Ebike Industry Updates

For the last 3 years I have really enjoyed riding my Ludicrous enabled Luna X-1 Full suspension ebike. After much use and abuse the rear freehub finally blew out. This is a common problem on higher power mid drive ebikes, but one that is easily remedied by relacing the rear wheel with a DT Swiss rear hub which uses a fantastic steel ratcheting system that is incredibly reliable. This article is about the issues I had when doing the rear wheel relacing and some direction on how to relace a rear wheel and also why I decided to swap the cassette, derailleur, shifter and chain from a 12 speed to a 10 speed chain.

This is the right hub for the X-1 : DT Swiss 350 Rear Hub – 12 x 148mm, 6-Bolt, HG 11 MTN, Black/White, 32H, 18pt for $239 on bikeman.com

The DT Swiss hubs can be hard to find and there is about a million different versions of them. I have bought about $1500 worth of DT Swiss hubs from bikeman.com and every single one has worked in the ebike I retrofitted them too. Generally I buy an ebike and run it till the freehub fails then I buy a DT Swiss hub and relace the wheel to get the bike back to ridable condition. Every single one of the high power mid drive fatbikes I ride including my Christini AWD are all fitted with the DT Swiss hubs at this point. Here is the cold hard truth, if you are running between 2000-4000 Watts through your drivetrain and plowing through deep snow your freehub will eventually self destruct. The lightweight and expensive aluminum ones will die faster but even cheap steel freehubs will eventually fail. The only hubs I have found that do not fail at those power levels is the DT Swiss ones with the Star Ratcheting system.

Measure spokes with this $10 tool

In all my DT Swiss conversions I have been able to use the same spokes that came with the original wheel. This makes things a lot easier and faster, just make sure that you keep the spokes on the different sides of the wheel separated because they are generally slightly different lengths. With the X-1 the spokes were extremely thick (12 Gauge?) and did not fit through the holes on the DT-Swiss hubs. I measured the length of the spokes with a spoke ruler and averaged the difference between the two sides and bought a set of 36 cheap spokes on Amazon that were 253mm for just $13.99 available here. Most wheels in the US only have 32 spokes so that leaves me with 4 extra spokes for future breakage. This includes the nipples as well. 38 cents a spoke is quite a bit cheaper than my local bike shop, but if you don’t have a spoke wrench and don’t want to deal with Amazon, you can wander into your local bike shop with the spoke that you have and they will try to find something similar or cut it and thread it if they have to.

This beautiful custom scooter really impressed me as soon as I saw it. As you can imagine, Steve is a experienced wooden boat builder, and he also makes fine furniture out of wood. If that wasn’t enough, Steve also owns patents for his development of the GoPed scooter “one arm” suspension. Steve made the wooden body, and the Vextrix chassis is owned by his close friend, Peter Senkowsky.

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Although Steve’s creation is based on a Vectrix VX-1 “scooter”, it is a serious commuter vehicle. As a road vehicle it is rated for 68-MPH. The front tire is a tubeless 120/70 on a 14-inch wheel. The Vectrix includes hydraulic disc brakes front and rear. Although the headquarters were in Massachusetts, the Vectrix was assembled in a factory located in Poland, since Europe has remained it’s biggest market.

The powertrain is a brushless electric motor attached to the left side of the rear wheel. A thin planetary reduction brings the motor’s high RPM’s down to wheel-speeds.

2006-2014

I thought I would save a few dollars on getting a 5kWh LifePo4 battery for my wife’s off grid home. Little did I know that this decision would cost me over a hundred hours of my time and take almost a year to get working properly. This article is a tale of my woes that stretched over the better part of a year and how I finally got the battery to work properly after replacing the BMS and one of the damaged cells. This story is not for the meek of heart so here we go.

This tiny dent (bottom right) in one of the 8 cells was enough to keep this cell from charging and discharging properly

It all started with Aliexpress

Aliexpress is owned by the same folks as Alibaba with the one big difference is that it looks a lot more like ebay and it is designed for people who just want to buy a couple of a particular thing instead of a couple of thousand of a particular thing. I got online and started shopping, I didn’t want the cheapest battery, but I also didn’t want the most expensive. I settled on a 24v 5kWh LifePO4 battery with a claimed charge/discharge rate of 250 amps. I have enough experience with chinese companies to know that a claimed charge/discharge rate of 250 amps really means a charge/discharge rate of 100 amps, but all I needed for our solar system was 80 so that was fine. The battery was about $1400 shipped so I paid the money with paypal and then the battery shipped. Because I bought this at the time of the shipping crisis it took well over 6 months to get here. I notified the sellers and they would send me a shipping manifest in chinese which I fed into google translate so I could follow my battery across the sea.

No pain, no working battery, all good things in life come through suffering

The battery arrives, but is smashed from shipping

I got the battery which showed 22v of voltage but would not charge or discharge. There was small plastic pieces in the box, there was no arrow showing what side was supposed to be up on the outside of the box and the 80lb battery had clearly been shipped upside down. They told me to take the battery apart to check the inside, but the top was glued on. There were handles on the top so I hung the battery from the handles and then heated up the glue around the rim of the box and used a screwdriver to open up the steel battery box and cutting my finger pretty badly in the process. Once the box was apart I could see what had happened. The battery was shipped upside down and one of the spot welded aluminum pieces on the first cell had broken off. That is why it was showing voltage (it was touching the battery) but why I could not charge or discharge because the connection was not good enough to pass any real amperage through.