byocycle or woosh

[chris1972]

Hi I'm thinking of getting a folding e-bike don't want to spend loads like the look of the byocycle city speed which is the same as the byocycle chameleon just £535 instead of £799 but ive read in a review that the motor is a bit noisy also like the look of the woosh zephyr but no reviews for this bike. Also are this style of e-bike nice for riding around on throtle only, on the woosh manual it recommends using the throttle on full power sparingly not all the time which kind of defeats the point of getting a e-bike for me not sure if this is to make the battery go further or to stop the motor from burning out or if this is the same for all e-bikes. If anyone has any thoughts on these bikes or any others in this price range £500 would be grateful cheers.

 

[Clockwise]

They aren't mopeds or motorbikes. Most of the folding bikes come with smaller batteries to keep the weight down so don't have great range. I have been looking at getting a full size bike so reading plenty and decided to convert a bike as the cheaper bikes have ok while parts but crappy bike parts.

It depends on your use really, how many miles, how fast, how much will you pedel, how much you weigh, luggage, etc.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

You need to go up to 500w if you want to ride around without pedalling, but as long as you pedal, you can use full throttle as much as you want. What you mustn't do is use full throttle for a long time with the motor labouring up a hill, which might cause something to over-heat. Obviously, if you use full-throttle a lot, you won't go so far. Once you get a bike, you'll find that you'll be using the pedal sensor for power more than the throttle because it's much more convenient, so choose a bike that has a panel that lets you adjust the level of assistance. Both those bikes have one. The Woosh Zephyr CD can climb much steeper hills with less effort.

 

[Kudoscycles]

Chris...I rode our Kudos Secret bike for miles around mountainous islands without any thought that the battery was going to give up....but you must appreciate these are only 20" wheeled bikes,for most people 30/35 miles is probably a long enough ride.
The tendency is not to use the throttle much but it is important to get used to the PAS controller,you can waste power by going round on max PAS when not needed.
Trust me....after 10 miles of usage you soon become an expert.
I found these small wheeled bikes to be stronger hillclimbers than their appearance suggests,only twice on very steep climbs did I get out of the saddle.
KudosDave

 

[chris1972]

Hi I'm now wandering about an 8 fun convertion kit which I could put on my specialized hybrid not sure how hard these are but a front wheel motor one should be straight forward enough.

 

[jackhandy]

Not difficult at all; I put one on a Carrera Kraken a year ago & it's still going well.

The tricky bits:
The motor is slightly bulbous & fouls some forks & you'll probably need to fit a bigger disc rotor.
The pedelec sensor can be fiddly to get positioned proper.

The bottle battery on mine has panasonic cells & suffers from voltage sag, but does the job as long as you don't intend trying to get more power from your bike - What you see is what you get with these.

All in all, a good first kit if you're on a budget.

Check out the various 8fun build threads.

 

[Deleted member 4366]

That's right. Have a look at your forks from the front. Are the drop-outs in line with the inner edges of the forks. If so, you'll have no problem, but if the drop-outs are central to the fork tube, the motor probably won't fit. If that's so, you can always upgrade your forks. you can get pretty good ones on Ebay for about £50 or less.

Here you can see the problem where the drop-outs were slightly outboard of the inboard edge on Rockshox Dart 3 forks. It only just touched, so was fixed with an extra washer: