Today's little jaunt. 80 psi tyres which is probably too much. Mixed country roads, bridlepaths, footpaths, canal towpaths. Almost entirely low mode and pedelec, only switching to throttle for the most nadgery bits. 3 stupidly steep off road hills that were properly sketchy; I had the front wheel bouncing off the ruts and the back wheel intermittently spinning but the bike just powered its way up. I squeezed 30 miles out of the battery although for the last 3 or so it would cut out under any serious load, but it did actually help me up the very last hill to the home garage. Overall average speed while moving, 10.5mph
Its a beast that dominated anything thrown at it. On the flat on real roads I had no problem peddling at 14-15mph but the best thing about the trip was that Low mode 10.5mph max was also a minimum. Normal road gradients didn't phase it at all, whereas on the plain old hybrid I'd be in the middle or small chainset and the largest rear and struggling.
Off road, there's so little weight on the front and with the high pressures the front was skipping all over the place, but manageable at sub 10mph speeds. I think lower pressures would help a lot but so would moving the battery into the frame triangle. The front suspension does get used but it doesn't feel like it, I think again because there's so little weight on the front.
I nearly gave up at one kissing gate that wasn't big enough to use the usual technique of putting the bike on the back wheel and walking it through. I surprised myself by doing a superman impression holding the whole 25Kg above my head! The weight is the one big downside. Lifting the bike over gates and styles is not really on.
The next test will be to do the same kind of trip but on medium mode to see what the difference is in mileage. I did something like that but not scientific on the first ride and got 22miles range.
A quick summary of tweaks. This shouldn't be read as criticism as every bike I've ever had needed the same kind of work.
- Wheels trued. They were out of line and out of round.
- Front wheel bearings freed off. They were too tight.
- Pedals thrown away and replaced with ones that had real bearings.
- Strapless toe clips added
- Rack lowered as far as it will go and as far forwards as it will go. An extra hole drilled in the adjustment straps to go 1cm lower and the front adjustment straps inverted and swapped side for side.
- Locknuts fitted to the battery support plate bolts. I'd already lost one.
- Bottom bracket bearing retaining nuts tightened down. They were loose.
- I lost 4 disk retaining bolts. Replaced, torqued and loctited.
- The standard grips are a bit hard. Replaced wiith some old M/C grips I had lying around.
- 40v is too much for the 36V rear bulb. Replaced with a tiny bit of veroboard with 6 LEDs I had lying around and a 1K 1/2W resistor from Maplin. That got a bit hot so I upped it to 2K with no obvious change in brightness. It really should come with LEDs as standard. Bulbs are archaic! The front 6 LEDs are wired in series with a fat 1k resistor.
- Opened the controller box, tidied the wiring and made use of the double sided tape already on the controller itself to stick it down to the box base. Somebody had never removed the backing tape!
- Slime added to the tyres and pumped to 80psi. As above, I'll reduce this to 70 psi tomorrow.
- Shortened the front brake cable and the rear derailleur cable so they're neater.
- Swapped the mudguard stays front for back so the front mudguard is better supported. Shortened the rear mudguard so I can stand the bike vertically on it's rear wheel without dragging the mudguard. See kissing gates above.
- Swapped the centre stand for a side stand. Just slightly more secure. Less banging and rattles over rough ground. Marginally lighter, as if that mattered.
One warranty claim I should mention. There was a loose connection that appeared early inside the battery. Probably (according to Alien) the keylock switch or its connectors. The symptoms were a drop from 40v to 24v (or 0v) which killed the bike after 30 seconds of riding or so. Switch off, wait 3 minutes, fiddle with the switch and it would start again only to fail again 30 secs of riding later. Alien replaced the battery with no questions asked. This one appears ok, so far. They said they would fix my one, but the replacement has a different case, so maybe not. It sounded like this was not the first and there may have been a bad batch of keylocks. Like all warranty claims, they're annoying when they happen in the first week. But that's better than 1 week after the warranty period expires!