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| Hacktastic e-bike - 2018/03/05 | Viewed 140 times this month, last update: 2018/04/30
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| For years, decades actually, my commute to work has been in the 30+ minute range. I've mostly driven My Truck, but I also leased an electric Fiat 500e for a couple of years. The Fiat was fun to drive, and the carpool lane access is priceless, but early next year, my commute will shrink to just 3 miles, thanks to my employer moving to new offices. With a commute that short, radically Californian options become viable, but I need to nerd it up a bit. How about hacking a cheap motor kit into my high-school bike?
Update: 2018-04-30: Integrated controller box
After riding the bike for a couple of months, I found that I would prefer to reduce in-frame space usage by "integrating" the controller box with the battery (really just shaping the box to look similar to the battery, and sticking the two together), and cleaning up the whole look with a fresh paint job. The first generation looked like this:
And the new controller box (which would only fit my bike and controller, otherwise I'd publish the file) looks like this:
The bill of materials is quite short:
1. The cheapest front/rear hub motor kit I could find on Amazon that had a thumb-throttle and decent reviews.
2. The biggest battery I could wedge into my bike frame, though the fly-by night vendor might make me think twice if I did it again, and use a more reasonably sized one.
I 3D printed a case for the controller, which is just to clean it up visually, keep it in place within the frame, and provide a place to stuff the wire hairball.
The first test setup I tried used the 40-volt battery from my Ryobi leaf-blower, and that worked surprisingly well! Plenty of power, and even at just 104 watt-hours, it seemed to have plenty of range, taking me to my local hardware store and back multiple times.
Of course, if 103 amp-hours is good, why not add 20 pounds to the bike, spend a bunch more money, and wedge 500 watt-hours in there?! The 36-volt, 15 amp-hour battery below is purpose made for e-bikes, is weather sealed, has a key to prevent unauthorized removal, and comes with a nice mounting bracket. The bracket proved to be the biggest problem, as it's intended to slide entirely off the bracket, but there's not enough room for that within the frame. So what I did was to cut notches into the bracket and groove so that the battery only has to move 20mm in either direction from the locked position, then it will lift out.
I have been using the thumb-throttle exclusively so far, as I like the separation of function, as opposed to pedal-assist. However the kit did come with a pedal-assist sensor, so I'm sure I'll try it someday.
I wanted to keep everything within the frame, and forward-mounted to keep the center of gravity low, and provide weight on the front wheel for traction. Most e-bike kits mount the battery on a rack over the rear wheel. I tried that and it worked, but I like keeping the battery lower and forward.
I was originally thinking of going with a mid-motor kit, which I think looks better, and also moves the center-of-gravity even lower. However, a hub-motor provides failure resilience to chain brakes, or derailleur lock-ups, as well as being much less expensive. I chose front-wheel installation rather than rear-wheel, mostly for ease of installation and front-back weight balance.
So far, it's working out great. It's actually faster for me to run to my local supermarket or hardware store on the bike than to drive, and with the motor, there's no sweaty huffing and puffing. It is rated at 500 watts, which is a bit less than 1 horsepower, but in human terms, it seems to have about as much starting torque as me standing on the pedals, and on a flat will get me moving at about 20 mph. We'll see if I prefer biking to driving for the new commute, in the long-term, but it looks quite promising.
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