Posts Tagged ‘ electric bicycle ’

Update to eBike battery box

My father welded up an aluminum battery box for my eBike conversion.  See more pics of the  install on Flickr.

Above you see the three 12v battery’s squeezed into the frame before the cover-plate was bolted on.

See notes on the initial build on my previous post.

2010
08/11
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Electric Bicycle Conversion, phase 2…

IMG_7459Continuing from  my previous post, I’ve (with the help of my visiting father) got the majority of everything assembled on my eBike conversion.  Again, the motor was purchased from AmpedBikes.com,  the SLA batteries from Gruber Power Services, and all other bags and whatnot from my local REI.

You can see more pics on Flickr here.

Took a bit longer than the “one hour” the web site described, but we got it done in the end.  Taking it out for it’s first run, it’s a truly eerie feeling hitting the thumb-throttle, and having the bike pull away with you on it.  A few things about its performance:

  • It won’t win any speed awards 😛  But I have no doubt you can get up to 20-mph with little effort on your own.
  • It will take you up hills without any peddling, but it is slow.  However, peddling with almost no effort will shoot you right up the hill.
  • Those three batteries are quite heavy.  The bike, with the motor, is now much heavier than stock.  You could ride it on the level if you had to unassisted, but I wouldn’t want to go up any hills.  It is top heavy… going to look at methods for moving the batteries down off the rear-rack, into the middle of the lower frame.

Things left to do:

  • Adjust front brakes:  Need to be made stronger.
  • Clean\replace rear brakes.  With that much weight, are almost useless.
  • Maye think about rear disk-brakes.
  • Other standard maintenance.

The only main goof up was with the charging system:  The instructions give you no info on how to wire in the wires for the battery charger that are provided.  I emailed AmpedBikes, and they didn’t give much of an answer other than “people disconnect the battery from the controller and plug it into the charger”.  So we went out, got a quick-disconnect that would mate with the battery line, and wired that into the controller.  However, the positive and negative on the quick disconnect were opposite from what was on the battery lines, and we didn’t realize it until a day later.  But after swapping the connections, the charger is now happily running.  Hopefully I can ride it more tomorrow!

I’ll report more after I’ve ridden it around for a while :)

2009
08/25
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Electric Bicycle Conversion, phase 1

I’ve been planning for a long time to convert my bicycle to electric power, and I’ve finally cracked.  After looking at several online sellers, I settled on ‘AmpedBikes.com‘ for their front wheel kit.  And since this is the first time doing it, I figured I’d settle on some sealed lead-acid batteries rather than fancier (lighter, but much more expensive) ones, so I picked up three 12v-10ah bricks from Gruber Power Services.

My current ride is a 14 year old Scott Magnum MK 1.0 that has served me faithfully over the years.  Only problem was, it had an aluminum front fork with suspension.  According to AmpedBikes, the electric motors can snap aluminum forks because of the high torque.  So recently my son and I went out and picked up a new shiny, chromed out steel front fork for it (plus new brakes), and did the install.

Now, all we have to do is wait for the components to show up.  Looking forward to commuting to work on my new ride!

2009
08/09
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