allotmenteer

Hello. Might be a bit of a late reply but on my haibike you long-press the up and down buttons.

Bike now SOLD Thanks to all who showed interest. The bike and kit are now sold.

Hello all Sorry for the poor communication. I've been having a bit of a stressfull time at work recently. Anyway, the kit is still for sale. £150 for the lot. I don't want the hassle of postage so sorry to those who can't collect. I live in Aldershot so anyone who is interested and can collect please pm me.

Bump. The kit is still for sale. New price: £150

Update: I've managed to get out for a spin on the bike. I tore round the neighbourhood using the throttle and barely pedalling and I did approx 8 miles including a long hill. Still seemed to be plenty of juice left. Measured voltage at just over 38 volts (1.267 volts per cell). Didn't have time to go further due to school run. I'm guessing the range is going to be around 12 miles or so. This is not sparing the horses though. The kit can do about 22mph top speed. I imagine if you are only doing 15mph the range will be much increased.

Hello Snipenose The kit is still up for sale. I've not had time to check the battery as my central heating started playing up just after I posted the advert and I've been trying to fix it for a couple of weeks. Hopefully now I got my nice warm house back I can check the battery this weekend. The bike is a fairly cheap affair (about £100) purchased to fit the kit to as I didn't want to fit it to my nice Marin. It's steel and I think about a 20" frame. Wheels are 26" and it's got a six gear cog on it. (or is it 5? I only ever use about 2 or 3 gears so I don't pay much attention to them). IT came with 6 gears but I may have swapped it for a 5 speed to reduce the width of the motor/freewheel assembly so I didn't have to bend the frame too much. Edit: Looking the photo it's a 5 speed. I couldn't tell you if the controller would work with a heinzmann kit. I doubt it though. Someone like flecc would be able to tell you I would think. My controller is the same type as ecrazyman(?) sells on ebay. Regards Allotmenteer

Electric bike kit for sale *** SOLD *** ************ SOLD ************************** I have the following items for sale: 250W bafang rear hub motor 36V controller (+ spare controller) 36V Nimh battery (from 50 cycles) 9Ah Charger for the battery I can throw in the bike it's currently fitted to too if required. As far as I know the battery is good (kept regularly charged). I shall take a test run this weekend to confirm range. It used to cope with a 15 mile occasional commute. I'm selling because I don't really have the time to ride much anymore due to having a young family. I'll add some pictures soon. I'm looking for £250 for the lot. ************ SOLD **************************

Try wearing swimming goggles. You'll be able to wrap a scarf around your face and I'm sure they won't steam up. You'll look a total fool though.

My bike (bafang motor, 36V nimh, 15A controller) can provide good assistance to about 24mph with me pedalling. I can average just over 20mph when I commute the 15 miles to work. A max speed of 25mph is about as fast as I would want to go. To get more speed I would have to add larger / more batteries to the bike which would make the bike heavier and put more strain on the frame, and also affect the handling. The heavier bike would need better brakes and so on. It would soon stop being a bike and become a motor vehicle. I wouldn't feel safe riding it. I agree the 15 mph limit is a bit low but there comes a point when adding more speed to an electric bike hits the law of diminishing returns. If you want more speed then I really would suggest a scooter (an electric one if possible). Then ride a normal bike in your spare time for fitness.

I'd wait until the child can walk as by then his/her muscles and skeleton are more developed. Sitting on the back of a bike will subject the little one to quite a lot of shock and vibration. You can brace against anticipated shocks but the child can't. A nice padded seat is essential I would think.

Don't give him a penny. Get yourself down to Lidl and buy one of their digital satellite kits for around £60. The kit has all you need (dish, digital receiver, cable, satellite finder, mount etc). Aligning the dish can be tricky and you may need to get a better satellite finder (one with a visual meter as I think the one supplied is audio only - though Lidl sell a decent meter for about £3.50). The only downside is that Lidl only sell the kits once or twice a year. If you are prepared to wait then they are great kits for the price.

Saw an article in New Scientist about the UltraBattery. HYBRID-electric vehicles (HEVs) could become cheaper thanks to a breakthrough that would allow inexpensive lead-acid batteries to replace the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries they now use. Lead-acid batteries are cheap and can store large amounts of energy. But if they are repeatedly and rapidly charged and discharged - as happens when storing braking energy from an HEV and then releasing it when it accelerates - the battery's negative plate becomes coated with deposits. That limits its working life to a few years and is one reason why today's HEVs, such as the Toyota Prius, use NiMH batteries. The UltraBattery marries a lead-acid battery with a supercapacitor. The combination stores as much energy as a standard lead-acid battery, but can happily charge and discharge without deterioration. The UltraBattery simply combined battery and capacitor in parallel in one unit. By acting as a buffer during charging and discharging, the capacitor boosts the battery's life to match that of NiMH batteries. In lab tests the UltraBattery lasted four times as long as the best lead-acid batteries, while producing 50 per cent more power. A test vehicle has so far covered 185,000 kilometres while being recharged as needed. The cost of the battery is a third to a quarter that of NiMH batteries and a sixth that of the lithium-ion batteries used in some high-performance electric cars. Japan's Furukawa Battery Company will start manufacturing the UltraBattery on modified lead-acid battery production lines by the middle of next year. In the US, battery manufacturer East Penn in Pennsylvania will make the device. In summary: The UltraBattery offers a number of advantages over conventional Lead Acid batteries: 1) cycle life is four times longer 2) 50 per cent more power 3) approximately 70 per cent less expensive than current HEV battery systems 4) faster charge and discharge rates. Granted they'll still be heavy but with 50% more power combined with long life and the low cost then we could see them on electric bikes in the future.

I made a halogen bike light last winter using a 12V MR16 bulb + 40mm overflow pipe. I used a 12V 7Ah computer UPS battery which I got free from work (they get replaced every couple of years and the old ones get binned). Total cost was about £5 and although it looked a real bodge job it worked great. It lit up the country lanes brilliantly and gave over an hour of run-time even with the shoddy battery. I can't imagine why anyone buys the expensive ones for 100s of £.

Fit a handlebar mirror. I've borrowed one for a couple of weeks and I can't believe I've managed without one all this time. I'm buying one for myself asap.

Helllo Stuart Yes I fitted a set of decent shimano V-brakes and all is well now.

Checked the motor last night but unfortunately the freewheel sprocket is covering up the numbers.

Don't forget that if you run the motor at a higher voltage than rated the speed will increase proportionally.

Hello there I got my motor as a kit from Electric Bikes Sales (Electric Transport Shop). They don't sell the kit anymore unfortunately but perhaps they may be able to help source one. The kit they sold was 24V with a useless li-ion battery but the controller can cope with 36V and I so bought a 36V battery and charger from 50cycles. I can do the 20 mph average on the way in to work but due to traffic levels I take a longer route (16.75 miles usually) home which has a few more junctions and I average 19 mph then. The 36 Volt 9Ah Nimh battery has enough juice to do both routes though if I am lazy I can run out at the 14.5 miles mark on the way in if I have overused the throttle or not pedalled from a standing start / when accelerating. I really think such a motor would be right for you. A Torq would be ideal but if you can't get one then I'm sure you could get the parts without too much difficulty. I'll have a look at my motor tomorrow evening and check the serial number on it which may help find the right one. Regards Paul

How bad is the road surface? Is is tarmac or an unmade road? This could affect the choice of bike as most electric bikes don't like excessive vibration (battery mounts break, electrical contacts can be shaken loose etc). When I do my commute (15 miles) by pushbike I average around 14 mph but on my 36V electric I can average 20 mph which takes the journey time down to 45 mins from 65 mins. My bike has a hub motor similar (if not identical) to the Eeze Torq (suzhou bafang 8 fun motor). If you can get one of these it'd do the job. You'd need a controller such as the 36V brushless one from Ecrazyman on ebay (me and some others on this forum have bought from him). As for batteries I would stick with Nimh if you can. You would still get plenty of exercise with the electric option but it would reduce the sweat factor enormously, leaving you in control of just how much work you do. Regards Paul

My guess is that the method involves fooling the sensor in some way. As assistance was provided from 15-30mph instead of 0-15mph this must surely involve tweaking the speed sensor in some way. Did it provide good assistance at 25mph+? The pro-connect sounds fantastic if you can tweak it like that.

Saw a couple at the Eurotunnel terminal (French side) the other day. They had a couple of young ladies on them giving out flyers for the Eurotunnel shop. Also saw a member of staff on one in a French store (Decathlon I think).

Thanks Russ. Paul

I can vouch for that problem, having had a lishen lithium ion battery do exactly that. I believe it was the battery pack bumping around inside the plastic case that caused such a fracture in my pack leading to one of the cells burning! Fortunately the Battery Management System shut down the cell before things got really bad. It's good that the problem has now been recognised and hopefully solved.

The request to change the date format gets my vote too. Anything but American style dates please!

And where do you stand on someone who chooses to wear a helmet and then receives a serious head injury which may not have occurred if they weren't wearing a helmet? A helmet, by increasing the effective size of the head has a greater potential to cause injuries by catching on the ground etc and jerking the neck violently. I know that when I was thrown from my bike recently (off the left side after a front wheel skid) I tucked my head in, used my hands to protect me, landed on my shoulder (on the nice soft grass luckily) and rolled up onto my feet facing the way I had come. My head did not impact the ground by any meaningful amount (I think it gently rolled onto it). Now if I had been wearing a helmet the extra 2" or so of plastic on my head would have impacted with the ground and would have deflected my neck 2" further, possibly injuring it.