Justin Lemire-Elmore

Coming up is the Victoria Day long weekend, and Justin and some crew will be heading down to the Maker Faire just south of San Francisco, with a few home-made gadgets for people to ride. As a result, the shop will be closed Saturday, May 22nd, but will be open again as usual the following Tuesday. Any ebike enthusiasts in or around the area should check it out, as there are lots of inspiring DIY projects being showcased and a number of characters from the endless-sphere forum will be there too.







Two years ago our side-by-side sociable tandem ebike took off all around the fairgrounds with a mind of its own. Unfortunately it's too big to take on the train down this time around, so we'll be bringing mostly single-wheeled vehicles which are more compact.

As of May 4th, we formally changed our business identity from "The Renaissance Bicycle Company" to "Grin Technologies Ltd."

This was in part because we were frequently mistaken for a bicycle shop, but mostly because we wanted a name that better reflects the increasing amount of Electric Vehicle technology development in which we are actively involved. Our goal is to spread the EVGrin far and wide through the design, manufacture, and distribution of cutting edge ebike components.

You can still refer to us as ebikes.ca too, but the things that we make (Cycle Analysts, Torque Arms, DC-DC Converters, Lighting Systems and no doubt more to come) will be sold under the Grin brand. Our Vancouver store front will be called the "Grin Cyclery", so if we ever do get a sign, that's what you'd be on the look out for.

Name changes are always a little weird, at first, but hopefully this is something you can all embrace with us. 

We have new phone numbers too in order to better manage the increasing call volume to our shop. The primary phone line has changed to (604) 569-0902, while the old number (604) 288-7316 will continue to be active for shipping & receiving. In addition, our engineering and manufacturing wing has its own line (604) 569-0903.

As hinted at last month, we are now in production with our Cycle Lumenator ebike light, taking our integrated DC-DC lighting systems to a new level. With four of the best Cree XPG-R4 LEDs driven at 750 mA, we're up in the 1000 Lumen brightness levels, shining more light on your path than most of the premium $300-600 systems sold at bike shops. The wide input voltage range is compatible with any power source from 15V to 100V, AC or DC, to run directly off your ebike battery pack with no separate voltage converter required.

The price is $185 USD for a single unit, or $299 for a Dual lamp (giving 2000 Lumens total). We also offer this as an Upgrade to the Cycle Analyst if you purchase the two together. In that case, we will attach a short DC power cable that comes out of the CA and plugs directly into your Cycle Lumenator light, so it gets powered from the CA with no additional wiring down the frame. Clean and tidy with minimal cable clutter.

The recipient of the great Cycle Analyst giveaway for May 15th goes out to Adam Mercier, an 18 year old student in Western France. Adam has been scheming to build an electric vehicle that is rain and weather proof so it can be more useful as a car alternative in the wet city of Brest. He started off with concept sketches of a somewhat futuristic trike, formalized this through 3-D computer modeling in Solidworks, and then got in touch with an communal workshop run by retired naval yard workers to learn all the welding and machining skills to build it.








Says Adam "I have a cheap watt-meter, but it miss a lot of the features of the CA, like avg watts or speedometer. It would be the perfect tool for me to gather data about my trike, and find the best set-up for my drivetrain for max efficiency. But as a student I'm not as rich as I want to be!"

Well, at the rate you are going you will be rich soon. The build thread for his project is posted here, with the frame already mostly complete. Good luck finishing this by summer time, congratulations, and we're always happy to see a CA getting put to good use. Next prize will be given away May 31st, send your submissions to ca.giveaway@ebikes.ca

This is just a simple photograph to show you that homemade ebikes don't have to be techy or weird looking in any way. Mark Stephens, our trusty electrical guy, recently put this conversion together over the span of several weeks for his girlfriend Natalie's birthday. It's a vintage Raleigh ladies bike with an original 3-speed Sturmey Archer hub in the back. Mark painted a front Nine Continent motor for a perfect colour match, rebuilt both hubs into aluminum rims, added white side-wall tires, and even installed switches inside the original brake levers to activate regen and assist the old side pull brakes for stopping. Fenders are original. The controller is tucked into the eZee battery bag and out of sight. And Natalie, "she loves it". No kidding!

Being well lit and seeing the road is especially important with the higher speeds on an ebike. Every now and then we get customers sending us pictures of crazy lit up contraptions, that not only keep them safe on the road, they also make us and I'm sure everyone on the streets smile a little too. We've decided to have a small promotional contest, with the best looking nighttime bicycle shot winning the first production unit of our next series of super bright ebike lights.

What's that super bright ebike light? It's been some time that we've been working on a new lighting series using the very best CREE XP-G high power LEDs. Our current prototypes have cracked over 1000 lumens of output, consume just 9.5 Watts of power and run off any input from 18V up to 100V, AC or DC. We are just gearing up for production and have the target release date for May 15th, and would like to give away the first one off the production line, to you perhaps. So send us your creatively lit-up bike pictures to info@ebikes.ca and you may end up with one very bright beacon to add to your lighting mix.

The submissions for our Cycle Analyst giveaway contest keep getting more and more interesting. For our April 30th winner, we decided to give the prize to Pascal Chollet for his BikeProof.ch solar bike adventure project, which he plans to ride from Switzerland all the way to Tibet. This is a fully engineered tricycle that uses 3 of our eZee hub motor kits and has a roof canopy containing a 220 watt solar panel. It can climb mountains and run off its own steam, and goes a long way to showing just what is possible in the realm of sustainable transportation. Pascal has a well documented website for his project, with many images and videosof the build. Bravo Pascal!









The next CA giveaway Prize will be decided on May 15th. Previous submissions will continue to carry forward, and any one with an ebike project that they'd like to enter the contest with, please send your conversion details and a bit of background to: ca.giveaway@ebikes.ca

There is tons and tons of stuff that goes on behind the scenes here which is pretty slow to percolate onto the webpage, but every now and then we get to something. We have just added our own battery discharge test data for all of the 36V packs that we offer on our site, from data collected over the past year with our own in-house computer controlled automated testing apparatus. This should help people better understand the differences in discharge profile and behaviour from the various chemistry and 'C' rate options. The specs for the individual packs can be seen below:


8AH NiCad


eZee LiFe


9Ah LiMn


10Ah LiPoly


14Ah LiPoly


Triang. LiFe


10A Curves Compared

We have also combined all of the 10A curves from each of the different chemistries and super imposed them on a single plot in the graph on the left. In this way, you can see side by side how they all stack up at different points in the discharge.

Our next Cycle Analyst prize goes out to Peter Wagner in Switzerland for his cruiser bike that demonstrates a remarkable level of craftsmanship. Fitting a battery nicely in the triangular frame area of a regular diamond frame bike is challenging enough, so it takes a special kind of dedication to fit this around the curved tubes of a classic beach cruiser, with a shaped sheet metal enclosure and quick release mounting mechanism. In addition to the superbly clean build, he also modified weak elements of a cruiser bike to better suit a fast electric assist, including thru-axle front suspension forks with disk brakes. You can read a full documentation of his project construction here.