Blog

Anyone who has been on a kilowatt-hour or Critical Mass bike ride in Vancouver over the past 8 months has probably heard and appreciated the fine high fidelity music and thumping bass coming from amongst the crowd. That's been the productive output of Bruce Lau, who built a performance 100 watt amp to run off his ebike battery pack. Now you too can turn heads and make people on the streets smile with an ebike sound system that rivals that of pimped cars. Bruce has made a few extras and we have them listed on our store site. They are hand-made in Vancouver, and ready to spread joy all over the world.

Back in 2006 we were the first to bring fast winding 404 and 405 Crystalyte hub motors to the scene; in 2008 we had eZee make a high rpm motor for their 20" kits; last fall we had Nine Continent do a faster 6 turn winding of their 205 hub for us, and now in our most recent shipment we have taken this a step further with a 5 turn winding Nine Continent motor, which we'll call the 2805. This gives us a 20" wheel option that has the capability of doing 25mph or 40kph speeds with a standard 36V battery pack. The advantage of fast motors with a lower winding count is that they provide a path to achieve good speed performance without going to high voltage 72V battery arrangements, which is a frequent source of problems especially when people series connect BMS protected lithium batteries.

As well, the rear motors in this shipment have all been laced with the heads on the left side of the hub flange and are properly dished out of the box, so our earlier caveat about wheel dishing is no longer a problem. 

Our Infineon-based motor controllers now includes all of the changes we sought to make this a great universal controller option. We have an integrated rocker switch for ON/OFF power control, a forwards/reverse connector so that it is compatible with the eZee hub motors, and an ebrake cutoff connector that can enable regenerative braking with a small modification to the circuitboard. The current limit on the 6 mosfet version with the high performance IRFB4030 mosfets has been increased to 25 amps. That of the larger 12 mosfet version is still 35 amps. These items are in stock and are plug in compatible with all of our Crystalyte, eZee, and Nine Continent motors.

This is just a reminder as days get shorter that we have a range of lighting accessories designed to run right off your ebike battery pack. These have been getting high acclaim from all who have purchased them. In particular, the Dual Halogen kit provides either 10W or 20W of bright illumination, and with a traditional warm colour spectrum that gets a lot more notice on the road than bluish HID and LED lights. For those who just want power sipping, our 0.5W and 1W bombproof LED front and rear array lights will work up to 100V, can be seen for miles, and have built in waterproof button and memory.



They also work great for lighting up Hallowe'en pumpkins!

We're pleased to offer a Fedex express shipping option for all of our international orders. This means a 2-day delivery time to most places in the world. We are still working on integrating this with our web checkout. That should be sorted soon but in the meantime we are happy to email a quote.

Vancouver is one of the birthplaces of mountain unicycling and has a large unicycle community, yet has always lacked a shop that specializes in them. We want to fix that and are ready to open up a small unicycle corner in our store, the preliminary website for which is here. You might wonder what unicycles have to do with ebikes. Well, not much, yet, though we're equally passionate about both.

After some development time we are pleased to make available a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery option in a triangular form factor. The layout is similar to that used in our frame mounted 36V NiCad batteries, only it is lighter weight (4.7 kg) and higher in capacity (10 Ah). These particular packs are made with low impedance 'F' size cells rated for 5C discharge in a 12S 2P arrangement. The overall pack has an internal resistance of just 130 mOhm, half the resistance of other 10Ah ebike batteries, which means less voltage sag under load and no problems delivering up to 40 amps of continuous current. Click the graphs at the right to see the complete performance details.

This finally means that we have a battery pack that can be recommended for higher power systems using the 35 and 40A motor controllers.

A heads up to everyone that we will be closed for a short summer break starting at the at the end of this week right through to the Labour Day weekend. So last day for order shipments to go out will be Friday, August 28th, and they won't resume again until Tuesday, Sept 8th. We will able to respond to emails during this period, but there will be no one at our physical shop and the online store will be temporarily de-activated as well. Hope that everyone is able to get out and enjoy the last weeks of summer.

One common problem with the rear hub motor maintenance is that people can't remove their freewheel, since the rear motor axles are too large to fit through the opening in the removal tool. We've now got a large supply of custom removal tools that were made up with a 14mm bore all the way through so that they will slide right over the large 14mm threads on the rear axles.

Just a short note that the Nine Continent kit sales are on again with the infineon motor controllers. More product announcements and details by the end of this week.