Electric bike news source.

dogman dan

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Joined
May 17, 2008
Messages
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Location
Las Cruces New Mexico USA
Here's a new place to go to see the latest electric bike news. Short summaries and links to recent news stories that relate to mostly to electric bikes, but with some of the more interesting e motorcycle stories as well.

Since I write or edit the summaries, no bogus links, just a clean link to the original story. No redirects to buy Viagra or some such crap.

http://www.electricbikeinsider.com/

New stories every weekday.
 
Thanks Dan - bookmarked...
 
Thank Jason for the site.

But I knew there would be those wanting to take a weekly peek at this here.

Beats doing your own search. I don't post really sucky articles. One the other day, some china dude that took thousands of eggs home from work on his ebike. No need now for you to wade through the stuff like that, when google spews it out.
 
Image on the first article has a glaring issue with the front wheel:

centinel-wheel-1.jpg
 
HA! I expected some ES hooting about that one. But I didn't see that! Buy from us, we don't even know which way a fork goes on a bike. :roll:

I was just thinking both those wheel designs would suck if you hop a curb. Bend that rim easy.
 
“I dunno which way a front wheel points, I’m a PHOTOGRAPHER!”
 
Hi folks,

It may be that the fork is actually intended to go that way, or they put the handlebars and the fork on wrong.

Just say'n. A long time ago (about 30 years ago), I noticed an old picture of a recumbent rider riding the Charles Mochet two wheeled version of the velocar and in the picture I noticed that the front fork was backwards. Huh!? At the time, this guy was beating the crap out of the standard upright bikes and riders of the day, and eventually set the hour record. The dude was not even a top tier rider, but his aerodynamic position gave him the advantage to best the other fellas. Naturally, this didn't sit well with the money boys who had interest in the production of standard bikes, so they banned recumbents hence forth from competing in official races, saying that recumbents weren't bikes, they were human powered vehicles.

Anyway, I was already aware of this malarkey regarding the ruling ( the world is flat too), but the interesting thing was that the front fork was reversed and that was intriguing to me. I wondered why they would do such a thing? There wasn't any documents regarding the theory of why to utilize a reversed fork, so it just seemed odd,,,,, until I decided to do a little experimenting on paper to see what would happen if I drew up several samples. I quickly found that a reversed fork gave tremendous amounts of trail (far more than normal) when the head tube geometry was kept the same (around 70 - 75 degrees) but that by moving the head tube angle more towards a vertical position, the trail numbers were getting more reasonable. Hmmm.

Well, I was in the process of designing another recumbent and so I factored in the head tube angles, fork rake, and found some agreeable trail numbers that seemed workable. The idea being, since this was to be a "short wheel base" recumbent and knowing that as was standard of the day( SWB's were/are known for being quite twitchy and rather a bit awkward when traveling slowly), that by making the head tube more vertical, the slow handling properties would be enhanced, while still having adequate trail numbers to handle high speed stability too. So I built the thing and guess what? It performed as good or better than I had hoped. I can easily ride at 1 mph without frantically whipping the handlebars everywhere to just stay upright, and the high speed descents are no problem. I've had it up to 45+ mph's (and that's really all the faster I want to go) and it is solid as a rock.

If they ( these guys the article is about) did still keep the head tube angle around the same as a normal bike geometry, they would develop excess amounts of trail and would experience a lot of "wheel flop". So yea, maybe they got the picture wrong, but maybe they didn't. :wink:
 
Definitely somebody put the handlebars on backwards. "get a bike, and take a picture of this" So some flunky ran to the box store, and grabbed a bike. Open the box, and you have to rotate and tighten the stem to assemble.

My neighbor across the street asked me once to do a tune up on his bike, that he virtually never rides. First item, flip his fork the right way. LOL. His response, "hey, what did you do? It rides a lot better now."
 
Airwheel, i can just imagine getting a flat..Nice link-source dogman.
 
Thanks for the feedback, It's appreciated.
 
Dogman dan 3000pts for awesomeness.

The site has a quite a few links to NYC ebike issues which matter to me. One article even mentions my neighborhood specifically. Thanks for the heads up.
 
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