Last week I went out and had some Adventures in Range Anxiety.
There's a really cool town about 25 miles away, over the border into MA, so I wanted to see if I could make it there and back. I've done a couple of 20-mile rides and come back with over half the battery, at least according to my cheap hand throttle. I probably should check with a voltmeter, but just haven't. The roads, as I've mentioned earlier, are truly horrible. There are some potholes that are 2-3 inches deep, which is what made me switch to full-suspension. It's made a massive difference for me.
Anyway, it was a beautiful ride, on a beautiful day, and as I was hitting the 20-mile mark (about 5 miles short of my goal) it hit me how much coasting I'd done, at some nice high speeds, for the last 15 minutes or so -- which meant I'd have to get back up those hills. So even if I was still at half battery, a) I don't trust my "meter," and b) flying drones has taught me that the bottom half of a lipo can be very different from the top half, so I turned around and headed home, thinking I would see if I maybe still had another 5 miles or so left in it when I got there.
I pedal constantly, and am always trying to get into better shape while also maximizing the battery life. It's 13ah, so I should be able to get some good distance out of it if I work at it.
So I made it up a bunch of long, not-too-steep grades early on, and at one point actually got off and walked it up one grade that was probably a mile long, just to be on the safe side. The green light was long gone, and the yellow "half" light was starting to go out on some of the climbs, but I knew the next 15 miles had a lot of down hills, so I should be alright. I got past the last of the big climbs going pretty well, and made it to the beginning of the nice downhill runs, which felt awesome. I can break 40mph on some of these hills without using the motor at all, so one day they'll be great for regen, which should get me even more distance.
So I'm hauling ass down this one hill and spot a big pothole, so I set up for a little bunny hop, but I'm old now and really moving and I think that when my weight was fully on downforce just before jumping, I hit the pothole. I felt it hard throughout the bike, heard the battery click against the frame, heard a few other loud noises I couldn't identify, but kept cruising down the rest of the hill and stopped at the bottom to make sure everything was intact, and discovered a pinch flat. With 10 miles still to go.
Now, I'm just getting started with biking again, so I didn't have any spares or even a toolkit with me. Not a huge deal, though, because I managed to stop on the ONE tiny stretch of road where I still have cell signal, so I called my wife to come pick me up -- except she's shopping several towns away, with more stores to hit, so I started walking the bike home. Gorgeous day, it was actually really nice to see everything at even slower speeds than on the bike, spotting old foundations and bridges and whatnot in the woods, checking out some 250 year old houses, etc.
I walked the bike 6 miles before my wife could pick me up. Lost 2 pounds that day :]
It was the cheap-ass default tire that came with the hub kit, but I just needed it to get me through that one weekend, as I'm getting a pair of Maxxis Hookworms for Father's Day tomorrow. I picked up some Kenda Downhill tubes as well.
As I was pulling the old tire off this morning I discovered that they had actually installed a 29-inch tube in the 26-inch rim, and just folded it over near the valve. I could see where the green slime had oozed out of the seams right near the fold.
So it was a bummer, but this morning I pulled the cheap 6-speed freewheel off the hub and installed the 8-speed that arrived yesterday. I was hoping to move the controller to the tail rack, but I don't have enough battery wire to make it that far. I also am going to install the MT60s on the phase wires from the motor so I can stop having to tear apart a terminal block every time I need to pull the rear wheel.
The new freewheel is an 11t, which should allow me to attain a higher average speed. I'm at 16mph now, and hoping to push more toward 20. The front gear is only 42t, and I want to bump it to at least 48t if not higher, but I have to replace the whole crankset so that'll wait until later in the summer because I've been nickel-and-diming a lot of projects on this thing lately. There should be room on the chainstay for well into the 50s, which should allow me to pedal along at quite a clip.
I can't wait to get this thing back on the road, the weather is perfect right now, but I'm waiting for tomorrow to unwrap the tires, and it'll be raining all day. Good day for wrenching, though, right?