Well we bit the bullet (or at least we nibbled it anyway). We bought ourselves an electric bike kit (a BD-36) from a store up in Boulder.

We photo-documented installing the kit and put up a tutorial.


Click for larger version. First impressions:

• It really is silent.
• I'm satisfied that it goes as fast as I want it to.
• Heavy! Heavy! Heavy! You really don't want to carry this sucker up a set of stairs. Unfortunately I live on the 2nd floor of our building and currently must do this. I have a solution though; I will be posting on the subject.
• You want to pedal. You can really tell that you are saving motor/battery life by giving them a little assistance when accelerating or going up hills.
• It’s fun whizzing up hills because you look like you are some kind of super-human-Lance-Armstrong dude to spectators.
• You can pedal or not pedal. I naturally arrive places out of breath, but could easily see letting the motor do 95% of the work if one was so inclined.

I've been really surprised at the amount of crap that I've been catching from family and friends on this little experiment of mine. My mother has told me that I'll crack my head in at least a dozen times so far (yes I wear a helmet: not good enough for Mom). I did get her to laugh at herself by evoking the old “You'll poke your eye out” thing though. I did get a good story out of the deal: as a kid she rode her bike through a cloud of bees one time. It involved a lot of screaming and culminated in her mother hitting her with a broom to get the bees off.

My friends (who mostly live in Minnesota) seem to think that riding a bike on the sidewalk makes me some kind of Horrible Person. This I really really don't understand as it's about a million times safer to do so:

• It's legal here (you have to give pedestrians the right of way and let them know you are overtaking them by making some noise)
• Storefronts don't abut the sidewalk anywhere I'm going
• Anywhere there is street side parking the sidewalk is usually set back from the road by a few feet of grass so people can't even open their car-doors into me
• Speed limits are really high: If you think I'm riding in the street on a 45mph road when I don't absolutely have to you are nuts. Drivers in Denver wouldn’t give Jesus the right of way.
• You often end up going slower as most of the sidewalks around here are curvy. Slower is safer.
• The sidewalks are simply deserted here. I’d bet you pass less than one person per mile.
• (Bicycle hitting a pedestrian) is better than (car hitting a bicycle).
• I bet it’s less likely too.

Oh yea, and Erin (the other author around here) has already given me crap for not having enough safety equipment mounted on the bike.

Seriously people, it's a bicycle, not a nuclear weapon. Calm down. Breathe. I'm sure that most of humanity will survive my riding a bike. I've ridden in a car that had no body (walls nor ceiling), no steering wheel (wrench), no windshield, no floor, and no seats (the driver was sitting on an up-turned bucket that was balanced on a small piece of plywood that wasn’t even attached to the frame). It was a dirt road with pot holes. We went fast. You know what else? I was hitchhiking.

It was fun.

4 Comments »

2 Comments »

3 Comments »