Re: Powered Bicycles

Last month I bought a Golden Motor 500W 26" front wheel motor kit from Amped The kit came with nearly eveything I needed and installed pretty easily on my mountain bike. I supplied three 12v batteries, some zip ties and a couple of washers to secure the large hub to the forks, and a couple of bolts to attach the rack.

 I have twist shifters on the bike, so the hand grips that come with the kit are a little awkward, they have a typical flared ring on the inboard side and the sensor wires coming from the break grips pass directly over the shifters, both of these make it harder to get to the shifters. On the other hand, with the power of the motor to compensate, I don't have to shift as much, so it hasn't been a big deal. Regular shifters would be better though.

I ride the bike to work, which is about 14 miles round trip. I'm terribly out of shape, and the bike is a heavy inefficent mountain bike with 2.5 inch off-road tires. On a bad day when I'm pedaling but only putting out a fairly pathetic amount of effort the batteries last for all but the last few minutes of the trip. The 7Ah pack recharges in about 3-4 hours on the supplied  36v charger. You could certainly add a larger battery pack if you wanted to go farther, the three 7Ah batteries are small enough that you could use bigger cells without much trouble.

I suspect that a more efficient bike would significantly increase the range, the big off-road tires on my bike are unbalanced at top speed and are heavy, so it takes more energy to get them up to speed.

Amped was great to deal with, free shipping out of California, very prompt and answered all my questions.