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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

What's a good ebike? Are the conversion kits any good?

I have a steel frame touring bike that I use to get to work on (a Trek 520 clone) occasionally. It's great but if it was a bit easier I would probably commute by bike more often.

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I'm really impressed by the kits from ebikes.ca. The owner, Justin, innovates several of the components sold through there and other retailers. Specifically their "cycle analyst", which is a multi function ebike computer controller.

For my needs, I ended up with a geared rear-wheel hub kit, as the motor is smaller and hidden by the gears and disc brakes. The battery came from Luna Cycle.

I will say though, buying the controllers or motors straight from China is cheaper by a factor of 50-80%, and allows you to get more headroom. Though I wouldn't trust Chinese batteries, and shipping can be slow.

How can something be 150% cheaper?

Ah sorry, I meant the reverse, that Luna cycles is more expensive by 50-150%. Will fix.

It's a different price for a different product. Grin Technologies does their own design, and makes great stuff.

Not for the motors, and the Grin ESCs are not the only ones available. In any cases, Chinese Kunteng ESCs are also very well made, with an open-source firmware available and provide pure-sine wave control as well as regenerative braking for less than a third of the price of a Grin ESC, and also have headroom (people have been overvolting them by significant margins without issues).

Yes, Grin has its own custom motor designs.

Yes, and they are pretty bad. For the price of a Grin motor you can buy a much better, fully custom QS Motor with components and windings of your own choice, and have enough money left to buy a second one. The Grin motor will be slightly lighter but will also overheat earlier, so there's really no advantage - you can just get a smaller motor and push it harder. Nothing is free - Grin motors aren't really better than anything out of China and for the outrageous price they sell at you can literally get a motor custom made.

Justin from a .ca website: nice.

He is also really active on some of the ebike forums.

If you consider converting your bike, make sure that your bikes brakes are good. Mass will increase and you’ll generally ride faster. There’s a reason most solid e-bikes use disk brakes.

In most countries e-bikes are limited to 250W and 25km/h, so considerably slower than what I do on my road bike with rim brakes. But your point still stands about weight. And if the e-bike is replacing other commuting, the weather will not always be nice which is another reason to use good disk brakes.

Many modern road bikes offer disk brakes, too. I certainly wish for having them on mine, but I’d need a new frame and I like my current one.

(the power limit is on average, btw, not peak power delivery, but that’s a nitpick)

Take care though, hydraulic disc brakes doesn't always mean more stopping power. I found budget ebikes are mostly fitted with really cheap disk brakes that felt spongy and lacked safe stopping power. Good cable rim brakes are always better than cheapo hydraulic disc brakes.

Yeah, I skipped on getting expensive Ultegra or extra light carbon frame, as I feel that don't really impact performance much. But I will definitely go for disk brakes next time. It's just smoother, and doesn't strain the hands as much when going down steep mountains. Even better performance as I with a disk brake bike dare to go faster because I know I can easily slow down before.

You are probably also right about the power, but from my workout yesterday my avg was 242 watts, and peak 686 w. So I still think it's about the same 8)

I got this https://www.bafangusadirect.com/bafang-750w-bbs02-mid-drive-... and it works great! I've had it for a few years now. strong enough to handle pulling both my kids in a bike trailer and also a lot faster than I was expecting for commuting back and forth to work.

These days I'm kinda reluctant to rec reddit due to all the toxic nonsense, but the ebike subreddit has some really great resources, particularly for people who want to do a diy buildup.

No... Reddit is still most definitely shit, even for Ebikes...

Check out Endless Sphere.

https://www.radpowerbikes.com

https://lunacycle.com/luna-fixed-stealth-ebike/

For commuting, the Crosscurrent by Juiced Bikes

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