ebike4healthandfitness
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Some people like very narrow q factor so DIY should be able to accommodate them as well.
If not, then that is a way that DIY fails.
Tons of dead, 1-2 year old prebuilt EVs out there
- Thread starter neptronix
- Start date
Some people like very narrow q factor so DIY should be able to accommodate them as well.
If not, then that is a way that DIY fails.
Oh, I'm sure all the pre-built people will do ever so much better. /sarcasm
No. No they won't.To clarify:
There's some nice prebuilt stuff out there, but that will never be the same as taking a nice bike and electrifying it yourself.
No prebuilt ebike people are building things like Race Inc. did. And does, even!
RA26 Frame
Race Inc.’s 26-inch big BMX is a modern take of the classic and ultra-rare Mickey Lundy cruiser. It offers the perfect balance of top speed and agility, making it the ideal choice for any ride out. Blast through the intersections like Mickey coming out the gate! This is a 6061 T-6 aluminum frame...
raceincbmx.com
What mid drive will fit into that?
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ebike4healthandfitness
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Does not have to be proprietary.
I've seen custom frame builders make universal mounting interfaces where a proprietary mid drive (via an adapter) could be mounted in any position at pretty much any height.
Here is one such an example:
ebike4healthandfitness
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Here is another one:
Yeah, that's pretty much proprietary. Why? Probably to have a monopoly on something.
That's not cool. (IMO)
Rewind3000
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Same for all sports equipment. Stores in Norway are secretly throwing new last year's skis in dumpsters, to keep prices up.
Well that's bad and unnecessary.
stan.distortion
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Sorry for going off topic again, nice discussion going. The guerilla marketers are already here, not in much force and it's hard to tell it apart from fanboyism but they're active and it's impossible to avoid even if prebuilt discussion is avoided entirely, component manufacturers hire companies to market their products too.
There's another guerilla aspect highly active here that's worth bearing in mind and that's idea harvesting, companies or their agents masquerading as DIYers and searching for innovations. They're quite common in some areas of hacking and open source and they're often bigger slimeballs than the marketeers, patent trolls with no intention of ever using those innovations themselves but getting rich from charging other for using them instead.
That doesn't seem to be a big problem here so far and record of public discussion is grounds for prior art so it could be worth considering it from that angle, how those kind of discussions could be of benefit to manufacturers. If they play fair then it could be a boon, they get a list of features and improvements customers would like to see on new models or issues folks are having with their products and quietly give a few hints on using their protocols or things they've learned about design that would be useful to DIYers in return.
I know I'm being a dreamer with that, managers who think proprietary protocols are a good idea are usually all take and no give but just maybe they'll find themselves shunned and their products recommended against in favor of manufacturers who do play fair.
Chalo
100 TW
One thing I learned at Bosch training is that they make three different shapes of motors with incompatible mountings... right now, this model year. What a pack of a-holes.
ebike4healthandfitness
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Sycip still offers it as an option:
Sycip Specialty Bike — Sycip Bicycles
These are bikes that require special needs. Each one is built for a specific purpose and for that individual that needs to feel Special! From Cargo trikes to food delivery bikes, these bikes are ready to roll on road or dirt and anywhere in between. Just dream it up and we can work with you to make
www.sycip.com
So it still alive and well.
ebike4healthandfitness
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Can you provide a link?
ebike4healthandfitness
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They don't bother me either but from a max power, submaximal power efficiency and aerodynamics standpoint they are less than ideal. This is why gravel bikes have q factors in the 146mm to 151mm range.
For a mountain bike these things don't matter as much because stance width isn't entirely about pedaling and aerodynamics. The stance width is also used to help the rider balance the bike (which has higher BB) and wider is better for this purpose.
Too bad road/gravel bikes never used 135mm rear spacing on a mass scale (road bikes went straight to 142mm TA from 130mm) because that has forced DIYers into using mtn bikes almost exclusively for their street bikes.
..yep... i'm aware.. and they are hard to detect.. but ES also has a lot of bullshit busters.. and you won't get away with BS here for long.
I think if we build a prebuilt hacking section, we would need some help spotting this kind of activity and have policies about it.. at the same time we should encourage vendors to come out in the open & provide benefits for doing things the legit way.
Do you think with some mitigations and such, we could at least cull 80% of guerilla marketing that arises because we made ourselves a target by talking about prebuilts more? .. with your experience would you be willing to help us maybe write some guides on how to spot it?
.. i see that going on and also notice an effort to conceal certain information in responses and inventors are aware of that going on.. ..seems to be well self-regulated, IDK?
..a smart manufacturer would come here and do their research. Good thing for inventors on here that most don't, lol.
I wish that was the outcome of all this, but i don't have that much faith in the ebike consumer right now.
Overall itihnk if we can come up with a nice anti-shilling strategy, the prebuilt bike hacking subforum is on.
I've had two Yuba Spicy Curry with the original Currie motor and TranzX system up for sale near me recently for pennies. But alas, with a non functioning battery, or controller, or motor. My searching for a relatively inexpensive fix yielded zero results so I passed on a top tier bike even at just a couple hundred $USD
ebike4healthandfitness
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It's not the ebike consumers fault. It is DIY's fault.
If you can't offer them what they want they are going to go to whoever can.
For example, if the best DIY can do for mid drive q factor is an uneven 175mm (drive side being 3mm wider than non drive side) there is going to be a need for proprietary.
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slaphappygamer
10 kW
I don’t think all vendors/sales reps should be shunned completely. I’m sure there are really bad ones. Some vendors are pretty nice and helpful. I came across one vendor that immediately identified themselves as such and held a raffle. Users came and entered the raffle and the vendor sent out the product promptly. Some users took the game controller part apart and started to provide feedback. That vendor forwarded the content to the manufacturer and progress was made with newer hardware revisions.
I think full transparency from a vendor or sales agent…..etc could be the key.
I think full transparency from a vendor or sales agent…..etc could be the key.
ebike4healthandfitness
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That is fine but you have been saying in this thread DIYers "can have it all" --> ( Tons of dead, 1-2 year old prebuilt EVs out there) but this not true.
P.S. The revel propulsion mid drive is in the same boat as the Bikee Bike lightest mid drive--> PaulD's lightweight mid drive development
"Q-factor is about 180mm for a 73mm BB. Q-factor for a 68mm BB is about 175mm. Offset is 3mm towards the driveside."
No narrow and even q factor for that one even though Paul has one mounted on a gravel bike on his website:
Am i going to need to split this into a new conversation? we need to get back to the topic, i don't want to argue about this anymore, i want to talk about the topic at hand. It's very important to get feedback about the prebuilt hacking subforum and we're getting derailed hard here.
+1 for the new subforum. I think ES would be a good place for that as AFAIK all other similar info about that sort of thing is very disparate.
I helped my friend go for renting high-end road bikes to electric bikes before the start of the pandemic. I advised them not to Jake in e-bikes for repair unless he sold them. One good example is sonders . As the other guy 15 years ago who started e-bike shop here found out trying to buy a saunders controller he bought three of them and none of them worked. They're all different and mismatched I didn't want to go into it with him because he started his own e-bike line 15 years ago with sometimes his manufacturer will do okay and sometimes he send him a bunch of junk.
Beware of the free ebike that just needs a battery.
Or good luck
Beware of the free ebike that just needs a battery.
Or good luck
gromike
10 kW
I'm lookin' for a dead Radwagon 1.
It's my holy grail at the moment, so to speak.
There has got to be a mountain of dead ebikes out there somewhere. The only question is -- how do we harvest them?
It's my holy grail at the moment, so to speak.
There has got to be a mountain of dead ebikes out there somewhere. The only question is -- how do we harvest them?
stan.distortion
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No doubt it'll be an invaluable resource
Just a thought. There are a lot of really good vendors on here, folks sourcing all kinds of useful things but forums are always clunky for that kind of thing. I don't think I've ever come across any plugins or addons that did much to improve it but if it could be improved... I know of at least 3 prebuilt bikes that I could have for free and it sounds like most members could say something similar, they're no use to me but if I could get a small amount for my time and shipping that "just works" then they could be in the hands of someone who can either use them or want to hack them for a tiny fraction of their original price or the cost of similar spec components.
Spotting the shills... It's damn tricky. Most of my experience was with a relatively small group, probably no more than 4 or 5 individuals but in the space of about 4 years they had well over 5000 different accounts. Familiarity was the main thing, writing styles, naming, etc. Often you could spot them within one or two posts but they were also buying and hacking existing accounts, recruiting and paying bounties, using botnets for IPs... Really nasty pieces of work but they worked to a pattern, operated out of a manual and throwing them curveballs was one of the best ways of being certain it wasn't just some (relatively) innocent random you where kicking. Questions that would contradict other points they'd made or couldn't really be answered without giving ground, that kind of thing. Regular hotheads would answer without thinking but that group would have to pause their argument while they go and have a think about it, pretty much always 10-15 minutes and you'd often get a few sockpuppet accounts aiming to derail the discussion at the same time.
Rules were very important. Most admins wanted really concise and clear rules to help deal with them. Big mistake, it's amazing how disruptive they could be while staying just within the rules and thumbing their noses at the mods. "This is a private forum, administrators have the right to remove users and content at their discretion".
Concern trolling was about the only easy way to spot them, "I'm really worried my Chinese ebike's battery will burst into flames or it's inferior build quality let me down, should I buy brand X instead?". Usually a lot more subtle ofc but during a particularly bad time those got an automatic kick and there was almost no fallout from it, at a guess less than 1% of those kind of posts were genuine questions.
That was the hardest part of the whole damn mess, being sure it was a troll/shill you were kicking and not a regular member because that was one of their aims, turning the place toxic through overzealous administration. Neither an easy nor enviable job but I've seen the same thing being dealt with here promptly and professionally, we're in good hands
Thanks for that. I in fact did lose sight of the thread premise already but am guessing it was what you stated in your posts #23 (last papagraph), and #25, correct?
So this new "prebuilt hacking section" would be oriented to be a subforum fostering "deproprietaryizing" proprietary systems?
Seems like it would take the nerdy techies to hack and simplify the proprietary stumbling blocks and present workable easily understood solutions that the consumer-with-some-DIY-aspirations could apply.
This already happens infrequently on ES (BionX workarounds, Yamaha dongles, etc.) but having its own subforum would probably elevate the conversation and activity. Definitely needs a clever snappy label.
For me the main objective is to keep the cast-off inop ebikes out of the landfills or from gathering dust in the basement.
Or did I miss the premise?