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Asus Bike Booster

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121–130 of 476 posts

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#123
post #12

Friction drive e-bike conversions were popular years ago. They generally: * Wear tires surprisingly quickly * Absolutely suck in any form of weather or terrain condition (dirt, rain, etc.) * Have ~20% less efficiency than any other drive form. But, they are easy, and they do work.

I remember back in the 90s some guys at my school fitted a whipper snipper motor to a 12” kiddy bike with a friction drive (I think it was a skateboard wheel fitted to the output shaft).

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#124

Clive Sinclair designed one of these in the 90s. It actually sold reasonably well, but was limited by the available battery technology of the period. https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/vehicles/zeta.htm

Yes my grandfather had one. It worked well on flat terrain. I think it used a motorcycle battery so batteries were easy to find and charge.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thieves will just take the whole bike.

Tbh solving this is one of the actual use cases for things like flock cameras. Simply bolting things down harder is still defeated by a battery powered grinder.

You don’t gotta be impossible to steal from, you just gotta be more annoying to steal from than the next guy.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#126

If I ever convert my bike to electric, I'll probably go with this https://www.swytchbike.com/

I actually bought one of these and love it. My road bike is indistinguishable from any other normal road bike with the exception of it being much easier to get around now.

From experience I can say that it seems like a lot more common sense to simply replace the front wheel of your bike with a wheel containing an electric motor, rather than attaching whatever Asus is selling to your bike.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not, it teaches the child dependence on the adult instead of giving the child agency.

But a 9 year old is dependant on their parents ...?

...yes? The child bicycling their own bike, vs being attached to the parents bike is a tiny bit of independence to grant a child at that age.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#128
If I bought this I might want a brake upgrade. Even though it probably provides only about 150W (I always assume ebike power ratings are inflated), the extra weight alone warrants disc brakes IMHO.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#129
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? Does prison work as a deterrence to others?

There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable. So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.

On one hand, you’re breaking existing networks; on the other hand you are establishing a social club for new ones.

Re: Asus Bike Booster

#130
post #33

some bike vendor told me that the biggest problem with regular to ebike conversion was that regular bike frames were not strong enough to support the additional forces that the electric bike imposed. And it was why the ebikes were much heavier than regular bikes. Does anyone know if that’s true and if that applies to conversions like this one?

It's less of an issue for this device. The reason is that the motor is further from the axle than a hub motor would be. Thus, there's less force on the frame for a given amount of torque.

A lot of extra force when slowing down from faster speeds though, no matter where the motor is added.
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