power that the motor put out. It accelerated only slightly slower than I could do manually. It kept up that acceleration to the kits top speed, which was almost exactly the top speed that the Huffy and I could manage when peddling as fast as possible in the highest gear on flat ground. I rode around the neighborhood for about 10 minutes, then headed back to check out connections, screws, and such.
One of the issues I had in this brief ride is that nearly any bump (such as a large crack in the sidewalk, or going down a driveway into the street) would cause the battery to pop out of the rack by about 1/4". This was enough to raise the battery off the contacts in the bottom of the rack. There are 2 locks that hold the batteries in, which I thought were for security. But they are actually required to keep the battery seated in the rack. A quick turn of the key solved that problem. At first, I thought this was an issue with the cracked case, but the replacement battery did it too.
When I was checking the bolts, I found that the 2 bolts holding the rack to the bike down by the freewheel were starting to deform. They were already deformed by about 1/4 their diameter, and were in the process of sheering off. These were obviously crap bolts. They were the only major failure of engineering that could have been VERY bad that I have found so far. A quick trip to the hardware store and some grade 5 stainless bolts solved the problem permanently.
The next day I also contacted Amazon to see if they could send me some non-broken parts. Unfortunately, they could only send me an entire new kit. I pulled the battery, controller and rim out. During this time I also was able to determine why my last kit had such a problem. The box wasn't closed. The box is a clamshell type box, and there was no closing mechanism (tape, glue, staple or other means). This box was not made to be shipped via a carrier, it was meant to go on a shipping pallet. When I sent it back to Amazon, I taped the box closed. Otherwise, they were probably only going to get parts of the kit back, with the rest lying on the floor of a fedex facility somewhere.
For the next week, I kept testing the kit to see what it could do. I rode all over on different surfaces to figure out how the kit acted. From a power standpoint, it could handle pretty much everything I threw at it. It could go up and down hills on dirt, grass or asphalt. There is one hill near my home that has a 50' rise over about 250 horizontal feet that the kit couldn't do without pedaling help, but the kit made that so much easier that doing it manually. As for range, I came up with about 5.4 miles on a nearly level gravel bike path with light pedal assistance from me. After that, the speed drops off to the point where it is faster to walk. The kit will still continue to assist when you pedal up to a total of about 7 miles though. After 7 miles, the kit is just dead weight. 7 miles is about 63% of the advertised range. I would have hoped the advertising would be closer to actual, but a 5 to 7 mile range isn't too bad. That works out to about $50 per mile for range for the kit price.
Now that I had proved out the concept, I wanted to put the kit on a full suspension mountain bike. The Huffy just wasn't going to survive, and I wanted the kit to have a suspension buffer between the road. It proved difficult to find a suspension bike that was 21 speed, durable, strong enough to hold the kit weight and myself while not being insanely expensive. In fact, I couldn't find one a bike that would work on Amazon at all. I went to a few different stores, and finally settled on the best of the worst, a Magna Excitor Terrain Bike from Target.
The Magna Excitor Terrain Bike was about $80 on sale, and the reviews that I could find were absolutely horrible. However, it had the correct dimensions that I was looking for, has a steel frame, and the majority of the reviews seemed to stem from poor assembly either at the factory or by the store. The assembly I could correct, so I went to a Target and picked one up. After getting it home, I agree that the assembly was horrible. The handle bars were not on correct, the height of the handlebars was beyond the max limit by a huge amount, and the brakes were suggestions instead of brakes. I fixed the handlebars and spent a good hour fixing the brakes. When I got those working, I put some more air in the tires, and went out on the street for some testing. After about 100 feet, the rear inner tube popped. I found out this was because the steel bead actually separated from the tire itself. 😵. I went back to target and they exchanged the tire and inner tube. To top it off, the inner tube they gave me had a hole in it. Arrg. So I bought a few extras.
After I replaced the tire and tube again, I tested out the Magna Excitor Terrain Bike some more. It seemed like I had found everything that was wrong with the bike, so I took off the rear wheel and put the powered one on. Putting it on proved much more difficult than on the huffy. The rear forks have almost no play side to side, so it is extremely difficult to get the wheel seated correctly. After taking the wheel on and off about 5 times so far, I have it down to where it takes about 30 minutes to get back on. That is way too long, but the price I pay for saving about $300 on the bike.
Once the wheel was on, I attached the rear rack. The down bars were exactly the correct length to attach to the seat post, so no problems there. Cycling the suspension showed no binding. I was expecting to have to fabricate some down bars, but so far, the stock ones have worked fine. The full suspension is much smoother than the Huffy. Time will tell on the durability though.
next kit
I picked up this 1000 watt kit to add some extra power to the 450 watt ebike kit from Currie above. The 450 watt kit is fine, but it is louder, and slower than I expected. The chain drive on the Currie kit needs a lot of adjustment, and it is very hard to change out flats or the like when I get them because the Currie kit mounts on the rear. My bike just doesn't like it really.
By the way, the reason I have that specific bike is because I wanted the dual suspension to transfer less bumps to the motor controller and batteries. Vibration in general is bad for batteries. That necessitated re-engineering the Currie battery holder so it would mount on a non-fixed rear wheel. The bike itself is also very sturdy thick walled steel tube, which should help it last with the extra 70 labs of batteries, motor, and controller stuff on it.
I was originally going to put this kit on with the currie kit. I rewired the switch on the Currie kit so that one direction would put the two 24v batteries in parallel, and the other way in series (either 24 or 48v). that way I could use either motor. After trying this kit, I decided to scratch that idea and use only this 1000w 48v motor with the 2 Currie SLA batteries. I didn't want the extra weight of the motor that I would never use.
The motor is 470 rpm. That sounds low, until you do the math. On a 26" rim, 470 rpm means 38,370 inches per minute. That is 36.3 miles per hour. So up to that speed, you can hit the throttle and get an assist. It was quite weird when going down a long, steep downhill to hit the throttle and feel the motor provide even more speed. This motor is FAST.
I was actually concerned the first time I used it because of how fast I could go. Several of the roads I travel on used to worry me because of the speed differential between me and the rest of traffic. On the Currie kit, I could do roughly 14 or 15 mph. In this, I am easily double that speed. I keep up with traffic on a 35mph speed limit street.
This does use a lot of power though. On the Currie kit, I could get about 10 miles of range using both batteries when they were brand new. On this kit, I get 4.5 miles max range. Part of that will be the wear on the batteries after a year of use, and some will be because of the excessive wind resistance at high speed. I have only been using this kit for a few days, and I haven't tried going the same speed as my old kit to see if the range differs. It is way too much fun to firewall the throttle and keep it there.
The cables are nice and long too. That was something that annoyed me greatly on the Currie kit. This kit also comes with brake levers that have a cutoff switch on them that cuts the motor. The levers are much longer than the ones that came with my bike, which was perfect to span the extra distance on the handlebars that the thumb throttle takes up.
A few 'gotchas' on this kit:
The directions are very badly translated. I used them more as a reference than as instructions. If this is your first electric project, pick a different kit. The wire harness is not marked, and several connectors can be interchanged. When my kit came, most of the connectors were connected already, but needed to be disconnected to be put on the bike. Make SURE to mark them before disconnecting them. In fact, almost nothing is marked. The controller has '48V' marked on it in pencil, but the motor on the wheel had '48v' engraved on it.
The wheel/motor does not have a direction of rotation on it. I put it on backwards the first time. I could have went very fast in reverse, but it was hard to steer, so I flipped the wheel around. The tire is 1.75" wide, which is thinner than the 2.25's that my bike came with.
Also, something I didn't think about was that since this is on the front, if you apply the throttle when the front is unloaded, it will spin the tire. I actually burnt a throw rug in my house when I did this on accident after I assembled the kit on the bike. I did it again later when I started moving in some gravel, and I ended up digging a hole with the front tire.
If I were doing this all again, I would get 2 Currie batteries, the battery rack, and this motor kit. I like the Currie batteries and rack because they keep the weight low and look professional, but this motor and controller is awesome power-wize compared to the Currie kit.
Since I am a geek, and enjoy building my own solutions to problems, I was going to try building a motor powered bike. However, when pricing out parts for a proposed solution, I came to an unfortunately very high price for something that wouldn't have a guaranteed chance of working. While I am all for a challenge, I have enough of those right now. To solve my problem, there are several kits out there that can give the satisfaction of building your own, while still being on the inexpensive side. The kits range from a low of about $300 to well over $2k depending on lots of factors.
I read lots of reviews and did a bunch of research before buying a kit. Since I was looking for more proof of concept than anything else, I decided upon the low end of the spectrum, a $300 kit from Currie. This kit comes with a motor and rim combo, one 10 amp/hr 24v lead-acid battery, controller, and the associated hardware. The kit is designed to be put on a non-suspension 26" mountain bike or a comfort/hybrid (front suspension only) bike. The shipping weight is nearly 50 lbs, so it adds some serious weight to the bike. It also puts out 450 watts, which is 3/5ths of a horsepower, and a published range of 11 miles. A normal human can generate spikes of 1.2hp or sustain about 1/10th of a hp, so 3/5ths is a large gain. This seemed like a kit that wouldn't go any faster than my maximum speed pedaling, and be able to help on those long trips at the expense of extra weight. It seemed like a good tradeoff.
I ordered the kit from Amazon. It arrived looking like it was run over by the UPS truck. The box was in shambles, and it looked like it had been repacked several times on it's journey. But a quick glance inside appeared to show everything in working order. I found out later that wasn't the case.
After I laid out everything on my workbench, I started making an additional parts list. The Currie kit requires you to use the 7 speed gear (freewheel), tube and tire from the existing bike that the kit is going on. Personally, I think this is a big oversight by Currie as a freewheel is only about $10 while the tool to take off a freewheel is $8 plus a chain whip which is $11. The tools are not needed to put the flywheel back on. So the difference to a consumer is actually $-9. A freewheel should have been included instead of requiring one be taken off the donor rim.
I was planning on putting the kit on a full suspension mountain bike, which I knew would require some modifications. I picked up the GMC Topkick mountain bike, but when I received it I found that the description and pics on Amazon is incorrect. the Topkick has front and rear disks, not just front, so the Currie kit will not work. I could have retrofitted rim brakes on the rear, but when pricing it out, it would have cost almost 1/2 of what another bike would cost. Since I had already assembled the Topkick and tossed the shipping box, I decided against returning it, and would keep the Topkick as a regular bike.
That left me without a suspension bike to put the kit on. Since I was aiming for proof of concept, I decided to put the kit on my old Huffy mountain bike that I used in college. That bike had seen more abuse than anything you could think of. I rode it all over the place to get to/from class and around town. This included going down stairs and off ledges that were a few feet tall. The rims were beat to heck and bent, and the frame was very 'tweaked', but it still road decently, though steering was more of a suggestion than anything else.
Since I knew this wasn't going to be the final bike the kit was going to be on, I decided against taking the freewheel, tube and tire off the huffy. I ordered a 7 speed freewheel, chain whip and freewheel socket (the last 2 were 'just in case') from Amazon to put on the Currie kit, and a cheap tire and tube from a trip to Wal-Mart. The freewheel spun on with no problem with no tool (the freewheel tightens when you ride, so it doesn’t have to be tightened with a tool) and the tire and tube were no problem. Fitting the new rear wheel assembly on the huffy was no problem either, even though I went from a 5 speed freewheel (original on the huffy) to a 7 speed freewheel.
When I went to start assembling the kit is when I ran into the first thing that Currie needs to improve. The instructions are very bad, as in they are not complete. They state to 'remove the old freewheel'. Ok, how do I do that? I had no idea what a freewheel was until I downloaded the instruction PDF before purchase and looked up a bunch of the terms online. Then, I had to find instructions on how to remove the freewheel. It was annoying. Same thing with all the bolts and connections. The instructions assume you know exactly what you are doing, and say things like 'bolt the rack to the bike' instead of what I would expect, such as, 'use the 10mm diameter 30mm long screws to attach the bike rack to the mounting points by the rear sprocket/freewheel'. The instructions were ambiguous, and incomplete. If you haven't worked on bikes for a long time, and done your own maintenance, expect the kit to take a while to assemble, or have a shop do it for you.
When I put the rear wheel on the Huffy I ran into the first mechanical problem. The Currie rim was bent. It was still usable, but it was off by a good 1/4 inch at one point. This meant it rubbed on the brakes when the rim passed the brake shoe every revolution. I would have to take it to a bike shop to be straightened after testing. Once the wheel was on, I mounted the battery and controller holder, which takes the shape of a rear rack. This is where I ran into another problem, though this time with the Huffy itself. The rack mount holes in the Huffy were not tapped for bolts. I tapped them for the bolts that came with the Currie kit using a Craftsman tap. There was enough room to do this with the rear wheel still on the bike. Once those bolts were in, I attached the down bars to the rear frame under the seat, and the rack was now completed.
the next step was to attach the throttle. Here I ran into another problem, the throttle was also cracked. It was obvious at this point that I would need some replacement parts from Amazon. I disassembled the throttle controller, and re-soldered on 2 of the 4 LED's that indicated the power level in the battery so I could still test, and fixed 2 broken traces on the cracked PCB. I then mounted the controller to the right hand handlebar. When routing the wire back tot he rear of the bike, I found that the lead wire is shorter than would be expected. The wire loom needs to be at least 6 inches longer. As it is, I had to route the throttle loom in a non-optimal location (the absolute shortest route possible) in order for the loom to have enough length to connect to the controller in the rear rack.
The final step was to connect the power feed from the bottom of the rack to the top where the controller is. This strikes me as a poor design. Why have wires on the outside of the bike, especially 2 wires? Why not use a common ground and 1 wire inside the frame of the rear rack? That will keep the wires from being in the way, reduce cost (copper is expensive) and reduce assembly time.
Now that my bike was assembled, it was time to try it out. Unfortunately, when putting the battery into the rack, I found that the case was cracked. It wasn't leaking or anything, but the case is what held the battery on the bike. I had some reservations about disassembling the case to try to fix it, so some duct tape held it together, just in case. I rode around a little without a battery to make sure that the brakes worked, and I wasn't going to run into a tree or something. Once I was happy with the handling, I put in the battery and rode around without turning on the kit. You could definitely feel the extra weight (the battery is about 17 lbs) but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I would estimate it at about 10% more effort with the battery on the bike).
Finally, I enabled the battery and used light power. I was extremely surprised at the amount of power that the motor put out. It accelerated only slightly slower than I could do manually. It kept up that acceleration to the kits top speed, which was almost exactly the top speed that the Huffy and I could manage when peddling as fast as possible in the highest gear on flat ground. I rode around the neighborhood for about 10 minutes, then headed back to check out connections, screws, and such.
One of the issues I had in this brief ride is that nearly any bump (such as a large crack in the sidewalk, or going down a driveway into the street) would cause the battery to pop out of the rack by about 1/4". This was enough to raise the battery off the contacts in the bottom of the rack. There are 2 locks that hold the batteries in, which I thought were for security. But they are actually required to keep the battery seated in the rack. A quick turn of the key solved that problem. At first, I thought this was an issue with the cracked case, but the replacement battery did it too.
When I was checking the bolts, I found that the 2 bolts holding the rack to the bike down by the freewheel were starting to deform. They were already deformed by about 1/4 their diameter, and were in the process of sheering off. These were obviously crap bolts. They were the only major failure of engineering that could have been VERY bad that I have found so far. A quick trip to the hardware store and some grade 5 stainless bolts solved the problem permanently.
The next day I also contacted Amazon to see if they could send me some non-broken parts. Unfortunately, they could only send me an entire new kit. I pulled the battery, controller and rim out. During this time I also was able to determine why my last kit had such a problem. The box wasn't closed. The box is a clamshell type box, and there was no closing mechanism (tape, glue, staple or other means). This box was not made to be shipped via a carrier, it was meant to go on a shipping pallet. When I sent it back to Amazon, I taped the box closed. Otherwise, they were probably only going to get parts of the kit back, with the rest lying on the floor of a fedex facility somewhere.
For the next week, I kept testing the kit to see what it could do. I rode all over on different surfaces to figure out how the kit acted. From a power standpoint, it could handle pretty much everything I threw at it. It could go up and down hills on dirt, grass or asphalt. There is one hill near my home that has a 50' rise over about 250 horizontal feet that the kit couldn't do without pedaling help, but the kit made that so much easier that doing it manually. As for range, I came up with about 5.4 miles on a nearly level gravel bike path with light pedal assistance from me. After that, the speed drops off to the point where it is faster to walk. The kit will still continue to assist when you pedal up to a total of about 7 miles though. After 7 miles, the kit is just dead weight. 7 miles is about 63% of the advertised range. I would have hoped the advertising would be closer to actual, but a 5 to 7 mile range isn't too bad. That works out to about $50 per mile for range for the kit price.
Now that I had proved out the concept, I wanted to put the kit on a full suspension mountain bike. The Huffy just wasn't going to survive, and I wanted the kit to have a suspension buffer between the road. It proved difficult to find a suspension bike that was 21 speed, durable, strong enough to hold the kit weight and myself while not being insanely expensive. In fact, I couldn't find one a bike that would work on Amazon at all. I went to a few different stores, and finally settled on the best of the worst, a Magna Excitor Terrain Bike from Target.
The Magna Excitor Terrain Bike was about $80 on sale, and the reviews that I could find were absolutely horrible. However, it had the correct dimensions that I was looking for, has a steel frame, and the majority of the reviews seemed to stem from poor assembly either at the factory or by the store. The assembly I could correct, so I went to a Target and picked one up. After getting it home, I agree that the assembly was horrible. The handle bars were not on correct, the height of the handlebars was beyond the max limit by a huge amount, and the brakes were suggestions instead of brakes. I fixed the handlebars and spent a good hour fixing the brakes. When I got those working, I put some more air in the tires, and went out on the street for some testing. After about 100 feet, the rear inner tube popped. I found out this was because the steel bead actually separated from the tire itself. 😵. I went back to target and they exchanged the tire and inner tube. To top it off, the inner tube they gave me had a hole in it. Arrg. So I bought a few extras.
After I replaced the tire and tube again, I tested out the Magna Excitor Terrain Bike some more. It seemed like I had found everything that was wrong with the bike, so I took off the rear wheel and put the powered one on. Putting it on proved much more difficult than on the huffy. The rear forks have almost no play side to side, so it is extremely difficult to get the wheel seated correctly. After taking the wheel on and off about 5 times so far, I have it down to where it takes about 30 minutes to get back on. That is way too long, but the price I pay for saving about $300 on the bike.
Once the wheel was on, I attached the rear rack. The down bars were exactly the correct length to attach to the seat post, so no problems there. Cycling the suspension showed no binding. I was expecting to have to fabricate some down bars, but so far, the stock ones have worked fine. The full suspension is much smoother than the Huffy. Time will tell on the durability though.
next kit
I picked up this 1000 watt kit to add some extra power to the 450 watt ebike kit from Currie above. The 450 watt kit is fine, but it is louder, and slower than I expected. The chain drive on the Currie kit needs a lot of adjustment, and it is very hard to change out flats or the like when I get them because the Currie kit mounts on the rear. My bike just doesn't like it really.
By the way, the reason I have that specific bike is because I wanted the dual suspension to transfer less bumps to the motor controller and batteries. Vibration in general is bad for batteries. That necessitated re-engineering the Currie battery holder so it would mount on a non-fixed rear wheel. The bike itself is also very sturdy thick walled steel tube, which should help it last with the extra 70 labs of batteries, motor, and controller stuff on it.
I was originally going to put this kit on with the currie kit. I rewired the switch on the Currie kit so that one direction would put the two 24v batteries in parallel, and the other way in series (either 24 or 48v). that way I could use either motor. After trying this kit, I decided to scratch that idea and use only this 1000w 48v motor with the 2 Currie SLA batteries. I didn't want the extra weight of the motor that I would never use.
The motor is 470 rpm. That sounds low, until you do the math. On a 26" rim, 470 rpm means 38,370 inches per minute. That is 36.3 miles per hour. So up to that speed, you can hit the throttle and get an assist. It was quite weird when going down a long, steep downhill to hit the throttle and feel the motor provide even more speed. This motor is FAST.
I was actually concerned the first time I used it because of how fast I could go. Several of the roads I travel on used to worry me because of the speed differential between me and the rest of traffic. On the Currie kit, I could do roughly 14 or 15 mph. In this, I am easily double that speed. I keep up with traffic on a 35mph speed limit street.
This does use a lot of power though. On the Currie kit, I could get about 10 miles of range using both batteries when they were brand new. On this kit, I get 4.5 miles max range. Part of that will be the wear on the batteries after a year of use, and some will be because of the excessive wind resistance at high speed. I have only been using this kit for a few days, and I haven't tried going the same speed as my old kit to see if the range differs. It is way too much fun to firewall the throttle and keep it there.
The cables are nice and long too. That was something that annoyed me greatly on the Currie kit. This kit also comes with brake levers that have a cutoff switch on them that cuts the motor. The levers are much longer than the ones that came with my bike, which was perfect to span the extra distance on the handlebars that the thumb throttle takes up.
A few 'gotchas' on this kit:
The directions are very badly translated. I used them more as a reference than as instructions. If this is your first electric project, pick a different kit. The wire harness is not marked, and several connectors can be interchanged. When my kit came, most of the connectors were connected already, but needed to be disconnected to be put on the bike. Make SURE to mark them before disconnecting them. In fact, almost nothing is marked. The controller has '48V' marked on it in pencil, but the motor on the wheel had '48v' engraved on it.
The wheel/motor does not have a direction of rotation on it. I put it on backwards the first time. I could have went very fast in reverse, but it was hard to steer, so I flipped the wheel around. The tire is 1.75" wide, which is thinner than the 2.25's that my bike came with.
Also, something I didn't think about was that since this is on the front, if you apply the throttle when the front is unloaded, it will spin the tire. I actually burnt a throw rug in my house when I did this on accident after I assembled the kit on the bike. I did it again later when I started moving in some gravel, and I ended up digging a hole with the front tire.
If I were doing this all again, I would get 2 Currie batteries, the battery rack, and this motor kit. I like the Currie batteries and rack because they keep the weight low and look professional, but this motor and controller is awesome power-wize compared to the Currie kit.
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