Photo Essay: BUILDING AN ELECTRIC BICYCLE WITH THE 8FUN/BAFANG KIT

[chain]

At the request of several members of another forum I've described the electrification of my bicycle with an 8FUN kit in six photo essays. So as not to overload boards with photographs, I've placed the articles on the server of my publisher, CoolMain Press, where I have several hobby pages, including a bunch for my bikes. My general bicycling page is at André's Bicycles & Bicycling Index and the electrification articles start at Building an electric bike 1: ELECTRIC MOTOR CHOICES FOR PEDELECS by Andre Jute

BUILDING AN ELECTRIC BICYCLE AKA PEDELEC
by Andre Jute

1: ELECTRIC MOTOR CHOICES FOR A PEDELEC
2: CHOOSING YOUR KIT, AND ITS SUPPLIER
3: HOW I BUILT MY ELECTRIC BIKE IN A COUPLE OF HOURS
4: FITTING THE BATTERY AND CONTROLS
5: CAR STRENGTH LAMPS FOR 36V ELECTRIC BICYCLES
6: SETTING UP CAR STRENGTH LIGHTS ON AN ELECTRIC BIKE

Enjoy.

Andre Jute
Hills? What hills?

PS I have no connection with the vendors of the 8FUN. I paid the full retail price.

 

[Hugh]

Really helpful Andre - thanks very much for posting.

Can this be made a sticky somewhere?

 

[Marmotte]

Brilliant!!

I've only recently bought my first electric bike and I'm just getting to grips with what it can do for me and what I need to do for maintenance. I would really love to build my own bike, somewhere in the future, this guide is a big help for increasing my own knowledge.

 

[bazwaldo]

Really nice post Andre and I enjoyed your website immensely.
Your writing is terrific and very interesting and enthusing, the result of which is I want to buy a Utopia Kranich right away!?!
What a fantastic bike.
My chinese Bearprint Ebike is also British Racing Green colour and I love it despite a few technical problems in the 19 months I have owned it.
Today on my day off I rode it across the Somerset levels to visit my old and Parkinson's affected Father in his Care Home. He was reasonably well in his 82nd year and I hope was enjoying the glorious summer sunshine.
Nearly 30 miles of joyful ebiking in today's wonderful summer weather, I saw a Deer, a pair of Pheasants, a Buzzard, various beautiful small birds all surrounded by lush green fields full of bright yellow buttercups all turning towards the bright sunshine.
There was a lovely cooling breeze through the day and I thought it proved how wonderful this world we live in is even with the horrors inflicted upon it by the "Breiviks" and other crazy happenings both manmade and caused by nature.
The part of Ireland you have chosen also seems beautiful and a terrific place to live.
Thanks for being a new part of this great forum.

Barry.

 

[chain]

Brilliant!!

I've only recently bought my first electric bike and I'm just getting to grips with what it can do for me and what I need to do for maintenance. I would really love to build my own bike, somewhere in the future, this guide is a big help for increasing my own knowledge.

Ha. I go the other way. My entire Kranich, and all its components, are chosen from the ground up to minimize maintenance. The Rohloff hub gearbox, for instance, is only serviced once a year by changing it's oil (which can be a clean process if you take care -- I did it in the front hall of our town house without landing in the divorce courts!), and I'm conducting an experiment at the moment with running the chain inside a Hebie Chainglider with the factory lubrication as its only lube, no lube added, so that I might end up, if my experiment succeeds, with a zero-maintenance chain as well.

I chose the electric motor and its bits on the same principle: it must either last very long (as everything on my Kranich does) or must be a straightforward and inexpensive swap, like a new motor already built into a wheel being bolted in and plugged in. A year in I don't yet know how realistic that is, but the battery, which is the most expensive part, has stood up well, and the wheel itself seems of such a good quality, and the motor has survived a certain amount of abuse (I live up and am surrounded by steep hills), so that I'm starting to think in terms of several years before any major part needs to be replaced. My annual mileage is low, though, only about 2250km on average, so count that into any comparison with your own circumstances and use.

Good luck with your bike.

Andre Jute

 

[chain]

Brilliant!!

I've only recently bought my first electric bike and I'm just getting to grips with what it can do for me and what I need to do for maintenance. I would really love to build my own bike, somewhere in the future, this guide is a big help for increasing my own knowledge.

Ha. I go the other way. My entire Kranich, and all its components, are chosen from the ground up to minimize maintenance. The Rohloff hub gearbox, for instance, is only serviced once a year by changing it's oil (which can be a clean process if you take care -- I did it in the front hall of our town house without landing in the divorce courts!), and I'm conducting an experiment at the moment with running the chain inside a Hebie Chainglider with the factory lubrication as its only lube, no lube added, so that I might end up, if my experiment succeeds, with a zero-maintenance chain as well.

I chose the electric motor and its bits on the same principle: it must either last very long (as everything on my Kranich does) or must be a straightforward and inexpensive swap, like a new motor already built into a wheel being bolted in and plugged in. A year in I don't yet know how realistic that is, but the battery, which is the most expensive part, has stood up well, and the wheel itself seems of such a good quality, and the motor has survived a certain amount of abuse (I live up and am surrounded by steep hills), so that I'm starting to think in terms of several years before any major part needs to be replaced. My annual mileage is low, though, only about 2250km on average, so count that into any comparison with your own circumstances and use.

Good luck with your bike.

Andre Jute

 

[chain]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

I'm not so new here, Barry. This time last year I had this long, confusing list of various motors and batteries and kits off Ebay, and no way to sort them, until the American Pete Cresswell, with whom I'm on the newsgroup rec. bicycle.tech, directed me here, and to an American pedelec site which seemed more about maximising power than efficiency. I lurked here, and it was on hand of the posts here, and installation photo-essays by a couple of members, that I first decided that the British-supplied 8FUN kit was worth looking into further. My current installation photo-essay is a bit of grateful payback for what earlier members shared with me. What goes round comes round.

On a ride on Thursday we saw a family of hares, pheasants galore, some colourful small birds, a heron moving upstream because the family is now too big for the main river, some minnows in a clear part of the stream at a culvert further upstream still, and lots of insects, because we were looking for the insects because they got mentioned in the Chelsea Flower Show coverage on the BBC. We live on the edge of the fields. We have our own pair of hedgehogs (1), and foxes come to eat the cats' food, and we have all kinds of birds that live in or visit the eucalyptus outside my study window.

Andre Jute

(1) Why I keep a hedgehog as my pet
Why I keep a hedgehog as my pet | Kissing the Blarney

 

[chain]

Thanks for the kind words, folks. I wrote some individual replies but they seem to have disappeared into the great electronic void.

Andre Jute

 

[Marmotte]

Hi Andre,

I'm amazed you've done all this 'without landing in the divorce courts' as you say. When I go out to the garage to do some adjustments on the bike - brakes, gears, spokes, saddle usually, nothing major - I get looked at with a suspicious eye and a comment of the sort 'what are you doing to the bike this time??' or 'you spent hours messing with the bike, what's wrong with it?'. As if being a mother of 2 small boys that I'm abandoning them to do bike maintenance.

Oh well, at least I can say I'm enjoying every minute of my commute to work on these past sunny days. I go from north Dublin city centre over the East Link bridge, along by Sandymount beach and the coast to Blackrock. The smell of the sea and the views of Dublin bay and the surrounding hills are just lovely. I feel sorry for the poor sods stuck in bumper to bumper traffic going the opposite way into the city centre. I smile at them...

Aine

 

[GT3]

A great deal of work has gone into the guides, so it with caution that I suggest the authoritative style of the writing may not be appropriate? For example, you state the pedelec control is useless as power is related to cadence. The two I have used operated as a switch and provided full power immediately I was on the move, which was ideal for the Tongxin, one of many ignored alternative motors.

That said, the cover of your Larsson book is superb!

 

[chain]

A great deal of work has gone into the guides, so it with caution that I suggest the authoritative style of the writing may not be appropriate? For example, you state the pedelec control is useless as power is related to cadence. The two I have used operated as a switch and provided full power immediately I was on the move, which was ideal for the Tongxin, one of many ignored alternative motors.

That said, the cover of your Larsson book is superb!

Suggestion is free, GT3. An authoritative style carries over into my hobbies from having been an expert in so many fields for so long.

I have a three position switch for the pedelec too, but power output is in each band related to cadence. If you have a three-position power switch which delivers full power without pedalling, it would be most desirable, but also most likely illegal. I wouldn't mind one of those if the switch has control electronics, or alternately the controller that arranges full speed; there's a controller available with a manner of cruise control (it holds your last speed until you press the thumb throttle again) but I don't have one.

Re the Larsson book's cover, it is a message to Larsson's Swedish and British publishers who tried to intimidate us (co-author Andrew McCoy and me) with lawyers before we even finished writing the book. If they hadn't been silly, the cover wouldn't have been quite so outrageous.

I didn't ignore the Tongxin motor; it just didn't suit my riding style and everyday requirements, which necessitated choosing the motor with the fattest available torque curve.

Andre Jute

 

[chain]

Hi Andre,
I'm amazed you've done all this 'without landing in the divorce courts' as you say.
Aine

It's a question of perspective. My previous hobby was building huge horn speakers, and arranging them at the top of our four story house so that the stairwell added further amplification at the bass frequencies, and blasting the PA of the sports field across the road out of existence. Before that my hobby was high voltage (600-1500V) tube amplifiers. I think my family breathed a sigh of relief when I took up safe, relatively inexpensive cycling.

See, the alternative could be so much worse, so they're delighted that I choose to work on my bike instead.

I love your account of your commute out of the city.

Andre Jute

 

[chain]

The final photo-essay of the saga of building my e-bike is now posted:
Building an Electric Bike 6:
SETTING UP CAR STRENGTH LAMPS ON AN ELECTRIC BIKE
BUMM Fly E & Toplight Line Plus
by Andre Jute
Building an Electric Bike 6: SETTING UP CAR STRENGTH LAMPS ON AN ELECTRIC BIKE by Andre Jute

If you're new to this set of photo-essays, they start at Building an electric bike 1: ELECTRIC MOTOR CHOICES FOR PEDELECS by Andre Jute

Andre Jute

 

[eddieo]

If anyone likes the Stig Larsson books, I would like to recommend the Joe Nesbo, Harry hole series...Great stuff

 

[chain]

If anyone likes the Stig Larsson books, I would like to recommend the Joe Nesbo, Harry hole series...Great stuff

Thanks, Eddie. Almost any Scandinavian writer is superior as literature to Larsson. That said, and despite anything said in STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress, I'm a fan of Larsson. I like cheap airport thrillers in the Robert Ludlum mode. But Larsson's most obsessed fans won't like my book of criticism of their hero... No way to make literary criticism into hagiography!

What Eddie is talking about is my book — STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress by Andre Jute and Andrew McCoy, CoolMain Press, pp204, electronic version £1.86, also in paperback: STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress eBook: André Jute, Andrew McCoy: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store or many formats at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/63463

Now we'd better return to electric bikes before the mods put us on bread and water! Just imagine what a critic who could do that to the iconic Stieg Larsson would say if he came across an electric bike that had something wrong with it...

Andre Jute