News

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!

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 :-) 

Hello everyone. The time has come! We are going to be migrating our website to a new system and doing a full shop inventory over the next couple days. During this time period we're going to disable all new orders from the web store in order to ensure as seamless a transition between the old and new system with all historic order data properly ported over.

As of 2pm PST today the checkout process is disabled on our store site, but you our simulator tools will stay active and other content is still accessible. At some point tomorrow you should see a new but similar version of the ebikes.ca live, and a day or two after that we expect to enable orders once again.

Thanks for being patient with us through this transition period and we look forward to seeing you on the other side.

We're glad to say that all the hard work of our manufacturing and shipping teams has paid off after the end-of-summer catchup. Our order queue and shipping lead times for most products are back to regular pre-covid era, even though our volumes remain just as high.  

With that under our belt we have yet another big reorganization to brace for next week. We'll be performing the migration of our website to a new and more modern platform on Thursday October 1st. We're expecting a 1-2 day period when the new www.ebikes.ca site will be live but order checkouts will be temporarily disabeld. This will allow us to carefully check the stability, security, and functionality of all aspects of the page before opening it up to payments order processing.

We thank you once again in advance for your patience while we sort through these upgrades! Forwards we go.  

After a succesful summer of field testing we're glad to have a pair of geared hub motors from Shengyi added to our catalog. These motors have the same quiet helical gears that everyone loves about the Bafang G310/G311 motors, but are in a slightly larger size level and power class. Many customers were pushing the G31x's a little beyond their capability and we think the SX1 (front) and SX2 (rear)  hubs will do a great job of fitting that gap between the small Bafang's and much more powerful motors like the GMAC. The front SX1 motors are in stock now, and the rear SX2 hubs should be in early October. 

Read more about the SX1 / SX2 motors here.

One feature we're proud to deploy in these hubs is a combined speed AND temperature sensing in the Z910 motor plug which is compatible with our latest Baserunner controllers.  As long as you have a kit with a V3 Cycle Analyst, you can comfortably see the motor temperature on your display and push the power limits without the risk of fried windings. We're aiming to make this feature standard in all of our new geared motors with the Z910 connector. 

Hey everyone we have now finished started the planned Aug 22nd - 29th store shutdown. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we got caught up. Please note that while our store is now open again - we are still not serving walk-in customers due to ongoing CoVID-19 restrictions. During this week we will get caught with all aging orders and communication backlogs, and also deploy new internal systems to smooth out our operations. Our sales and support staff will still be available by email but new orders are now on hold.  If you have things in your cart you'll be able to check out on Aug 30th. 

Ebike activity has really been through the roof this summer and we wanted to thank both the team here and our customers for their patience as we adjust to this new reality. We've managed to step up our manufacturing throughput so that most of our key items (Phaserunners, Baserunners, All Axle motors, CA3-WP's, LiGo Batteries..) have been in good supply again; our sales and support team have been responding to over 1500 emails and countless phone calls each week; and our packing and shipping team of been getting record throughput out the door.

One downside of this unprecedented activity is that other items (new video releases, web content updates, R&D, user manuals, new product development etc.) have taken a backseat as we try to stay on top of top order volumes. We're hoping to make headway on a number of those fronts next week too.

Introducing our new Operations Manager - Guy Thorburn

We're pleased to have brought an experienced fellow like Guy onboard as our first full-time operations manager. Guy has previously been involved with successful tech businesses in BC like Carmanah (https://carmanah.com/), and helped Grin during our first move away from the small shop on Main St. 10 years ago. We're looking forward to have him as part of our core team as we scale things to the next phase in this exciting industry. 

More Job Hirings

Thanks to everyone that sent in an application for our recent job postings - we're currently finished with hiring for now and have a few exciting new team members here at Grin...

That said if you're an eBike repair and support expert, we'd love to hear from you - send over an email with a resume and cover letter as well as anything else you think we should know.

We've had a half dozen new staff join Grin this summer but we are still looking for even more! There are two roles in particular that we could use filled like yesterday:

1) Remote Technical Support: We're still looking for people with a technical background in order to help with troubleshooting and support. This is a position that can be done remotely so no need to be in Vancouver, but we are after someone who already has deep familiarity and understanding of Grin's entire product lineup and superb typing and writing skills. This could be a great side hustle for an ebike guru out of work due to the Covid situation, and we're open to both part time or full time possibilities.

2) Packing / Shipping Assistant: We're also after another pair of hands to work full time in the packing and shipping side of our business. This job can't be done remote, so if you know someone in Vancouver looking for a manual job with a good crew of people then feel free to spread the word.

If you are interested in either of these then please send us an email with a resume, cover letter, and any other details about yourself you think we should know.   

This summer hasn't slowed down one bit and we're still firing away on all phases to keep up. However the excess activity has resulted in some organizational chaos across our shop. We will be closing both our online store and phyiscal shop for from Aug 22nd to Aug 30th for some deep cleaning and restructuring to better serve people and to fully catch up on any backlogs. It will also allow us to sort through tons of old stock and prepare an epic end-of-summer garage sale of ebike parts!

During this period we will still be answering support emails, but we won't be able to take in new orders or process any orders placed after August 14th.

Thanks in advance for your understanding and happy riding.

We thought May was a record busy month here but June has even stepped that up a notch! Normally this should be a good news item as we all want ebikes to take off. However, it also means that in spite of careful inventory planning and increased staffing levels earlier this year, we're still having a difficult time keeping up with this activity. We're currently receiving 250-300 emails a day which is more than our capacity to answer, and many items that we thought would be in good supply are fast running out of stock.

We're doing what we can to stay caught up, to bring on more staff, and to expedite stop-gap inventory supplies. And in the meantime, we appreciate your patience as our email response time is slower than usual, and orders are sometimes taking a week or more to ship out as we work through the queue.

We would also like to remind our local customers that we are still committed to contact-less order pick-ups and are not accepting unscheduled visits. Please continue to place your orders online and we will contact you when the order is ready to collect. 

Efficiency Presentation - Sun Jun 21st

In spite of all this busyness, we will still be going ahead with the next installment in our live seminars to spread in-depth knowledge of different aspects of ebike technology. But we will be dropping the frequency of these from every 2 weeks to once a month. The focus of our upcoming presentation will be all about motor and system efficiency, and will start this Sunday at 10am PDT. Tune in if you feel like geeking out! This talk will get a little nerdy. 

Our Phaserunner Motor Controllers are back in stock with an updated V3 design that uses the new waterproof WP8 Cycle Analyst plug standard. This brings the Phaserunner into the same connector realm as the Baserunner controllers and simplifies the hookup of motor temperature sensors and handlebar on/off power switches. See our short Phaserunner V3 Updates List for a detailed explanation.

Actually, we've been making them like mad for the past couple weeks since the parts came in just trying to keep up with the order volumes during this record breaking busy month of May! By the end of this week we expect to be fully caught up on the back-orders and we thank everyone for their patience if you've had an order in the queue that hasn't shipped yet.