Nuvinci is all the rage lately, and it seems to be a good solution to dealing with fat tires that tend to rub the chain in the lower gears as well as the incessant chain jumps & breakage that comes with shifting a mid-drive under load. Two weeks ago Fallbrook (Nuvinci) announced the release of a…
Seems like I’ve been getting a lot of emails about the Origin 8 Crawler fatbike with the Nuvinci hub from people wanting to do BBS02 conversions on it. Seems like a decent platform although pretty hefty at a claimed 42lbs, probably for the smallest frame size. 42lbs is the same weight that my singlespeed Deadeye…
I got an email last week about replacement costs for a Bosch Battery direct through Magura USA who is the US center for Bosch ebike parts and repairs. I’m not a big fan of the Bosch drive system (you can see why about 1/2 down the post here) but I thought I would do a financial…
A couple of weeks ago I pretended that I was someone who actually had any money and sent inquiries to a bunch of vendors on Alibaba for bulk purchases of ebike quotes. Of about a dozen vendors, the one I liked the best was this front suspension fatbike with a BBS01 750W drive unit and…
Several weeks ago I was hitting a banked turn on a snowmobile track going over 25mph with chains on when the bike slipped out from under me and I hit the ice so fast I didn’t know what hit me. After that incident I borrowed a set of Dillinger 4 studded fatbike snow tires from my…
If you mount a hub motor that is over 500 watts on any bike frame you’re going to want to use a Torque arm to prevent your dropouts from opening up under load and in some cases catastrophically failing. There are a couple good options from Grin Tech that involve hoseclamps (the v3 and 4v…
For most people using the PAS system on the BBS02 they have had to get used to just barely pulling in the front brake (enough for the motor to disengage) in order to up shift without putting serious strain on their chain and risking breakage. Paul from em3ev is now selling a Giant Green Button™…
I’ve been procrastinating about doing this post for a while now because I honestly feel like hub motors have no place at all on trail-riding fat-bikes except maybe as the front wheel of an AWD ebike. The wheels are way too big and the torque is far to limited to be of any use at…
I’ve built a couple of AWD fatbikes out of my Boris X9 donorbike that I bought for $700 on BikeIsland.com, all have been something of a disappointment. I have to admit that this current build firmly joins my other AWD builds in the ‘disappointing’ category. It is a startling contrast to have a MAC motor and a…
When you’re going over 20 mph in the woods and you slam on the brakes you want to stop as quickly as you possibly can. Most fat bikes that cost <$600 have what I call ‘Brake Shaped Objects’ (BSO) mounted on the frame. These ‘BSO’ look like brakes but don’t work very well at all. The…
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