The Reliant Robin of E-Bikes

 

Maybe three isn't the magic number

In the early nineties, I worked in a bike shop and suspension forks were the latest in a long line of bicycle crazes. Everyone's previously fun mountain bike had suddenly become unusable if they didn't ditch their rigid fork in favor of a pogo up front. People would come into the shop with $100 to buy a suspension fork, and I would sell them mountain bike clipless pedals and shoes after carefully explaining that an entry level suspension fork, without effective control of that movement, would make their bike ride worse, but effectively attaching their feet to the pedals, two more points of control, would bring far more joy from their invested dollars. Yes, I've since learned the amazing things that can be done to control a bike with grippy shoe rubber on open pedals, but none of those customers ever came back to complain about how I'd advised their purchase.

Jump forward a lot of years, and the bike industry is still reaping the rewards of selling crazes. The latest is the e-bike. Like suspension forks, e-bikes can be really good. Yes, I just said both those things. But also like suspension forks, when everyone now "needs" an e-bike, plenty of manufacturers will produced poorly executed ones at attainable price points, so I'm back to my old opinion that money is more effectively enjoyed when spent on a good design of some other technology instead of a cut rate version of the latest craze.

Yesterday was Bike Lab, and Adele called me over for my input on someone's bike, an recent e-bike conversion. The electric front wheel, the main portion of the kit wasn't true. It never had been. It was built cheaply, and not well. In using the brake pads as a gauge of how out of true it was, I took note that they were both adjusted high on the rim, so I first checked that the wheel was sitting fully in the dropout. It wasn't. Closer look, it couldn't. The owner told me the hub axle was offered in 9mm and 10mm diameters and hoped the right size was ordered, and yes, 9mm was tbe correct diameter, but the electric hub axle wasn't actually a diameter. It wasn't round. It was the result of a 12mm diameter round shaft with two sides ground down to 9mm, but a top shape that didn't fully seat in a dropout designed for a 9mm DIAMETER. The owner acknowledged there are instructions on the company website for how to file the axle to properly fit a fork dropout designed for something round.

Fork dropout, that's another important phrase to consider. Pedal a bike, and far in excess of 9,999 times out of 10,000, that power will go to the rear wheel. In addition to the design simplicity of not needing to transfer power to a steerable wheel, a wheel can also steer much more effectively when its grip isn't also distributed to propulsion duties. Yes, front wheel drive has become the defacto standard for automobiles due to compact packaging advantages, but pretty much any car designed for handling from the ground up splits steering and propulsion duties between all four wheels. It just works. No, no, I didn't test ride the front wheel e-bike to feel the different dynamic, partly because Bike Lab was busy, but also because probing the handling limits of a borrowed bike that I didn't trust seemed a bad idea.

So for $500, this company from the UK sells a wheel that isn't true, may disrupt the bike's natural handling, and with a hub axle that requires filing to properly fit a fork like it should have, in my opinion, from the factory. Sigh. Yes, e-bikes can be a lot of fun, and you can choose from ones with gut punch power delivery or without, but unfortunately, you can also noe buy electric assist parts that were fast tracked to cheap production so everyone can afford to make their bike dangerous with a sub par design. I can think of much better uses for $500, like multiple cool used bikes!