Help! I want to build my very own e-bike.

Hi there, my name is Deo and I wanted to make my very own first e-bike. For the past couple of days I have done a lot of research, and have learned much of what I needed to know. That was the easy part, the hard part is looking for the equipment. UnFortunately after a lot of looking It hard to find one that can reach up to 60+ km, but was wondering if my measurement is correct. My budget is no more than $1500.

Now about lipo batteries, I really have a minimum amount of knowledge on how you build it. I see that you can purchase it from hobby king but is it really easy to install into a bike? Are they smaller than LiFePO4 Battery Pack? Also how many lipo pack would be equal to a 48V 20AH V2.5 LiFePO4 Battery Pack.

Umm I have done some searching and this is the best I did at looking

Battery:
http://www.pingbattery.com/servlet/Detail?category=48V+LiFePO4+Battery+Packs&no=2&param_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pingbattery.com%2Fservlet%2FCategories%3Fcategory%3D48V%2BLiFePO4%2BBattery%2BPacks&searchpath=3178
Bike is what I'm getting from friend for free:
http://www.amazon.com/Diamondback-Response-Sport-Mountain-20-Inch/dp/B005NXNO52/ref=sr_1_54?s=cycling&ie=UTF8&qid=1354515561&sr=1-54
Conversion kit:
http://www.ebikes.ca/store/photos/NC26_Fast.jpg
Upgraded controller:
http://www.ebikes.ca/store/photos/40A_upgrade.jpg

Umm you guys have a better conversion kit, battery, controller, or purchase every part by itself don't be shy to tell me.
I just want to get the right bike for the buck.
I weigh 175 pounds and I'm 6'1

Are these legit?
Conversion kit:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Front-48V-1000W-Electric-Bicycle-Engine-Conversion-Kit-Scooter-E-Bike-thumb-26-/321026044513?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4abea4b261
Or
http://www.dhgate.com/48v-1000w-electric-bicycle-e-bike-conversion/p-ff80808130ff16960130ff44b3f404d9.html

Hi and welcome.

First off, whereabouts on the planet are you? It makes a difference, as the laws are very different around the globe and shipping costs can play a big part in making a recommendation, too.

60km/h is pretty fast, around 38mph, and will need a fair bit of power. This usually means that the weight and cost will go up, too. The ebikes.ca Nine Continents kit is a reasonable starting point, but there's no need for the 20A controller that it comes with, ask them to swap it out for the upgraded 40A one.

Ping batteries are pretty good, but they really don't like being used at high current. The normal recommendation is to use them at around 1C to 1.5C, which is 20 to 30 A in this case. 40A is pushing it a bit, and the battery voltage will sag at that sort of current, plus you may find that pack life will be shortened a bit, depending on how much you use the power available.

The ebay kits are pot luck, you may get a bargain, you may get rubbish. Buying from ebikes.ca will get you a warranty, good customer support and known to be good parts, so my advice is that if you're within easy shipping distance of Vancouver, then use them (I just wish they weren't a few thousand miles away from me!).

Hi Deo,

I think that your expectations for a first e-bike are a bit too amtibious. Unless you have previous experience in electric vehicles, RC lipo, or other motors, I think you will run into a lot of issues when continuing.

First, read this thread: http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=45204

Not only does it contain some good warnings, it also has some very good links to high power ebikes.

Let's take your expectations:
Budget 1500 bucks
doing more than 60kmh / 38mph
Medium voltage high capacity (48V/20Ah)Ping battery
Free Diamondback hardtail bike.
Ebikes nine C hubmotor with 40A controller

Now, go to ebike.ca/simulator/ and punch in your values. The sim will show you that even the fastest 9C (2805) at 48V will only give you 50kmh.

This means, that with the 48V, you will be disappointed. If you want to reach 60kmh, you wil need to increase voltage. 74V seems to be the sweet spot. But that means you will need to spend much more on batteries. My 20S 74V 13.5Ah lipo pack costed around 800 including shipping. Your budget will have to bulge...

Also, at speeds higher than 50kmh, you will get a very sore behind without rear suspension, unless you only travel on very slick tarmac roads without potholes and the likes.

High speeds means full suspension, big battery, high voltage, and a lot of attention to all other details like torque arms, fuses, and the likes. If I were on a budget with that bike you linked to, I probably would go for a completely different kind of bike. That bike is suitable for nice rides in the park at 30kmh speeds. I would probably electrify it with two small motors (one front one rear), driven by a Thun torque/PAS sensor and control it via a Cycle Analyst v3. Just stay at 36V (10S Lipo), and put only 10Ah on it in a small bag in the triangle. That would make for a highly efficient strong city bike capable of speeds in the range of 30-35kmh.

Once you have saved enough (like 3k) you can get yourself a nice dual suspension frame, big battery, big controller, heavy hubmotor, and go fast. And you will have the experience of your first bike to build it well.

My 2 cents.
wrong bike, wrong motor kit.
You want a FS bike with steel dropouts. Aluminum frame is OK as long as where you install motor has steel dropouts. Use a rear hub motor. Never install a powerful hub motor on the forks. Especially not suspension forks.
Motor kit. Something rated for at least 1000W and at least 450rpm@48V for sustained speeds of 50kph or more.
Battery pack capable of at least 40A. The higher the better. 20ah ping or similar will work fine. I prefer rc lipo for it's size and massive power output.
It's not hard to build a complete 70kph bike for under $1000 including new bike.

I'd agree that you'll need to compromise in your spec. I suggest holding to your goal of $1500, as costs are usually the most painful, if exceeded. I spent about that on my first & only ebike - see my saga thread for more info. Long & short of it is, you'll find cost savings in building your own battery pack. Its wholly within the reach of the average treker. Best of luck.

Well I live in north NJ, more towards NYC . We seem to have a lot of wide off road bicycle trails, or paved roads meant for bikes only. My college is 6 miles away so my range is 20 miles that I want for an ebike. I read mostly every topic there is on e-bike, the main reason I want a fast bike is because we have some held e-bike completions over here. There rich kid that got the stealth bomber and all that fancy crap but I want to prove to them that a cheap 1500 bike can be fast. I understand our nations law, and I respect it, especially when my dad is a Senior sergeant of a nearby precinct. Now about lipo are they easy to connect and install into the center of a bike. http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23290 because the way this guy did it look pretty hard but not impossible. I have made my own gas rc cars and planes and I'm also thinking about building my own e-bike. http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__317__85__LiPo_LiFe_NiMH_Battery-Turnigy_Lipoly.html what kind of lipo do I need and how many for the NC26_fast. I will upgrade the controller. Then get a better bike like an Fs bike? I guess I will be good at wiring batteries together with better research done. I will make my very own center aluminum thingy or get a falcon bag. Thanks for the help you guys are giving me, every day I learn more and more. The only thing that kills me is what batteries I can get to mount in the center of the bike that will give more speed than range. I do want to reach a range of 20 miles, and speed of 32+ average. I would get a motorcycle but I'm more into an ebike for the budget.

OK, NJ is in America, right? It helps a lot if you fill in at least your country in the profile field, BTW, as many of us are thousands of miles away and don't always understand country-specific shorthand for place names.

20 miles range and the sort of performance you're after is going to mean a pretty big motor, controller and battery pack and require a fair bit of knowledge to build. You're going to struggle to get what you're after for the money you have, so I'd be inclined to aim a bit lower. There is a reason that the Stealth Bomber is the price it is, and a large part of that reason is that the parts needed to make it cost a lot more than $1500 US.

Speed is the killer here, as the power needed goes up in proportion to the cube of speed. This means that doubling the speed needs about 8 times the power. Even reducing your max speed down to 30 mph will make a big difference. Others have already pointed out the potential problems with an alloy frame. A motor of the power you're after will exert a lot of torque on the dropouts, and there are many cases here where alloy frames have failed in this area. At the very least you are going to need some good torque arms, and often these may need to be custom made or adapted to fit an alloy frame bike. It's doable, but may need a bit of mechanical work to get things to fit well.

The simulator on the ebikes.ca site is a very good start and will let you play around with different batteries and see what sort of performance you may get. You can use a custom battery option to try out different RC LiPO combinations, just remember to set a fairly low internal resistance figure (a single 5Ah LiCoO2 LiPo cell of around 20C max rate will have an IR of around 0.0015 ohms, I'd err on the side of caution and use 0.002 ohms per cell in the sim). After a while you'll get a good feel from the sim as to what sort performance you can get with different combinations, which should help you make a compromise that works for you. Don't forget you will need a way to charge those cells, and a way to monitor them to keep things safe.

I didn't dig through all your links this time, it's about time for me to head off to work.

Generally, most people aren't equipped to build a hot rod ebike on the first try. I can't say if you are or are not mentaly and mechanically up to it. A few have done it spectacularly, and coincedentally they are pilots. Right stuff, trained in techincal things where a goof will kill ya is a good start for sure. I'm a pilot, but only a balloon pilot, and I still needed a more gradual approach to it myself.

My advice, anticipate that you will want to join the 40 mph club soon. So make your battery something strong enough for a 40 amp controller. Headway lifepo4, A 123 lifepo4, or if you are able to set up a safe place to charge, RC lipo.

But build your first bike for 25-30 mph. Just about any type of generic rear hubmotor kit will do, if you run 48v through it. Later, when you understand better what you need in terms of a bike for the kind of ride YOU do, then get your 72v controller and more battery.

Bear in mind, in most US states, above 20 mph is an illegal unregistered uninsured homemade motorcycle. Some states like mine for example, have 30 mph legal as a moped.
So when you build your hot rod, most likeley it's a compeltely illegal vehicle. So ride it so they never notice you even have a motor. We call it clown pedaling, when see a cop and pretend we are actually pedaling that thing at 35 mph.

Build for 25-30 mph, and chances are no cop even notices you. But at 40 mph on a bicycle, passing cars, you get this look from everybody that sees you.

I understand what your saying. But I want to head in very high speed while killing lot of power for races we have. E-bike and gas competitions over here. But when I got to college I'm not going to go high speed to there, that is 100% crazy. I usually gonna travel about 15 mph max when heading there because there is a lot of bicyclist on the road I'm heading and I have also noticed a lot of bicycle police 0.0. I want to head high speed during racing, and I want to reach max ranges when I'm riding in low speed. This is my fault for not clarifying well what I wanted. Curse grammar. I know the risk of riding high speed at a long range and I have seen other people mistakes doing that in other post. But I just want to know 2 things and nothing more. One if the setup I'm using is good enough and I just understood that I want to think about changing my bike but the setup I have is good but to just change the batteries to lipo. And #2 how many of a certain kind of lipo do I need to accomplish the range at 20 miles going 15 mph, and have really good acceleration and high speeds while killing power during competitions, and I'm gonna increase my budget to 2000.

Have a look here, at the simulator: http://ebikes.ca/simulator/

Select the motor you want, in this case the Nine Continent 2805 (which is the fast wind version), and the controller you want (the 40A IRFB4110). Next, select the custom battery option and start off with a 15S, 4P RC LiCoO2 Lipo (55.5V, 20Ah, 0.008 ohms IR). Select mph as the speed option.

This will give you a plot with various performance parameters displayed against bike speed. Top speed will be around 36.6mph (close to your requirement). Max power will be around 2.2kW. Range is going to depend very much on how fast you ride, keep the speed down and the range should be OK, ride fast and range will really suffer.

You can play tunes with the simulator from this starting point. Try changing the battery capacity, for example (halving the capacity will double the internal resistance), or try changing the battery voltage. After a while you'll get a good feel for what you might be able to achieve.

The choice of battery is pretty massive, but for a lot of power at the lowest cost it's hard to be cheap RC packs from Hobbyking. Safety is an issue that needs to be carefully managed, and charging can be a pain because of the need to rearrange wiring for charging, but many of us have been using these cells safely for years without incident, it just takes a bit of care.

I could be wrong,but if this is what I think it is,then it is one of the worst requests that I have read here. Gas and electric bikes racing in northern New Jersey ? On the wide pedestrian trails or on the streets? Please help me build an e-bike faster than rich kids store bought bike so that I can beat them in an illegal racing activity? That would do a lot to discredit this forum, and the acceptance of the e-bike by the public.

+1 aroundqube

You want lipo because if you're going to race you need high discharge rate, which lipo provides. Lipo is modular. You wire it for high voltage when you want to race. Reconfigure to lower voltage for range. (RPMs with a hubmotor are a function of voltage. Double your voltage, you double your top speed.)

Check out Icecube57's harness thread in "Items to Buy New" section of the forum. Watch his youtube videos. If you can't figure out how to make your own harness from that, you are not ready Grasshopper. So just buy a harness from Ice. Once you have the thing and go through the process a few times it all makes sense. Read the lipo safety threads on the forum and follow all the paranoid advice to the letter. Sooner or later you're going to see sparks and smoke.

You can go 40 mph for $1,500, easy.

I'd like to hear more about these races. The more we know about it, the more we'll be able to help you take down that frat douche and his Stealth.

Deonaldi said:

But when I got to college I'm not going to go high speed to there, that is 100% crazy. I usually gonna travel about 15 mph max when heading there because there is a lot of bicyclist on the road I'm heading and I have also noticed a lot of bicycle police 0.0. I want to head high speed during racing, and I want to reach max ranges when I'm riding in low speed. This is my fault for not clarifying well what I wanted. Curse grammar. I know the risk of riding high speed at a long range and I have seen other people mistakes doing that in other post.

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If my 15 y/o nephew would say that, I would not believe it. If I would have said that when I was 18, no-one should have believed it. In both cases, given a high power bike, me and my nephew would have raced the tires of our wheels all day at WOT, regardless of other cyclists. Maybe it's just our reckless Dutch spirits.... then again, boys are boys all over the world.

Deonaldi said:

But I just want to know 2 things and nothing more. One if the setup I'm using is good enough and I just understood that I want to think about changing my bike but the setup I have is good but to just change the batteries to lipo.

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I think you got a lot more responses than what you seem to understand. Going 40mph on your setup is not good enough. Yes, lipo will get you to 40mph, but it is not sustainable on your bike. Racing at 40mph is done on completely different bikes. Check Dogman's posts and Luke's (LifeForPhysics) posts. They raced. Listen to them or die.

Deonaldi said:

And #2 how many of a certain kind of lipo do I need to accomplish the range at 20 miles going 15 mph, and have really good acceleration and high speeds while killing power during competitions, and I'm gonna increase my budget to 2000.

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You have been pointed towards the simulator by a couple of people now. Did you ever check it? What were the results? Did you play with different battery capacities and check for range? What capacities did you simulate? Did you simulate the 2805 as Dogman suggested? Did you see what voltage you need to reach your targeted speed?

The more I read this thread, the more I tend to agree with aroundqube. And if I as a non-native English speaker can punch the "enter" key to make a new paragraph, surely you can do it and pay attention to your grammar and spelling as well... 8) But show us differently, and show us that you are a responsible guy trying to build his very own e-bike, who listens to the advice of more experienced people. You made the right decision by asking the advice here on ES. Keep it up and show us.