Your Best Options for Building an Electric Bike (1.2024)
I have done a video previously on the various uh ways that you can easily Electrify a bicycle that you have especially if you have a brumpton but all of the other bikes that I recommend on this channel can be electrified you can Electrify a birdie a molten even a
Taxi even a cargo bike so what I would like to do in the this video is to take a deeper look as to the kind of approaches you can take in the variety of kits and options you have now on the market as always I am providing links
Below so if you are interested in any of the products mentioned in this video all you need to do is scroll down and click now the first uh most obvious uh kit to do is is to get a front wheeel a powered front wheeel kit
And I have said this before I’ll say it again I think for most people who don’t want to get into this very deeply people who don’t want to tune or overclock uh the bike they are just looking for a way to Electrify and to empower an existing mechanical bike or a
Mechanical bike they are planning to buy in a way that’s easily reversible with easy installation halfway decent support from the company I don’t think there is a better way that you can go than to get a switch kit the switch has been tried on the brumpton many people have
Installed it it can be installed on the Molton as well not on the birdie the birdie has a unique front suspension design that will simply not tolerate a powered wheel it would just rip apart your front suspension but the birdes front is a very unique design I would
Say it is the most interesting most sophisticated and Powerful front suspension there is for a two-wheeler of any kind on the market and you can definitely Electrify the bike but not with the switch kit so what you get with the switch is easy installation really
Relatively small size of the Hub a a big heavy massive Hub even if it fits a Brompton or whatever you’re writing is not as good for example the one I have which is an 8B crystalite uh Hub it’s an excellent Hub it I I swear by it it can go so fast
It can regenerate so much energy on on downhills but you know there’s not much space left between the rim and the Hub so it’s really hard to get in and to inflate the tire in fact I had to buy elbow extensions for the for the valves
At least for the front uh so the switch is your first option you have a small manageable powered Hub you have a controller that’s merged pretty much with the battery and the computer the battery is kind of separate it pops on it there’s a snap you snap it on Snap It
Off and you can buy many batteries it’s only 36 volt but I think that’s enough especially if you have just like a 25lb folding bike a 250 wat Hub at 36 volt is not Earth shaking but it’s going to help you tremendously in taking uphills accelerating and so on and the top speed
Is 20 M an hour which is so much better than what the rton electric offers it’s a 30% upgrade from that imagine that if you want something more intense for the front wheel something that allows you to overclock to have regenerative braking to have an open computer that allows you to get inside
And program the controller to do all kinds of amazing things such as measuring the temperature of the motor and automatically switch it switch it off in case the motor is beginning to overheat or to set the extent to which you want regenerative braking to to function all of these things they can
Only be done with a much more sophisticated setup and that’s why I recommended the green kit green has readymade kits for the brumpton if you have a molten they can certainly work with you you can give them the wheel size or even send in the front wheel and they will send you back
Uh the rebuilt wheel with the with the Hub motor in it now for the birdie I would if you want to Electrify the wheel I would also recommend that that you take out the rear wheel and you send it over to grin and you negotiate with them and have them
Install the Kit that you want you can have as much power as you want but just keep in mind the size of that Hub motor the bigger it gets the harder it’s going to be to fit into the kit but green is going to advise you so I don’t think
There’s a problem there if they need to replace the rim with something stronger it’s still going to be the same size so the safest way is to actually send the wheel that you have in your bike over and have them set this up now these are are typical home installations front
Wheel that’s the easiest you can easily reverse it if you need to travel with the bike or whatever the rear wheel is not so easy partly because if you want to reverse it first of all you’re probably going to have a cassette on it some kind of cogs so if
You have a mechanical wheel in storage that’s also going to have to have the cassette and everything on it I mean can it’s doable certainly but it’s not as easy as working on the front front is very easy rear not so much so the second
Solution that I want to talk about is a Center Drive most of the center drives are really ugly as powerful as they are the benefit of them is that first of all they have enormous torque the difference between a hub drive and a Center Drive is the difference between trying to use
A scissor by pressing it together close to the screw in the center as opposed to pressing it together using the end where you supposed to use the where you’re supposed to handle a scissor so the torque you get by not powering the hubs the wheels but by powering the crank
Indirectly is is far superior to what you can do with with a a a center um a wheel hub design and this is typically good for people who need to take nasty uphills if you live in San Francisco you do a lot of offroading you ride a
Mountain bike those are the kind of people that the Center Drive kits have been uh invented for and there is an Italian kit it’s it’s called bike ebike a weird Kit that is not bad looking I mean most of these Center Drive kits are really not good-looking
But at least this is one that that looks pretty good in addition there are some other options that you have there is a german-made center kit which also has been fitted to the Bramton it’s called pendix it’s not very powerful but 250 WTS in the at the center is probably as
Good as a 350 or even 400 at the wheel would be it’s an elegant kit for a Center Drive it looks pretty good unfortunately the speed is limited to only 15 15 an hour but I mean that’s the same thing you would be getting with the Standard bromton
Electric and everything is custom made custom made batteries they they give you a sense of how much power you have in them it’s a neat looking kit but because everything is made by the company everything is custom you can’t really tune it or get into it do anything with
It and the price is high plus I think for the most part you’ll have to buy everything from Germany the cheapest of these kits starts at around $1,700 and it goes well above 2,000 so it’s not a cheap way to Electrify a bike and the battery even
Though it’s kind of stylish the way they stick it onto the tube of the average folding bike is kind of disturbing it’s not very aesthetic in fact the kit I think in general these Center Drive kits pretty much ruin the estatic of of most bikes especially a smaller bicycle such
As the brumpton or the bird so it’s up to you these are great kits if you need to climb need to do off-roading so it’s good for that not my first choice definitely not um so if you don’t want to do the Center Drive don’t want to do the front
Wheel or the rear wheel the last option you have is some kind of a friction drive friction drive is available there are a zillion kits to do this in general touching the touching the um the tire directly with some kind of a friction application is a really dirty
Application because the tire is going to be full of mud if you go into any kind of a dirt or even sand the friction drive is going to just spray it all over you it’s also not a very secure connection it easily slips it wear it causes a wear on a tire so
These kits are not the best choice I think they are actually pretty poor choice for a bicycle but they can be a good choice for a scooter a number of people have done installations of these kits on the zutter and the zutter has an option with the wooden deck and the
Wooden deck is really easy to drill so you can easily install a kit like that and I think it’s it’s great to have a zooter that has some electric power even if you you are only good for 10 miles 10 miles is is a lot of distance and most
People don’t do that much of a distance on a tiny scooter like that so it’s great for those kinds of applications for bicycles I would not recommend them and then finally I should review some weird and unus usual kits there are kits there there was something a German
Kit that was sold a while ago and there were some copycats as well this German kit was supposed to hide the fact that you had an electric conversion by inserting both the batteries and the motor into the tube of an average full size bike so this is not really a kit
For um a Bramton or or or a birdie it’s it’s really it was really a kit for full-sized bicycles and there were some custommade batteries that just fit into the tube the bottom bracket also had to be replaced this kind of a kit is totally hidden there’s no way to tell that there
Is a kit on the bike and it’s very lightweight typically the in Tire setup is less than 4 lounds but because you have to replace the bottom bracket and the batteries are custom size custom made the price of this setup was close to $3,000 for the cheapest and
Um I don’t know if any of these kits are still on the market because these came around 1520 years ago when the law was not so kind to electric bikes and a lot of people tried to hide them there was also a possibility of using them for races at their tour the
Front and other races and in fact some of the competitors bikes had been x-rayed by the organizers on suspicion that they had something like this installed so this is just a fun tidbit that I wanted to add on you’re probably not going to get a $3,000 kit like this
Even if you can get it used or whatever anywhere I think I think most of these companies are by now gone so your options are really front wheel rear wheel center or in some cases even a friction drive and that’s all you can do I not
Aware of much else that you could do as far as getting uh prefab bicycles most of them are gravitating toward the Center Drive there are various reasons for this one reason is that if you have a Center Drive even though you cannot undo it you cannot reverse it easily it’s very easy
To to fix a flat to remove the front rear wheel to work on the wheels without having to interact with the drivetrain and there’s really no reason to touch the Center Drive very much most people use the same uh chain wheel for years and decades the bottom bracket also is
Not frequently replaced so it’s a pretty reliable and solid way to Electrify a bicycle the downside of it is that there’s absolutely no brake regeneration possible because for that you would have to be directly in the wheel this is it for the current video I hope I help you
Get going with this in case you want to to build a bike of your own or want to Electrify a bike that you already have keep in mind I bought my bike in 2017 and I spent at least a year researching everything and I bought the
Bike and the kit roughly at the same time so I had the planning and everything worked out before I purchased any hardware and I recommend that you do that you should take your time and look around on the market and make sure you have the details correctly before you get to
Work this is it uh for now and I’ll be back a few days from now with the next video
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More Here: http://s2w-shop.com
Featured in Video:
https://pendix.com/products/edrive-for-folding-bikes
https://www.zehus.it/product-categories/all-in-one
https://www.bikeradar.com/reviews/bikes/electric-bikes/gruber-assist-kit-review
https://www.lightest.bike/
https://www.bikeebike.com/
https://www.swytchbike.com/folding-ebike-conversion-kit/
https://ebikes.ca/
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#biking #bromptonbike #birdybike #moultonbike #hummingbirdbike #titaniumbike #electricbike #grinkit #ebikes.ca #swytchbike #pendix #ebikekit #electricbikekit
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Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Swytch
1:52 Birdy
2:33 Crystalite
4:10 Grin Kit
7:08 Center Drive
10:26 Friction Drive
10:26 Hidden Kit
