News

Hey Everyone, it's coming close to Christmas season and another interesting year about to wrap up. We want to thank all those who've been supporting us through our shop move and summer supply woes, and are wishing you all the best for these holidays. 

Grin will be operational during the Christmas to New Years period but with reduced staffing, and our response times and shipping times may not be as quick.

Finally, big kuddos to all those who continue ebike riding through the winter season!

PRO TIP: If you do ride in freezing weather, you can expect your battery pack voltage to sag more than usual and the BMS to trip earlier in the discharge as a result. This is just a temporary effect that reverts when the battery is warm again. If you want to avoid this behaviour, keep your battery indoors until you need to use it, and consider wrapping the battery in an insulating material so it doesn't cool down as fast on the road.

COLD WEATHER CAUTION: While discharging in the cold is fine, please be mindful not to charge your batteries in below freezing temperatures, as this can cause dangerous lithium metal plating inside the cells. Bring your battery indoors or someplace warm before charging it up.

A few months ago our Grin Instagram account sprung back into life thanks to Aaron, our resident Videographer. It had been sitting dormant since the 2018 Suntrip race, but is now active again with weekly peeks into some of the stuff going on behind the scenes here at Grin.

If you'd like to keep up to date with activities, product rollouts, neat projects, and fun personalities, then give us a follow! See short videos like our CNC Lathe Delivery and First Customer Electric Sailboat Installation. We'll keep it sweet and interesting and look forward to engaging with you on this platform.

Our youtube channel subscribers have noticed a lot of solar related videos being dumped lately. From the 1300 watt installation on an electric sailboat to panel wiring tutorials to a follow up with Mark Havran, you'd be forgiven to think that the sun was always shining in Vancouver!

Anyways, summer may be winding down but our interest in the overlap between solar energy capture and personal sized EV's keeps growing. We now have a wide assortment of 50W to 170W Sunpower solar panels in stock, a good supply of MPPT charge controllers, and have recently written a new solar kit info page for those wanting to learn more. The sun may not be shining much anymore but there are many reasons to see how solar fits in with your winter project plans, not to mention that next summer the famous Suntrip Solar Ebike Race is taking place in America.  

Well it's the middle of 2021 and you'd think from our blog updates that not much has been going on since the move. But as usual quiet on the blog is because we are wildly busy behind the scenes!

Parts Availability

As has been widely discussed, 2021 is proving to be an exceedingly difficult year to navigate in the manufacturing industry. Oversease shipping costs have tripled, lead times on most ebike part orders have gone from 8-12 weeks to more like 8-12 months, if we can get them at all. We've been working exceedingly hard navigating this situation, finding alternative suppliers and backup plans to ensure we continue having items available for customers interested in DIY ebike builds.

In spite of our best attempts and planning over winter, the situation is still far from ideal. Here is an update on some key parts:

• Downtube Batteries: Many lower capacity models have been out of stock or cells not available, but our shipment ordered in January is finally expected to arrive at the begining of August and the full range available. Expect higher prices than before. 
• Baserunner_L10 Controllers: Unfortunately these key controllers for our higher power ready-to-roll kits have been sold out since May, but spot buying and part substitution should yield a relief batch again in early August.
• CA3-WP: Many orders from the last few weeks have been hung up from an outage of CA3 devices, but luckily our next production is imminent and back ordered kits will be shipping this week.

Otherwise though, we are doing great in the supply of smaller geared motors and lower power ready-to-roll kits, and continue the rollout of innovative electric systems for DIY conversion of other vehicle types beyond ebikes.

Wheelbarrow motor and Kit

After the unexpected success of our initial order of geared wheelbarrow motors, we now have a fresh supply this time with the 16" wheelbarrow tires already installed to facilitate use of this hub in custom low speed and high torque projects.

Here's an overview video we just released of the motor

And a first order preview of the conversion kit

Marine Conversion Drive

We're also making great headway in our development of a custom high-RPM hub motor for direct drive in sailboats with inboard engines, and are taking this from our proof-of-concept into a commercial project this summer.<

For those interested, we have a sign-up sheet and are sending out update emails to keep in the loop of our rollout plans and participate in this pilot. Here's the latest video update showing the power of this hub right up to 5kW, and we have an even larger motor model that will do 8kW:

Adapter for Bosch Batteries

We've also got an initial batch of custom XLR->Bosch adapter cables made up to charge Bosch battery systems using our Satiator charger.  This is one of the most often requested adapters and we're glad to finally have a solution. 

The overmolded plug includes built-in electronics with a 42.5V cutoff as an extra safety against accidental use with a higher voltage charge profile, and we're looking forward to feedback from early adapters before we produce them in bulk.  

Website

Finally we've been continuously enhancing aspects of our website since the fall platform upgrade. Now you should be able to see much more relevant information about the components of each conversion kit, eta dates for out of stock options, automatic links to our motor simulator, and dynamically generated spec information among other things.

We know that there is still a long way to go to simplify navigating and finding the information you want, and appreciate your feedback and patience. This is a constant work-in-progress.

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.

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 :-)