Cyclotricity hub motor rear wheel, something of a saga

Paul Wrighton

Pedelecer
Aug 6, 2018
76
23
64
After months of suffering broken spokes from time to time and replacing with unsatisfactory ones obtained from my LBS I decided it was time to do the job properly and replace all dodgey spokes along with brass nipples and retension the wheel, hopefully putting an end to spokes going ping!

One of the things that had held me up was waiting for Cyclotricity to get back to me about spare spokes. They never did reply to any of my contacts, so I can only guess they do not offer spoked for their wheels? There was the option to return the wheel for replacement, but having felt the weight I did not fancy bearing the cost of shipments there and back!

So I bit the bullet and tracked down the hollandbikeshop, who claim to supply a great range of spokes. They were true to that claim and the ones you'll need for a Cyclotricity rear hub motor wheel are;
577644 Sapim Spoke 13 x 194mm J-Bend Inox - Silver (10) costing € 5,75
Along with that my LBS were kind enough to look out some size 13 brass nipples, probably overkill, but I wanted to make the wheel as bulletproof as possible. I wanted to share that info for any other cyclotricity owners in search of spokes.

It's early days, but I am hopeful this wheel will last and last now.

Unfortunately that's not the end of issues with my kit. At the same time I have experienced loss of power in wet weather ( so tried to deploy insulation tape wherever leaks might be) and more worryingly the console will sometimes fail to display any speed whatsoever, which can lead to it timing out and turning off after five minutes. More often it picks up the speed after a few minutes of inactivity. But even then I know it is not showing a true measure of my speed, more like roughly half of it. I didn't change anything knowingly, so this is a mystery.

Apart from messing up the range (oh yes and the battery power left display seems messed up too, showing zero battery prematurely) the basic throttle on for thrust on the bike, the basic drive which is how I use this bike, continues to work.

But I wonder what could be wrong? I know there are a set of parameters within the console accessed by a double reset and maybe I should check those, along with wheel size of course, but they would all be unchanged and I'm suspecting malfunction.

I'm not going to bother trying to contact Cyclotricity, since they have never returned a call or email from me to date (which was a surprise since I've read only good things about them).

Anyway, that's it, end of saga!