here are some additional things that caught my eyes on the last day of the show. ( Keep in mind of course that slick and tightly integrated commercial ebikes generally don't catch my eye at all, not that there's anything wrong with them! )
First it was nice to see Heinzmann with a booth, as one of the original hub motor kit suppliers from the 90's, its cool to see that they are still around. Their original high torque (albeit noisy) geared hub motor is still in production and still used by various fleet vehicles, but they now have a more modern direct drive system, the PRA-180
We got samples of their their 500W model version of this motor a few months ago that are up on the simulator. But what surprised me about their booth is first that they had an Edgerunner as their demo bike, and second that it was outfitted not only with the PRA-180 but also a secondary chain drive cargo system.
It's a rather industrial looking motor+gearbox which drives a left side chain to the rear wheel, with a sprocket/disk assembly attachement on the disk mount of the rear hub
The lady at the booth was saying this was still early in the prototype stages, and was intended for getting heavy cargo loads efficiently up to the ~10kph range. I just thought it was cool to see a large manufacturer looking at commercializing this drive topology that we're more used to seeing with DIY builds. Even the pedal torque sensor was custom made idler block to sense the chain tension
I visited the Kappstein booth with some excitement to see and check out what I thought was going to be a two speed retro-direct motor that Miles had previously
linked here. While they had three hub motors behind a glass case, none of them was operational and the banner over the display advertised them as a 3 speed hub, not a 2 speed device with a direct drive forwards mode. The person I was chatting with wasn't very clear about the details
The other part of the Kappstein booth that was operational is a 2 speed crankset that has a 1:1 mode and a 1:1.5 overdrive mode, but unlike the Schlumpf which shifts with a spindle button press, or the Patterson which uses a handlebar shifter, this one changes gears with a short quick back pedal motion. It's also by far the most compact geared crank that I've seen, and of course it freewheels. So there are ever more options freewheeling cranksets suitable for high speed mid-drive ebikes.
Jules did have a small fat-tire bike built up with the chinese 2-speed retro-direct hub from Xiongda. It was really cool to actually experience this auto-shifting in action, even if the motor power is on the low end of the spectrum
I mentioned that there were many companies copying Bosch's lead and making proprietary motor crankset systems which require a custom frame interface, and showed the Samsung model in my earlier post. Here is a Yamaha model
In the central courtyard areas with outdoor booths there were lots of recumbent bikes, tricycles, and cargo vehicles on display and available for test riding. We were happy to see our friends from Radkutsche who hand-build in germany a range of front loading boxbikes as well as very large delta cargo trikes typically used or business delivery. All adequately powered with a single geared front hub motor.
http://www.radkutsche.de/
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But my real highlight of the last day wasn't anything inside the show, it was an old German fellow we ran into at the supermarket who was riding this DIY stokemonkey style build which uses a small hub motor with flanges machined off it, supported just from a single side on the left chainstay, driving the left crank arm.
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At first glance I saw a bunch of welding around the crank and thought oh, rather than buying an expensive tandem crankset he just welded a chainring flange onto the regular left side crank. But then looking closer I saw that no, there's more to it than this, he actually machined and welded on his own ratchetting freewheel and pawl system so that he can pedal freely without turning the chain and the motor. Crazy
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Sadly, he didn't speak any english and I don't know any german, so I couldn't get any more detail but did my best to provide my full thumbs up of approval
