Surely it is SWMBO? She who must be obeyed! What does your H stand for? I must agree the kitchen is a much nicer place in winter than the near freezing garage.
Death of the derailleur?
- Thread starter Deus
- Start date
It's brilliant. If only it had some gears!
If simplicity, no cable and no indexing is your goal, why not go one better and use single speed, like the Gtech?
Gears are great. They allow you to pedal efficiently.
Last edited:
For the very large numbers of pedelecers who only ride within the assist speed range, the SRAM Automatix with its two gears is almost always ideal.
.
Not quite, note my words "almost always". That was to take into account that some will have steeper hills, perhaps with not so powerful motors.
However, many always staying within assist speeds are likely to be utility cyclists who don't tackle severe hills.
.
No, he meant as long as you only go downhill or have a throttle and don't pedal.
They tried that thing on the Momentum bike. It was absolute flop
No I did not mean that, as I made clear in my reply. You really need to broaden your horizon beyond your limited view of what constitutes cycling. The great majority of the world's cycling seems outside of your ideas about it.
.
Congratulations, you've invented the hub-motor, except that yours has all the disadvantages of a crank-drive too.
what disadvantage? you could have tried it the last time you were in my workshop, it was the blue road bike on my stand. The motor weighs 2.65kgs, not much more than the crankset it replaces. There is no derailleur, no cable, nothing to adjust, not much exposes the kit to the elements, only an LCD to turn it on/off, set the assist level and speed limit.
The gospade has 120 tiny magnets on its pedal assist sensor. You don't have to turn the cranks much before the motor kicks in. The way the Gospade resists the torque of the motor is also ingenious. You undo the left BB cup, screw into its place a replacement BB cup which has indents for the motor to grab to. It's lightweight, easy to fit and totally idiotproof.
Last edited:
You can have a single speed bike, like the Gtech, which works and a lot of people are happy with it. You can have a 2-speed bike with the Automatix driven by a crank motor or you can have a front motor, like the Momentum. Some guys (not many it seems) bought Momentum bikes and were happy. You could put a three-speed SA gearbox in your bike, and maybe that would make you happy, but for most people somewhere around 7,8 or 9 speeds is about right depending on what type of terrain you ride over.
There's no exact number of gears that's perfect, but you normally know when you don't have enough. For most people, riding mixed terrain, anything less than 5 speeds is just not going to cut it unless you have a motor that's going to do all the work.
The justification for a crank drive is that you can keep it running efficiently by using the gears. The fewer gears you have, the more inefficient it becomes. The same applies to human beings. You have a natural power band. If you're pedal speed falls out of that, you lose efficiency. If you've ever ridden one of those Gtechs up a hill, you see the problem immediately. Without gears, you the motor and the battery are going to get tired very quickly.
Yes, when I was in my teens, I had a Sturmey Archer 4 speed, and I rode it happily everywhere in my ignorance. Does that make it good. Would I use one now? No, I think I'll stick with my 9-speed, which is many times better. I've converted a few bikes with SA 3-speeds. When I tried them, all I could think of was thank Christ I had a motor with decent torque.
Let's not fill ourselves with nostalgia. Compared with modern systems, they're just crappy. If they were any good, we'd all have them.
Mr Woosh, how many of your light-weight bikes with Automatix did you sell compared with say a Woosh Rio?
none, but it's not the point. There are merits in a system that is simple to fit to a wide range of bikes or require zero maintenance.
The point about a cadence sensor system (which the Gospade is) is you pedal as much as you like, selecting in the right gear becomes much less important to the point where riders don't need to change gear. I have sold over the years a lot of bikes with the Nexus Inter-3 hub gear with very high customers satisfaction.
If it's that fantastic, you'll sell loads of them and retire early. If it's as bad as the Momentum, you'll be shipping them to Matt at E-bikes direct to clear them out at a substantial discount. I wish you good luck.
Most of the world does have them, mainly single speed, but their view on what constitutes cycling is very different from yours.
In Africa cycling is done on the flat and bikes not used in hilly areas.
And in China as Wai Won Ching remarked when he said the Chinese were baffled by our obsession with cycling up hills, they simply dismount and walk up them.
There are still quite a few of our utility cyclists who have similar views, only cycling in areas of moderate territory with no tough hills. For them single speed or as few as two gears suffice and anything above three gears is overkill. They don't even think about cadence or efficiency, they just amble down the shops, workplace or wherever else at speeds they are comfortable with, content that it's faster than walking and cheaper than the bus.
.
Are you serious? So we should chuck our gears and electric motors and push our bikes everywhere instead? I had a feeling I was doing something wrong. Now I know. Thanks for the enlightenment. If only you had told me that 10 years ago, I could have saved thousands.
No, just pointing out there's other circumstances and other points of view.
We are the last country to be thinking we know best about cycling, being almost the one country that cycling all but disappeared in the 1960s and '70s and why we are so sport biased with cycling now.
Nor are we any better placed with e-biking experience, given our very low takeup compared to our neighbours.
.
In the mid seventies (in my arrogant youth) I didn't own a car and cycled everywhere, being too impatient to wait for a bus.
On my 6 mile commute into Birmingham I used to slipstream buses, overtaking them at stops, then slowing to be overtaken. I was so glad of my 2x5 speed deraileur as Brum sits on an elevated plateau that needed climbing.
Now, approaching my own seventies, I live in Wales. If I were only to cycle on the flat - well I wouldn't even get out of the door. As it is my kit/deraileur combination allows me to go shopping and on leisure rides where I, at best, get ignored by fat blokes on £3K, 10kg sports bikes 'cos I'm 'not a proper cyclist'. I still give them a cheery Haloo though, just to rub in the fact that I've got the breath to do so and I'm not gritting my teeth.
On my 6 mile commute into Birmingham I used to slipstream buses, overtaking them at stops, then slowing to be overtaken. I was so glad of my 2x5 speed deraileur as Brum sits on an elevated plateau that needed climbing.
Now, approaching my own seventies, I live in Wales. If I were only to cycle on the flat - well I wouldn't even get out of the door. As it is my kit/deraileur combination allows me to go shopping and on leisure rides where I, at best, get ignored by fat blokes on £3K, 10kg sports bikes 'cos I'm 'not a proper cyclist'. I still give them a cheery Haloo though, just to rub in the fact that I've got the breath to do so and I'm not gritting my teeth.
Related Articles
-
MTF Enterprises announces acquisition of EMU Electric Bikes- Started by: Pedelecs
-
Wisper 806T folding bike wins Which? ‘Best Buy’- Started by: Pedelecs
-
Sustrans calls for protected cycle lanes- Started by: Pedelecs
-
Amazon launch their first UK e-cargo micromobility hub- Started by: Pedelecs
