Blog

Thank you everyone for your patience the past week. We managed to clear through a huge backlog of stuff and really straighten out our systems and organization for the season ahead. 

Our online store checkout is now open again! As a small treat our videographer Aaron Enevoldsen created a fun musical montage of our setup into the new space.  

Happy Easter to everyone out there. After some deliberation we've decided to pause all new orders from now until the end of next week to catch-up on our order backlog, make fixes to our website back-end, and do a proper rollout of our new inventory system. This will let us get back to having ~1-3 day shipping lead times instead of the 1-2 weeks that has has been the norm since our move. It will make it easier to keep you updated on order status and potential delays, and it will allow our website to maintain much more accurate stock levels.

During this time we will be working hard to get all existing unshipped orders processed and out the door. The info content and tools on our website should still work but the store catalogue will be changing around and may be unavailable at various points. We expected to be live again on Friday with the new system fully deployed.

Thanks for your understanding and we look forward to finalizing this step of our move and preparation for an exciting year ahead. 

Well the year is off to a very busy start as we continue to settle in our new home. Meanwhile though a little R&D project we started last year retrofitting a sailbaot with a hub motor electric drive has been gaining lots of steam.

We're considering a pilot program to test this out on a wide range of sailboats later this summer, and are looking for potential early adopter customers (preferably in BC) who have suitable vessels they want to convert. Ideally this would be crafty boat owners who have a sailboat between 22-36 feet with an inboard engine that's maybe on it's last legs.

If that's you or someone you know, please fill out our form with details about your boat (length, displacement) and engine (HP, operating RPM if you know it) and some background. It's an exciting prospect to have our already quite versatile All Axle motor to find a place replacing noisy, polluting, and smelly diesel engines on the water too.

On Wednesday we had our first set of orders picked up by Canada Post at our new location.	There's not much left to do at our old 950 Powell Street address other than playing trapeze in the giant empty warehouse.

We're happy to announce that the major hurdle of moving is now over and we're able to start catching up on all the orders, shipments, and emails that have accumulated in the past 2 weeks. Thanks for all of your patience and encouragement as we weathered some small disruptions for a big leap forward.

Here are a few notes on our current fulfilment status:

• Basic orders that don't require setup and programming, wheelbuilds, or tested batteries have been flying out the door as our shipping department is chipping away at the backlog
• We are still on track to resume wheel lacing services and shipping complete kits at the start of February
• The shop is not open for retail visits but we are resuming the scheduled in person pick-up of prepaid orders for local customers
• Our sales/support team has been working away at emails and phone calls on a priority basis. There are still many emails going back 10 days or more and we will keep working hard to get caught up

It's happening!

We're excited about 2021 and hope that you are too. Things have been moving fast preparing and renovating our new shop space, and while we didn't have much disruption during the holidays that's going to change in the weeks ahead:

Full Shutdown:  Jan 18th - 24th

In the 3rd week of January we will be closed completely while we actually move the entire contents of our operation. There won't be any shipments, emails, or phone support as all our staff will quite literally have their hands full.

Limited Shipments: Jan 25th - 30th

In the final week of January we should be able to resume shipping basic parts orders from the new location, but not the more complicated conversion kits with wheelbuilds etc. Our sales team should be mostly setup in their new offices for phone and email support but we will not be able to do RMA processing or in-store visit.

Back in Biz:  Feb/March

By early to mid February we should be all geared up to resume shipping full conversion kits, do custom wheelbuilds, process RMA's, and offer in person order pickup. Most of our manufacturing will be up and running and we'll be turning the cranks of our machinery to make things happen on a whole new scale.

We can't wait to show off the new digs from which we'll be proudly serving you for years to come, so stay tuned, mind the near-term disruptions, and have a wonderfully happy new year!

We’ve got another two popular hub motors updated to be compatible with our L1019 connector standard.

First in this list are the front geared eZee motors. Our latest batch includes an internal 6 pole speed sensor and thermistor just like the GMAC motor, and has a side plate updated with O ring seal for better waterproofing too. This lets us offer the eZee hubs in our ready-to-roll package with a Baserunner motor controller and finally brings a high torque freewheeling geared drive to our RTR collection.

We have these available prebuilt in 20”, 24”, 26”, and 29” wheel sizes and also as unlaced hubs for custom wheelbuilds. (There are also still a number of our original Anderson terminated eZee hub motors left on heavy discount for those bargain shopping.)

The second motor to get this upgrade is the unique TDCM hub with 5 speed internal gearing. This direct drive hub motor fills a unique roll at converting bikes that don’t have a rear derailleur. You get a 5 speed Sturmey Archer IGH for your pedal drivetrain and a direct drive hub motor for the electric drive all in one wheel. Now that we have these motors reworked with an L10 plug they too are available in our convenient RTR kits with a downtube battery, as well as DIY kits for use with 3rd party packs.

This year has been full of surprises and challenges and has forced us to 'grow up' a little faster than anticipated. That goes to our physical space too, and as we approach the end of our lease at 950 Powell Street we're pretty much bursting at the seams.  What seemed massive and spacious 5 years ago is now a big constraint.

Sooo, we've taken the bold step to relocate at the start of next year to a much larger shop just a few km away in East Van: 

Happy American Thanksgiving everyone. There is still a long way to go but we have been chugging away at fixing many issues with our new website over the past month.  In addition to this blog post now showing photos again, we also have embedded videos working!

This timing is good since we're started releasing a steady stream of new videos filmed over the year which we've only now had the time to finish editing.

That includes videos on the disassembly of the RH212 direct drive hub motors:

The installation of our front hub motor Brompton ebike kits:

The installation of the 24 pole mini PAS sensor:

As well as the ERider T-9 Torque Sensor:

Plus an updated summary of the V2 Grin All Axle Hub fork inserts:

Along with an installation video for fitting the All Axle front hub to a bicycle:

And finally, for something a little out of left field we used an All Axle hub motor powering a 25 foot sailboat through direct replacement of an inboard diesel engine!

We have many more video releases in the queue so feel free to subscribe to our channel if you want. It's guaranteed to be all solid content, with no ads, no embellishment, and (we've heard you) no excessive background music either :-) 

Hey everyone, as you can see the new website is up and running in a functional state, but not yet a very refined state. We've prioritized the work to ensure that the store page is fully functional with an accurate inventory count, and that existing customer accounts should still work with full order history when you logged in. If you are having issues with your account then please send us an email. For customers in Canada, please be sure to manually set the store selector to the Canadian store view as the geolocation feature isn't yet working correctly.

As you can tell many visual aspects of the migration took a back seat and are going to take a couple more weeks to straighten out. So if you notice images that look out of whack, videos that aren't showing up, and layouts that seem a little questionable, we know! It's going to take a while for us to rejig everything for this new platform and we thank you for your patience while we chip away at it.

From Canada, we wish everyone a happy thanksgiving long weekend. We'll be back shipping orders on Tuesday.