Justin Lemire-Elmore

There are few things we love more than riding around Vancouver hauling stuff on electric cargo bikes; turning heads and getting high fives and thumbs up while shuttling goods back to our shop at Grin. So we were smitten to see that Vancouver will be hosting it’s first every Cargo Bike Championship on May 29th, right at the end of Bike to Work Week, courtesy of Modacity and HUB. Read about it right here.

What’s a Cargo Bike Championship exactly? We don’t really know, but we figure it’s going to involve some kind of informal cargo hauling contest, some kind of vehicle rally, some kind of judging, and of course prizes! On that front we’re going to be sponsoring some very big awards, like Satiators and Lumenators and perhaps even a full conversion kit. We’ll update on the details as they materialize.

In the meantime though, if you ride a cargo bike of any kind here in Vancouver, whether for transporting kids or your full suite of work tools, then come help us to showcase this other side of utility cycling. Modacity is looking for participants to register their bikes by May 18th, so get your details in and lets make this a great little rally. It's timed to coincide with the wrap-up BBQ at creekside park from 4-7pm, where there will be tons of cyclists gathered and free foodstuff too. 

Last year around this time we got our Torque Arms listed and stocked at Amazon for faster and cheaper shipping to US customers. Well we can now add to the mix the Grin Lumenators Lights, USB Power Adapter, and Cycle Satiator Charger too. So if you're after just one of these items and are in the United States, then you should find Amazon can deliver it to you quicker than we can here in Canada. 

In our first community event of 2015, we’ll be participating in the BC Sustainable Energy Association’s (BCSEA) electric vehicle faire, taking place this Friday evening at Science World from 5:30-9:30pm.   This is being promoted as an opportunity to learn about EV’s, meet local EV businesses, and test ride any number of electric vehicles. Additional information is here:

BCSEA Page: https://www.bcsea.org/bcsea-vancouvers-electric-vehicle-fair-2015
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BCSEAVancouver

So come on out, it’s not free but it should be worth it. We’ll be there to balance out the heavy presence of commercial electric cars with a full suite of electric cargo bikes, trikes, folders, and longboards, all available to test riding.  

And if you do have a nice homemade electric bike or other PEV that you’d like to show off, it’s not too late to sign up as an exhibitor. Please either contact us or BCSEA directly to be a part. You can help bring awareness to the massive impact that ebikes can have as a viable transportation option.  After all, you don’t need 4 wheels, a roof, a trunk, and 2000lb of steel and batteries to get around town and have fun doing so.

We’ve recently changed how ebike conversion kits are presented on our website in a way that hopefully makes it easier to find the best option for your bike. At the center of this is a new conversion kit summary page that highlights the key features of every Grin kit and the applications and bicycle types where they shine.

Our mission is always to create conversion kits that use universal standards and interchangeable components, and address interesting niche applications that aren’t well serviced by other “one size fits all” systems.

On the new kit front, you’ll now see two dedicated Brompton specific packages based around the Crystalyte NSM and SAW20 hub motors. We’ve customized the cable lengths and controller / Cycle Analyst mounting brackets to fit neatly on these unusual bike frames, had the motor axles machined with a 8mm axle flats and a 75mm length to be a drop in fit with the Brompton forks, and even made custom 8mm mini torque arms too. No fork spreading or dropout filing required, these kits are ready for primetime, and feature the same upgrade options of PAS and Torque sensing pedalec control as our other systems.

Have a look at the Brompton Kit info page where we’ve explained the options and compiled a detailed installation guide with plenty of photographs and pointers on how to put things together right. This is our first time preparing a kit install guide in many years, and we’d welcome any feedback as this will become a template for other conversion kit installation pages soon to come. 

We’ve got a nice update for those like doing things a little bit custom. The high performance V2 eZee hub motors have only traditionally been available as part of a complete built up wheel, laced with a rim, tire and tube, which added a lot of wasted expense for those wanting a different diameter or rim type.  Well we had a recent shipment arrive of pure unlaced eZee motors both front and rear, permitting eZee motor systems in a custom wheel build.

Included in these unlaced motors is a new fast 350 rpm winding, which will help 16” and 20” wheels get up to a decent road speed without the need for a high voltage battery. They’re a bit quicker than the normal 300 rpm motors that are in the 20” eZee kits, and have been added to our simulator page too.    

Custom Builds

To facilitate the purchase of custom built wheels, we’ve also created a new part on our store site that lets you select any available hub, spokes, and rim option from a dropdown menu. That enables you to specify the best hand-laced motor wheel for your project rather than relying on stock kits.

A Suitable Fat Rim

One of the rim options you’ll see listed is a 65mm wide Weinmann rim for fat tire bikes. With the recent updates to our spoke calculator it’s much easier to figure out the optimum lacing and dishing strategy for a fat tire build and these particular rims have a close enough left and right hole offset that they can work well with most motors.  

If you are doing a custom fatbike conversion, the best approach is to select a rear hub motor and use this on the front fork of your bike for a front wheel drive. Most fat bike forks have a 135mm dropout width, the same as a standard rear mountain bike hub. 

Well who would have guessed that the improved spoke calculator we put online last summer has been used to make over 75,000 spoke length calculations! We imagine only a small fraction of those turned into laced up hub motors, but it feels good to see our tools get put to such good use.

We've now wrapped up the the second phase of this project to include a dimensionally correct cutaway edge view of the laced motor so that you can see the effects of dishing, spoke hole offsets, and even of lacing the spokes with the spoke elbows inside or outside of the motor flange. We're trying to turn this into the ultimate wheel lacing resource for ebike enthusiasts and welcome any additional feedback. Have a look and play around!

Under the calculator results are full descriptions and explanations for the various fields, and we've updated all the hub motors in our database to include the offset from the flanges to the axle center for dishing considerations.

One of the key issues we wanted to illustrate was the importance of having the spoke elbows on either the inside or outside of the hub flange in different scenarios. This can be a significant consideration when lacing hub motors which often have spoke flanges spaced much closer together than a normal bike hub. We also wanted to make it easier to let people do hub lacing into Fat Bike rims which tend to have large offsets between the left and right holes, and included a simple "swap spokes" button to gain better triangulation.

Hey guys and gals, check it out:

We've completed what is surely the first online lithium battery charging simulator, with accurate renditions of the constant power, constant current, and constant voltage charge regimes. With this tool, not only can you see just how long it will take to charge a given battery type using the Cycle Satiator, you can also figure out the exact voltage profile for partial charge levels, and then download the resulting profiles right to your Satiator Charger.

We're hoping that this takes some of the mystery out of designing custom charge profiles for your battery and encourages you to produce partial charge routines to enhance your pack's longevity. With good management you can often make your expensive lithium battery pack give 2-3 times as many discharge cycles as it would with the stock generic chargers, and have the satiator handily pay for itself just on reduced battery replacement costs alone.  

Hey you'd think with the launch of the Satiator we'd take a little break and relax for the holidays, but not at all.

Field Oriented BAC500+ Controllers

Many of our custom EV projects over the past few years have made use of an advanced Field Oriented Motor Controller from ASI (Accelerated Systems Inc.) of Toronto, rather than the more generic imported Infineon devices. We've talked about these before, and have now made a small pilot batch generally available to the enterprising public.

Made almost 100% in Canada, this BAC500+ controller in a hardcoat anodized CNC'd enclosure can measurably increase your motor efficiency and torque output at low speeds, run sensorless with even the highest RPM motors, use field weakening to increase the top-end speed, and remove the motor buzz from even noisiest of hubs.

For more information, have a look the descriptions and test results in the ES forum thread. We are down to single digit quantities remaining for those who who are tech savvy and want to taste the future of ebike control.

Cycle Stoking a Yuba

On another front, we renamed the Right Side Drive Stokemonkey to the Cycle Stoker several months back, and are now pilot testing a new model custom fit for the Yuba Mundo cargo bikes. Mid-drives like the Bafang BBS02 have made the rounds lately but this stands apart:

• Patterson 2-speed crankset, gives the equivalent of a 62T chainring for unprecedented high speed gear ratios even at a comfortable pedal cadence
• Provides true Proportional Torque Assistance with all the custom settings of a V3 Cycle Analyst to dial in the desired performance
• Uses of standard bicycle chain and bicycle components for the entire drive transmission, no special proprietary gears in the mix. 

If you have a Yuba Mundo bike and like being an early product tester to help work through any early release kinks, then please be in touch as we should have a half dozen kits ready by early January.

Finally, we at team Grin want to wish you all a Merry Christmas. We'll generally stay open with reduced staffing during the holiday but should still keep up on all the online orders. And in case you didn't see it, the -20% Satiator Promo for loyal customers will continue until the end of the December if you want to treat yourself to a little gift.

We apologize that our webpage was down for maintenance much of yesterday. We were upgrading servers in order to make our site faster and better at handling high traffic. Now that the migration is finished you'll notice quite a dramatic improvement in the page load times when your browse our website.  

Unfortunately there was a time window yesterday evening and night when emails to any ebikes.ca address could have bounced. So if you sent us an message and don't receive the usual timely reply, there is a chance we did not receive it and you might want to forward the email along again.  Otherwise we hope you all enjoy the much snappier ebikes.ca !