Others have discussed this MY1018 brushed motor on here; this particular one is BY1018 but basically the same thing. The first motor I got from GNG (kit was $425 with shipping) I promptly fried after a grand total of 5 miles. 48V battery + 36V motor + full power up a modest hill = motor started burning up 30 seconds into the hill. I was pretty surprised how fast these brushed motors heat up. The motor itself with mounting brackets weighs exactly 6.5 lbs. You can get a 10Ah battery that weighs about 5 lbs, and have the whole thing with accessory parts for about 13 lbs extra to the bike. So if you have a 25 lb XC bike, it will be under 40 lbs! Mine is 48 lbs with a 20Ah battery, dropper post, seat cover, and beefy downhill tires. But again with the right weight weenie parts on the bike, you can get it down to 35-40 lbs with this motor.
The replacement motor was from E-Bay (kit was $115; Amazon has a similar product but only 24V). I decided to get the $115 kit instead of the $138 MY1018 motor a la carte. There are almost identical motors out there for $50 but the key point is the screws that can take brackets on each side of the motor, and the motor mounts themselves --- I already had the mounts from the first GNG kit. You can however put the motor in the frame's triangle and make your own mounting brackets. Then you can do this for under $100 if you want (I would recommend the E-Bay kit for $115: Uimoso 450W Electric Brushed DC Motor Kit 36V 3000rpm with Speed Controller). The brackets have to keep the motor super tight or the drive chain will pop off, believe me. Screws on both sides of the motor are also critical, otherwise you can't attach any bracket screws on the left side; most of the brushed and brushless motors out there only have screw holes on the right side. Better to play it safe and get the real MY1018 (or BY1018) motor with screws on both sides. The screws are very tight and you need to loosen them with a vise grip first before unthreading. MY/BY 1016 is 24V, 1018 is 36V, 1020 is 48V. Unfortunately the 1020 is too large for the GNG mounting brackets unless you can mount it yourself with DIY brackets. The proper mounting brackets only come with the $425 GNG kit unfortunately.
Modifications to make this BY1018 work:
1. Brushed Motors run HOT: As mentioned the BY1018 is more or less identical to MY1018. The 2nd time around, I installed a 5V fan under the BY1018 motor and 5V temperature sensor on the handlebar; sensor is black taped to the front of the motor as pictured. The Hailong battery has a USB port, thank god. The motor will heat up to around 45-55C after a decent climb. My rule is to completely stop throttling after about 70C since plastic inside will start to melt around 77C. So far it has not gone above 55C. Keeping the bike moving helps cool it a lot. I often will leave the battery and fan on after stopping the bike, takes several minutes to start cooling down.
2. Throttle: Bought an aftermarket brushed twist throttle with a voltmeter, because brushed controllers do not have a display option
3. Motor Freewheel: Because the Uimoso MY1018 kit is designed for left-side mounting, when you use it as a mid-drive and flip it around to the right side, the freewheel drive sprocket will spin backwards and the chain won't move. I tried to turn the freewheel around but then the chain cannot move forward, DUH! Because freewheels spin in only one direction, so you can't reverse the freewheel; you can only reverse the polarity of the motor and controller power wires. In this case the normal plug-in was yellow controller to black motor, and blue controller to red motor. You have to cut both plastic covers off, strip the wires down 2 cm or so, and then put yellow to red and black to blue. That will make the freewheel move forward. Remember to do this only with the controller wires going to the motor, and NOT the battery wires going to the controller.
4. Battery connection: My battery has an XT60 Female plug. The controllers that work with this motor are the electric scooter-type ones with horribly stupid plugs. Large T-plugs that don't fit normal T-plug adapters. So I could not hook up my battery to the controller. It 'looks' like Anderson L1 adapters would work but they did not. I had to cut off the large T-plug plastic housing on the motor leads, buy an XT60 Male to O-Ring adapter, and then twist the black and red motor wires on to the O-Rings and seal with electrical tape.
5. Drive Chain: Throw the kit chain away, it's crap and too small anyway. Use a KMC E1 chain with missing links. This has to be really tight; you can do 36T or 40T, I did 40. 44 T will probably be too close to the motor mounting screws on that side so I think 42T would be the largest for the drive chain, and I've noticed that every chain link = about 4T so 42T would be either 1/2 link too loose or tight. So 40T is best IMO. The first kit came with a very flimsy chain tensioner. You won't need that. You will need to get the chain so tight that it will barely even fit on both the sprocket and drive chainring. This is absolutely critical if you don't want the drive chain to keep popping off the ring. If you get the $425 GNG kit, you throw that chain away too. Because the GNG sprocket is wide-wide, you can't use a KMC E1 chain and must get instead a KMC HL (half-link, wide) chain. Those are harder to work with but it will get you the correct chain width and tension, and you can also use whatever drive chainring size up to 42T. Remember the drive chain has to be as tight as possible and still be able to link the chain to itself. The Uimoso sprocket is narrow-wide so a normal chain will fit it. Remember that the Uimoso sprocket needs a chainring that should be 36T or 40T, not 38 or 42, or the chain will be either too loose or will not fit. (Or you have to buy the KMC HL chain instead). The GNG chainring can be anything up to 42T because of the half-link chain for proper tensioning.
6. Bottom Bracket and Rest of Drivetrain: The GNG kit came with an ISIS bottom bracket...that was backwards (they accidentally threw in a left-drive BB). You can get a Truvativ $25 ISIS BB, make sure the threads are on the RIGHT-hand side!!! You can then use the red clutch wheel that came with the GNG kit to throttle without pedaling (remember the mounting brackets and clutch come with the $425 GNG kit, not the $115 Oimoso kit). Because I was using a square-taper setup, the red clutch disk could not fit, so I left it out and have fixed pedals. What that means is when you throttle, the pedals move; you can't stop them unless you stop the throttle. However, you can pedal without the throttle. This not dangerous, don't worry about that. Cruise control is far more dangerous than fixed pedals. As mentioned the drive chainring is 40T and the cassette chainring is 44T (you might be able to do 46T for the cassette but not more because the ring will be too close to the bracket screws for the chain to be put on). You can of course use a freewheel on the back wheel but the range will be much worse than a cassette. And cassette freehub-based wheels are only around $80 on Amazon, it's 100% worth switching; you can get an 8-speed 11-40T cassette for $25 and wheel for $80 and have far more range. My setup is 11 speed 11-52T. Plenty of range; 11 speed kits are around $200 ($15 chainring, $40 shifter, $60 rear derailleur, $40 11-sp chain, $50 cassette).
7. What it can and cannot do: This is a brushed motor, so treat it nice. No more abusing the motor like you can with a 48V brushless one. If you want to haul ass at 25+ MPH on the street or 12 MPH up fire roads, this is not the correct motor for you. To me, those motors make the bike more like an electric motorcycle that just happens to have pedals. They are fun to be sure, but this level of 350W nominal, 720W peak power keeps the bike a real bike, and you pedal more and have it feel more natural than a higher-powered motor. They claim that this motor can do 22MPH on a flat surface...maybe for like 15 seconds but it will risk overheating after that. The motor itself does make some noise but it's not as bad as some other double chain motors. This was a MAJOR pain to install but the tips above will keep this to 2-3 hours total and not 25. If you are confident about making mounting brackets inside the triangle, you can have a mid-drive for $115 plus the other parts listed above, maybe $200-250 total.
The replacement motor was from E-Bay (kit was $115; Amazon has a similar product but only 24V). I decided to get the $115 kit instead of the $138 MY1018 motor a la carte. There are almost identical motors out there for $50 but the key point is the screws that can take brackets on each side of the motor, and the motor mounts themselves --- I already had the mounts from the first GNG kit. You can however put the motor in the frame's triangle and make your own mounting brackets. Then you can do this for under $100 if you want (I would recommend the E-Bay kit for $115: Uimoso 450W Electric Brushed DC Motor Kit 36V 3000rpm with Speed Controller). The brackets have to keep the motor super tight or the drive chain will pop off, believe me. Screws on both sides of the motor are also critical, otherwise you can't attach any bracket screws on the left side; most of the brushed and brushless motors out there only have screw holes on the right side. Better to play it safe and get the real MY1018 (or BY1018) motor with screws on both sides. The screws are very tight and you need to loosen them with a vise grip first before unthreading. MY/BY 1016 is 24V, 1018 is 36V, 1020 is 48V. Unfortunately the 1020 is too large for the GNG mounting brackets unless you can mount it yourself with DIY brackets. The proper mounting brackets only come with the $425 GNG kit unfortunately.
Modifications to make this BY1018 work:
1. Brushed Motors run HOT: As mentioned the BY1018 is more or less identical to MY1018. The 2nd time around, I installed a 5V fan under the BY1018 motor and 5V temperature sensor on the handlebar; sensor is black taped to the front of the motor as pictured. The Hailong battery has a USB port, thank god. The motor will heat up to around 45-55C after a decent climb. My rule is to completely stop throttling after about 70C since plastic inside will start to melt around 77C. So far it has not gone above 55C. Keeping the bike moving helps cool it a lot. I often will leave the battery and fan on after stopping the bike, takes several minutes to start cooling down.
2. Throttle: Bought an aftermarket brushed twist throttle with a voltmeter, because brushed controllers do not have a display option
3. Motor Freewheel: Because the Uimoso MY1018 kit is designed for left-side mounting, when you use it as a mid-drive and flip it around to the right side, the freewheel drive sprocket will spin backwards and the chain won't move. I tried to turn the freewheel around but then the chain cannot move forward, DUH! Because freewheels spin in only one direction, so you can't reverse the freewheel; you can only reverse the polarity of the motor and controller power wires. In this case the normal plug-in was yellow controller to black motor, and blue controller to red motor. You have to cut both plastic covers off, strip the wires down 2 cm or so, and then put yellow to red and black to blue. That will make the freewheel move forward. Remember to do this only with the controller wires going to the motor, and NOT the battery wires going to the controller.
4. Battery connection: My battery has an XT60 Female plug. The controllers that work with this motor are the electric scooter-type ones with horribly stupid plugs. Large T-plugs that don't fit normal T-plug adapters. So I could not hook up my battery to the controller. It 'looks' like Anderson L1 adapters would work but they did not. I had to cut off the large T-plug plastic housing on the motor leads, buy an XT60 Male to O-Ring adapter, and then twist the black and red motor wires on to the O-Rings and seal with electrical tape.
5. Drive Chain: Throw the kit chain away, it's crap and too small anyway. Use a KMC E1 chain with missing links. This has to be really tight; you can do 36T or 40T, I did 40. 44 T will probably be too close to the motor mounting screws on that side so I think 42T would be the largest for the drive chain, and I've noticed that every chain link = about 4T so 42T would be either 1/2 link too loose or tight. So 40T is best IMO. The first kit came with a very flimsy chain tensioner. You won't need that. You will need to get the chain so tight that it will barely even fit on both the sprocket and drive chainring. This is absolutely critical if you don't want the drive chain to keep popping off the ring. If you get the $425 GNG kit, you throw that chain away too. Because the GNG sprocket is wide-wide, you can't use a KMC E1 chain and must get instead a KMC HL (half-link, wide) chain. Those are harder to work with but it will get you the correct chain width and tension, and you can also use whatever drive chainring size up to 42T. Remember the drive chain has to be as tight as possible and still be able to link the chain to itself. The Uimoso sprocket is narrow-wide so a normal chain will fit it. Remember that the Uimoso sprocket needs a chainring that should be 36T or 40T, not 38 or 42, or the chain will be either too loose or will not fit. (Or you have to buy the KMC HL chain instead). The GNG chainring can be anything up to 42T because of the half-link chain for proper tensioning.
6. Bottom Bracket and Rest of Drivetrain: The GNG kit came with an ISIS bottom bracket...that was backwards (they accidentally threw in a left-drive BB). You can get a Truvativ $25 ISIS BB, make sure the threads are on the RIGHT-hand side!!! You can then use the red clutch wheel that came with the GNG kit to throttle without pedaling (remember the mounting brackets and clutch come with the $425 GNG kit, not the $115 Oimoso kit). Because I was using a square-taper setup, the red clutch disk could not fit, so I left it out and have fixed pedals. What that means is when you throttle, the pedals move; you can't stop them unless you stop the throttle. However, you can pedal without the throttle. This not dangerous, don't worry about that. Cruise control is far more dangerous than fixed pedals. As mentioned the drive chainring is 40T and the cassette chainring is 44T (you might be able to do 46T for the cassette but not more because the ring will be too close to the bracket screws for the chain to be put on). You can of course use a freewheel on the back wheel but the range will be much worse than a cassette. And cassette freehub-based wheels are only around $80 on Amazon, it's 100% worth switching; you can get an 8-speed 11-40T cassette for $25 and wheel for $80 and have far more range. My setup is 11 speed 11-52T. Plenty of range; 11 speed kits are around $200 ($15 chainring, $40 shifter, $60 rear derailleur, $40 11-sp chain, $50 cassette).
7. What it can and cannot do: This is a brushed motor, so treat it nice. No more abusing the motor like you can with a 48V brushless one. If you want to haul ass at 25+ MPH on the street or 12 MPH up fire roads, this is not the correct motor for you. To me, those motors make the bike more like an electric motorcycle that just happens to have pedals. They are fun to be sure, but this level of 350W nominal, 720W peak power keeps the bike a real bike, and you pedal more and have it feel more natural than a higher-powered motor. They claim that this motor can do 22MPH on a flat surface...maybe for like 15 seconds but it will risk overheating after that. The motor itself does make some noise but it's not as bad as some other double chain motors. This was a MAJOR pain to install but the tips above will keep this to 2-3 hours total and not 25. If you are confident about making mounting brackets inside the triangle, you can have a mid-drive for $115 plus the other parts listed above, maybe $200-250 total.
Attachments
Last edited:
