It's a week later than I wanted to be finished with assembly and taken my first ride, but I got her done today and went for my ride!
First of all, this bike is fast! It feels like it has about twice the torque of the BBSHD, and I'm guessing about an extra 5mph over the BBSHD! Yeah, that's a gas to ride! 2wd is the way to go for 1/2 the price of a BBSHD! Even with these cheap $200 motors!
Sorry about the blurry photo. I was going to wait until tomorrow to take photo's, but decided to rush out my front to take a few tonight. I'm still excited about the first ride, and knew I'd want to post about it tonight.
It's not done yet. I started the build with a bike I parted together with a different set of forks. As it turns out, the axle is that much bigger than a regular bike that my break pads fall short of reaching the rim strip. I'll need to swap in the correct forks with factory break mount. So no front break for the moment! The rear breaks I swapped onto the bike don't work very well either, but I had to give them a try since I had them on the shelf. If I used a complete bike rather than one parted together with spare parts, the break issues wouldn't of happened. A bike this fast needs both breaks that work better than just good enough!
That mirror has to go! Makes the bars and all the effort I put into keeping them clean looking worthless! The mirror just sticks out all over the place. I'll swap it out with the simpler and cheaper one I was using on my BBSHD bike.
In the above photo you can see how well the EM3ev bag works in this bike frame. Not very well. I'll be making hard case battery boxes for these bikes. You can also see in the above photo how I decided to mount the larger rear motor controller to the front of the seat tube. This looks better and eliminates any potential disasters of the rear tire destroying it in case of a blow out if I decided to mount it behind the seat post with only 3/8" clearance. It did shorten the seat post a bit by placing it up as high as I did. The seat post would of been an issue had I decided to keep it mounted to the rear anyway. I hid all the wires in the cheap controller bag I got with the front 1000w motor. It works for now under the battery bag.
This winter I'll be adding a hard case battery box to clean things up. The front motor controller will be mounted to the underside of the box just above the BB. The box will get a hard wired charging plug, and a two speed switch. Street legal, and what I'm doing now speeds.
This display is completely worthless! Since it's made for a 48V battery, it will show full charge until after I want to stop and charge my 52V battery for long life! It needs to show battery Volts! I was just at Luna the other day and I should of picked another one up, but for now I'll just swap in the unit I got with my 3Kw Cyclone motor with key switch. The remote key switch will be mounted to the new battery box. Rather than a On and Off switch, I may wire it as a two speed switch. Off would be full power, and On would be street legal 750w. I just have to figure out what wires I really needed to hook up today to make the bike work. I think I may not of had to hook up three of them. After the white wire wasn't enough, I hooked up the red and black. When that didn't work, I hooked up the yellow and brown and it worked. I think I can leave out the red and black wires so I can hook up the Luna Volt display with thumb throttle. Yeah, I don't like the full throttle these kits came with any more than the displays. It needs a thumb throttle!
So I still have a bunch of work to do. Tomorrow I'll change out the forks and take care of the break issues. After that, I'll be riding it to work all next week to see how she does. Then next weekend I'll be changing out the display, and tuning the wheels. For the first couple of weeks, at least, I'll be truing and tightening both wheels. I don't trust these 12ga spokes. When I first looked at them I was impressed by how much better they were than the photo's in the sales adds on Amazon/Ebay. When I took a closer look, I noticed some bend in them at the rim. Not a good thing.
Overall, I got what I payed for. In the future I may just get the bare motors from Nexus. The wires are so thin from these motors that I don't dare think about overvolting them for more top end speed. The bike has plenty of torque! If I was any lighter and not leaning forward, I would be getting some unexpected wheelies out of it. The 2wd feels more stable than a rear wheel only bike. More like a little motorcycle.
At my first light in traffic, I had a guy in a work truck next to me. I took off and got out in front of everyone (yeah TORQUE), and I could hear the guy floor it to get up speed to pass me. All I could think of was how much that gallon of gas cost him to get out in front of a guy on a bicycle! Hahahahaha!
So the advantages of a 2wd bike vs 1wd. You can get motors with high speed winding's to keep it a fast bike, and get double the torque of a bike using high torque winding's. Motors share in the work, so you don't need to get a mega big ass motor that does everything and watch your battery volts drop like crazy when you take off full throttle and decide to keep it at full throttle! Even these cheap motors just blow away the overpriced BBSHD! Period.
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