DEMO INSTALLATION OF A FRONT HUB MOTOR KIT AT THE 2019 BC BIKE SHOW

Okay, everyone, I believe it's. 02:00. So time to start this presentation. I'm Justin La Miramar, the owner and founder of Grin Technologies. We're a company that specializes in manufacturing, engineering, distributing, selling parts to convert bikes into electric a six. This is the first time for us to actually do a live conversion on stage in the time pressure of a 30 minutes time window. And the point of this talk is to sort of demystify what the process is of converting a regular bike into an electric bike and to show that it's not that complicated of a process. Anyone who's mechanically adept enough to fix our work on bikes should be comfortable with putting a conversion kit on a normal bicycle. So here we're fortunate enough to have a bicycle that this isn't just a staged installation.

We actually have a customer in the audience.

I believe it's Carolyn over there. It's a thumbs up. So she has this bicycle that she loves. It's a step through frame bike that makes it very easy for getting on and off. And with the turnkey electric bicycles that are out there, there weren't many models that had the same appeal that she had as a bite that she could ride.

So this is one of the main reasons people will choose a conversion over a factory bike because they already have a bike, a bike that suits them that's personalized to their needs. And a conversion kit allows them to then upgrade that bicycle to have all the benefits of electric assist on this bicycle. It's a three speed bike. It has a three speed internal hub on it, and that eliminates the possibility of doing a rear hub motor, because if you put a motor on, you need to have a detailer system to change the gears. So that gave us options then, of putting a motor either in the front or putting a motor on the crank.

Now, because of the unusual geometry of this bike, where the bottom bracket is connected to the seat tube rather than connected to a junction point. The bottom bracket conversion, the mid drives that go on the bottom bracket won't fit mechanically because it's also got a three speed hub on the back. If she was to install them, they drive kit. It would be putting more power into this hub than the hub is rated for. And there'd be a higher risk of actually causing the calls in the gears in the three speed hubs are failed.

So really, that force the only option to be a front hub motor, which is great because there's a ton of front hub motor options, and a front hub is the easiest motor option to install on a conversion kit. So as our first go to choice, we would always like as a front hub suitable. If so, then we would go over the range of front Motors because they have the easiest installation and the least likelihood of compatibility problems. So the other thing about this bike frame is that it's not a conventional triangle frame like you see on most bikes where you have a straight down tube on which you can Mount the battery.

On this bike. And you can read for the beginner's guide for electric bicycle works in previous article

There are water bottle mounts on this curve tube here, but if we were to physically put one of the down two mounted batteries, it would block this channel where you use the statute for the frame convergence. So that rules out the option of a frame mounted battery, which is kind of the most popular choice for a conversion kit because it keeps the center of gravity low, and that forces us to rethink step back and look at the other possibilities. So one option is to put a battery in the front. So we have some flat batteries that we would have thought could fit flat on the bottom and still let you use the basket. But they were about half an inch too long for this particular basket.

Does that really forced us to go from the get go? Looking at our rear rack battery options. A lot of bicycles already have a rear rack on them, and we have a range of adapter plate that will let you Mount the battery, have it, click and lock on to your existing rack. If the bike doesn't have a rack, then the companies that produce these rack batteries often supply a rack for you. And in this case, we'll be using the battery rack that comes with the battery, and that I'll discuss in a minute some of the benefits of going with the dedicated rack options.

And so having decided that that we're doing a rack battery and a front hub motor, we're going to look at the components of the kits that we're going to install, as well as the tools that are necessary for doing this installation. First and foremost, we have the actual motorized wheel. So at our stock, we carry a whole range of different hub Motors. Most of them as we stack them, are not laced into a rim. It's just a bear hug.

And then we would build it into a wheel. So the customer picks up a ready to go wheel like this. So this mode, this wheel will then just swap out for the existing front wheel. This here is the rack that I was just discussing. So this is a double deck rack, so it has a cavity for the battery to fit inside and still leaves a fresh top surface so that you have the option of installing a trunk bag or carry on cargo on pot. If you have a conventional rack that you then put an adapter on the battery will sit on that. But you have a difficult time mounting additional gear on top of the battery pack. The battery itself here is an easy flat pack battery. This one is 36 volts 20 amp hours. That gives us about 720 Watt hours of energy.

And on a typical consumption rate that is equivalent to 70 km of discount. So there are smaller batteries and larger batteries. But at this point most batteries will be in the 50 to 80 kilometer range, and this is sort of on the higher side of that. There's a component to the conversion kit that most people won't be familiar with unless their experience with electric Motors. And that's the motor controller.

And so the battery Pat provides DC power able to run a system. But the hub motor itself is alternating current. It's a three phrase brushless motor, and when you're on the bike, you want to be able to modulate and vary the power going to the motor. So you can't just plug a motor straight to the battery. You need some control circuit in between the that dolls out the power and converts the direct current to alternating current. And that's the job of the motor controller. Now, in this conversion kit, the motor controller is a separate entity. It's a separate black box. Some of the conversion kits will hide the motor controller. Either they might fit it actually inside the motor, which you can do on the bigger Motors, or they might Mount the motor controller inside the battery pack.

Those have advantages for having a clean installation because you don't have this extra part, but it has downsides for its substitutability and upgradability down the road, because if you have an electronic failure, it's not easy to swap something out that's integrated that way or controlling the bicycle itself. We're going to do an installation here where we use a throttle control. So this is a thumb throttle lever, so as you ride, you can just control exactly the power that you get by pushing the lever with your thumb. There's also options for twist trip, more like on a motorcycle. A twist grip can be handier for long duration riding because you don't have to have your thumb extended, but it's easier to accidentally twist the throttle if you're just walking the bite to lock it to Iraq.

If you're not mindful, you can twist the throttle by mistake and have the motor take off. It's also possible to install pedal sensors on any conversion kit where there's a system that detects when you're pedaling or how hard you're pedaling and then regulates the power automatically that we wouldn't be able to fit into a 30 minutes installation. So here we're going to show the install up to the point of a throttle control. There's also a range of display options, so most conversion kits now will come with a display that gives you the basic information on the charge of all on your battery pack as well as the speed of the bike.

This is a fairly technical display that we produce, but it will show on as main screen a battery icon doing how full your battery is and give you your speed, your distance. But it also gives a lot more interesting information that as you gain familiarity with the bike, you start to understand exactly how many amp powers the battery produces, and you see what your energy usage is like in a unit called Watt hours per kilometer. And with that information, you can predict with very high accuracy how far you'll get with any given battery, and you can see as you change your writing habit exactly how that's going to affect your range. So it's a bit of an educational tool to inform people about how their electrical systems working and behaving over here.

We have the stuff that facilitates the electrical installation. So cable pies are front and foremost the main way that you deal to handle the keeping the cables routed close to the bike frame. There's these Velcro stretchy sleeves, and these are just a fabric that you can use to wrap around the tubing or the cable bundles and tuck away. All the connectors is concealed from view and results in a more aesthetic finish. One of my favorite components in the installation is spiral rat, and this is a plastic tubing that's cutting the spiral, and it allows you to bundle all the electrical wires to the existing brake housing or shifter housing, so that visually and aesthetically, you just have one cable run.

You don't see five or six parallel wires. In the absence of this, a lot of people will run a bunch of zip ties side by side, but this has a much cleaner look. Now, the tool for the installation here is really three things, so I have side cutters for cutting zip ties. That's really the only function of that. There's an Allen set and that's used for removing components on the bike, and then a rent is required for installing the motor itself.

Okay, so with the front wheel, you have to be a little bit careful about what is the Ford in the reverse direction of rotation and the two that you have for any of the motives that we sell is that the front Motors all have a disc brake map, and the disc brake is always on the left side of a front porch. If you make a mistake and install it backwards, you'll be surprised the moment you hit the throttle. Luckly. We're going to hit the throttle before we hit on the bike to make sure everything's good that way.

There's another consideration with the installation, which is the exit on the wires, and you generally want the cable to exit pointing downwards. So if you install this wheel and you have the wire sticking up like that, then the wire can become a point of water in graph. So if there's any break in the seal, it'll track water into the hub. If the cable exit pointing down and water will drip to the bottom of the loop and fall off, it won't climb its way back up and into that deal. So always try to have cable exists on the underside.

So here. I've removed the hardware that was on it. We're going to slide this up into the fork. So about 60% of the bicycle, the front wheel will just slide into the fork like that. About 30% to 40% of the time. You try to get it in and it'll actually get. Or you can see more pleasure for DEMO INSTALLATION OF A FRONT HUB MOTOR KIT AT THE 2019 BC BIKE SHOW