Str33t Us3

Bike Motor Modification

Sculpturer Eric Peltzer has built his own electric mountain bike using a huge go-kart motor. He writes on his blog: "The reason for this powerful a motor is simple: hills. I live on a steep hill. While a Zap or a US ProDrive rated at 400 watts goes a decent 17 mph on flat land, they slow to 3 to 5 mph on a decent hill. I can pedal that fast. However I wanted to go faster and be able to get up a hill. The simple fact is that you need from 5 to 10 times as much power to go a given speed on a decent grade. This is why a car that only needs 12 hp to go 60 mph on flat roads has an engine that can put out 100 to 200 hp."

A separate independently created home-made electric bike, found on Flickr (via Makezine). Don't know much about it, other than it was made by Pete Green and uses a 350W motor.

Posted on November 7, 2006 at 4:41 PM | +del.icio.us +digg +reddit

Comments

You control the motor with a pulse width modulating speed controller. A bit expensive, but worth it. look it up.

Posted by Andrew on May 11, 2007 at 3:18 PM

on and off worked fine for me! this was using the c5 motor, i found a 70amp relay and with a burn-coast usage it worked fine.

Posted by Brent on February 2, 2007 at 1:31 PM

very nice. i motorised a old bike but i removed the padals and cranks so it was a proper motorbike. it was powered by a lwanmower engine with 950 watts of power. it eaisilt hit 30mph and ran nicley around 40mph. it no longer works as the engine overheated to many times so im going to fit a sinclare c5 motor to it instead. i was wondering how you controll the speed of the motor and if i can just have it on or off. thanks

Posted by Matt on November 24, 2006 at 3:28 PM