Greetings –

No problem – I’ve got a 2WD, er… um now a FWD – and it got me home fine. I figured it could be that the wiring needed a redo: The front hub got the phase-wiring upgrade before I made the road trip although not the rear: Planned work Item for some dreary (I almost said rainy but that’s all the time) weekend.

Meanwhile, the FWD was holding up just fine – until two weeks ago on the way home approaching the summit of the last hill before home when that hub motor outright quit on me. Lovely, right when it’s chucking down big-drop rain, in the dark, 100 feet to go to the top, cars backed up behind me... I pushed the bike over the hill and coasted on down to the base of my hill and walked it back to the secret urban bat cave.
I have spare motors: 9C 2806s & 7s, all but one are front hubs; the one rear 9C has a disc on it but I hates it. Anyway – there are parts available to test with. I did modify my present EBikeKit hubs to use the USB Mini-B Connector for the Halls connection so I could slip the nuts & washers & torque-arms on and off, although none of my other motors have that feature. With no spare cables for testing, I ordered up a few and waited.
Today I finally got around to fabricating a test harness to positively diagnose that the issues were with the motors and not the controllers (tiny but very important detail). I removed both hub motors and rotated the axles with a 10mm wrench: Rear Axle feels like there’s a little bit debris hitting, nothing gigantic, however the front hub definitely has profound grinding problems, and gets stuck – which leads me to think that I have a moisture problem and likely rust.
I took one of my spare mint-condition 9C front hubs and mounted it on the front fork, hooked up the test harness and tried it on both controllers: It spins smooth as glass, and thus concluded that the controllers are not at fault. (Good news if any could be had)

OK – so now the question:
I am going to presume that the stators are suffering from moisture and likely not recoverable. Both hubs came from EBikeKit last spring and they have the disc brake option which after some effort, figured out how to make work.


Looking forwards to getting back on the road soon.
~KF