RustyKipper
100 W
After 9 years of hardcore commuting I’ve made it into the 40,000 mile club!!
Off the top of my head that’s 2 frames, 6 wheels, 27 chains, 9 sets of cogs, 60 sets of brake pads 4 calipers, 3 motors, 3 controllers, 4 batteries, 2 broken shoulder bones, a broken nose, 2 broken wrists, 2 broken cheek bones and believe it or not… 1 pair of cycling shorts, a bit tattered and torn but still going strong! Luckily I always wear a helmet which has saved me from 2 broken heads. I’m on first name terms with the awesome staff at the local fracture clinic.
A lot of the worn parts are upcycled into clocks and given away to family and friends, it’s a shame there’s no market for them as it would hugely offset my running costs.
All this excitement takes place in the North of the UK as I commute to and from the next town. If I drive to work it can often take 2 hours to get home, on the bike its 25 – 30 minutes depending on wind direction. My workplace relocated a few years back so I no longer have to ride through swamps, farms, fight with flooded rivers or get shot at riding through run down ex pit villages, but this is the UK, the winters are dark, its constantly battered by Atlantic storms and it rains…often. The hills are savage, it’s easy to achieve 40MPH freewheeling down and purple faced riding up, the wind is constant and can be 30 – 40mph which seems to create a violent oscillation in the steering when riding directly into it, this is always fun on the freeway with cars and trucks passing 6 inches away.
The bike is currently enjoying 100% solar charging, I have a clip-on solar panel that adds a few watts when in the bike shed at work but gets the bulk of the daily charge via a 280Ah LifePO4 storage battery at home with a dedicated 215W panel. A wind turbine helps out in the winter when the UK only has a few hours of daylight (I’m at 53 degrees north which is as about the same as Newfoundland), this also explains why the battery is thermally insulated with an inbuilt heater, I use studded snow tires in the winter, we get surprisingly little snow but there can be a lot of ice. When it gets really bad its time for my 2WD ice bike, this thing gets up completely iced over hills that even 4x4’s can’t! Admittedly fingers and toes suffer when the mercury falls below -10C with the wind blowing in from Siberia. I nearly died once when a storm blew down from the Arctic known as the beast from the east, the wind chill was about -30 but I was on the edge of heat exhaustion from powering up one of the super steep hills for a solid 20 minutes into a 40 mph head wind with only a 250W motor, my drinking water was frozen solid, my legs just stopped working miles from civilization but somehow I made it home.
I’m currently working on a stealth wind charger that I can deploy at work, sadly where I work there’s a very oppressive regime that won’t allow personal possessions or ebike charging so I’ve built a wind charger into a traffic cone.
A single 5 hour evening charge replaces the 8-9Ah used during the day, this does depend on wind direction and temperature. The only reason for topping up at work is to keep the charging time down so the bike doesn’t get charged unattended at home. That being said, I built the latest battery into a metal box lined with fiberglass exhaust wrap to give it some rudimentary fire proofing if the worst were to happen.
So interesting technical stuff….. the frame is a 26 Inch steel Cotic frame (a local design), 17 Ah homemade battery (50x18650 Panasonic cells), controller and motor are 36V, I’m not totally sure what the motor power is, its certainly less than 500W, there is a rating plate on it that says 250W so lets go with that.
Tires are Schwalbe Smart Sam plus’s with 4mm thick inner tubes to give the best protection from glass, screws and broken car springs that litter the roads, the gyroscopic forces are insane making the steering quite heavy at speed! The quality of the Schwalbe tires seems to have nose-dived, I had 2 beads break within a coupe of months, I once had to ride 6 miles with an inner tube hanging out until some clown made me brake hard then the front tire finally popped off completely, that was an interesting ride home!
Brakes are Shimano Deore 4 piston, 203mm front and 200mm rear rotors. (I need regen braking….no I really genuinely need regen braking! These brakes are awesome but braking from 30- 40mph to a stop several times a day tortures them, I’ve cracked more than one rotor. Originally, I used mechanical disc brakes, these were awful, they had no feel and would just grab, once a car pulled out in front of me on a roundabout, hard breaking launched me freestyle over the handlebars and into an unconscious heap on the road which made other road users angry as they were trying to get to work.
Gears are 9 speed sram with a twistgrip change, this is essential, it lets me go from top to bottom gear in around a second, which is ideal for hardcore city commuting, I have to cross 4 lane freeways about 4 times a day, for this I need the acceleration of a scolded cat, gear changes are hard, fast and several at a time! The throttle is a thumb throttle on the left handlebar, this allows me to change gear with my right hand. There is a push button for the cruise control so the throttle doesn’t need to be held open for the entire commute which gets incredibly painful, it also saves breaking the throttle when hitting potholes / kerbs etc. The throttle only ever gets used in 2 positions, 0% and 100%, never anything in between. The front mech gear change has been relocated to under the seat to free up real-estate on the handle bar, this is only ever needed when the battery runs out of charge. Rear mudguard is homemade Kevlar composite, I tried carbon fiber a couple of times but it was too brittle and kept cracking. Front mudguard is hand formed aluminium and plastic, the center mudguard is carbon fiber, the pretend water bottle (controller housing), switch enclosure and junction boxes are 3D printed from ABS. There are several titanium bolts used as a token effort to try and keep the weight down, the bike weighs about the same as a small planet! Actually the water bottle is 3D printed ABS with an painted carbon fiber skin.
There is a guard to help protect the rear mech from weeds or when the bike slides down the road on its side. A small chainguard keeps a decent amount of debris off the chain, the chain is lubricated with wax as oil often gets washed off in a day.
Lighting, I could write a small book about that. In the depths of winter out in the boonies my whole life is contained in the patch of light being produced by the front lights so they’re quite important, also with the rear, if they go out I’m likely to get killed so there is a fiber optic telltale that runs from the rear light to the handlebar so I can see the rear light is working, this is also good for fault finding, if the motor wont spin and the brake lights are on it means one of the brake hall sensors has moved out of position.
Front lights are cast aluminium Magicshine knock offs, I throw the circuitry away and build my own drivers that run directly from the 36V battery, I can set the two front lights to flash 3 times each similar to recovery truck strobes, they can be set to static low beam or high beam, there is also a rotary knob on the handlebar that lets me adjust the brightness from min to max, if the roads are wet you need more light as it just bounces off.
Rear lights are cheap eBay led motor cycle lights that I gut and make my own circuit that gives way more brightness and crucially a wider viewing angle. I have incorporated brake lights which I feel greatly improves safety especially when hoofing down a hill at traffic speed and wanting to turn right. There is also a flashing fog / rain light but that’s yet to be wired up.
I have turn signals fitted, on dark winter evenings these are worth their weight in gold, they have massively reduced the abuse from drivers when I’m stuck in the middle of the road waiting to turn right, also some of the roads are so poor that both hands are needed to hang on to the handle bars when turning or braking. The front indicators use 3 x one watt LED,s with separate lenses, at this latitude the sun is often low in the sky so they need to be mega bright, none of the eBay offerings came close, in fact every one I tried was downright dangerous.
I have a motor cycle horn, some of my routes are shared walkways / cycle paths, occasionally I get joggers or people walking who ignore a polite ting on the bell or an ‘excuse me’, so I give it a second then give a load blast on the horn and watch them leap into the bushes!!
I use a Thudbuster seat post after damaging some internal organs when I hit a pothole with the back wheel sending the shock up into my body, that was a fun bit of time in hospital.
The controller (disguised as a water bottle) is mounted via rubber shock mounts, the battery internals are protected by foam.
The handlebars are a kind of Dutch design, I bought them by mistake but I really like them, the roads in the UK are very narrow, therefore wide handle bars tend to get you killed, there often isn’t enough room between lamp posts or trees and overtaking traffic. I welded a cross brace to the top and fitted rubber bushes, this makes the bike stable when upside down at the side of the road fixing punctures, it also adds protection for the gauges and allows mounting of the front turn signals.
A bag mounted to the front houses the wet weather gear, often the forecast shows 0% chance of rain only to be caught in a heavy downpour on the way home. The only thing that tends to be fully waterproof here is polythene however this kind of works like boil in the bag and can make you wetter with sweat than the rain would have done so is only used in very heavy rain.
Future mods include an integrated lighting driver that sets the strobing headlights to static when the turn signals are operating, Canbus networking for rear light, battery monitoring and gauges. I’ve made the circuit boards but have just too many other projects on the go. The front of the bike badly needs a tidy up.
Most of the electrical add-ons are pained in NATO green to try to hide them as at some point the government / police are bound to clamp down on homebuilt eBikes so I’m trying to stay under the radar.
All in all I’m very happy with this bike, it makes commuting sooo much easier.
Top left - Rear mech guard and chain guard
Top right - upcycled clock made from chainwheel and chain
Centre left - solar charging at work
Centre right - the Konerator under test
Bottom left - rear lights and turn signal
Bottom right - front lights and turn signal
Off the top of my head that’s 2 frames, 6 wheels, 27 chains, 9 sets of cogs, 60 sets of brake pads 4 calipers, 3 motors, 3 controllers, 4 batteries, 2 broken shoulder bones, a broken nose, 2 broken wrists, 2 broken cheek bones and believe it or not… 1 pair of cycling shorts, a bit tattered and torn but still going strong! Luckily I always wear a helmet which has saved me from 2 broken heads. I’m on first name terms with the awesome staff at the local fracture clinic.
A lot of the worn parts are upcycled into clocks and given away to family and friends, it’s a shame there’s no market for them as it would hugely offset my running costs.
All this excitement takes place in the North of the UK as I commute to and from the next town. If I drive to work it can often take 2 hours to get home, on the bike its 25 – 30 minutes depending on wind direction. My workplace relocated a few years back so I no longer have to ride through swamps, farms, fight with flooded rivers or get shot at riding through run down ex pit villages, but this is the UK, the winters are dark, its constantly battered by Atlantic storms and it rains…often. The hills are savage, it’s easy to achieve 40MPH freewheeling down and purple faced riding up, the wind is constant and can be 30 – 40mph which seems to create a violent oscillation in the steering when riding directly into it, this is always fun on the freeway with cars and trucks passing 6 inches away.
The bike is currently enjoying 100% solar charging, I have a clip-on solar panel that adds a few watts when in the bike shed at work but gets the bulk of the daily charge via a 280Ah LifePO4 storage battery at home with a dedicated 215W panel. A wind turbine helps out in the winter when the UK only has a few hours of daylight (I’m at 53 degrees north which is as about the same as Newfoundland), this also explains why the battery is thermally insulated with an inbuilt heater, I use studded snow tires in the winter, we get surprisingly little snow but there can be a lot of ice. When it gets really bad its time for my 2WD ice bike, this thing gets up completely iced over hills that even 4x4’s can’t! Admittedly fingers and toes suffer when the mercury falls below -10C with the wind blowing in from Siberia. I nearly died once when a storm blew down from the Arctic known as the beast from the east, the wind chill was about -30 but I was on the edge of heat exhaustion from powering up one of the super steep hills for a solid 20 minutes into a 40 mph head wind with only a 250W motor, my drinking water was frozen solid, my legs just stopped working miles from civilization but somehow I made it home.
I’m currently working on a stealth wind charger that I can deploy at work, sadly where I work there’s a very oppressive regime that won’t allow personal possessions or ebike charging so I’ve built a wind charger into a traffic cone.
A single 5 hour evening charge replaces the 8-9Ah used during the day, this does depend on wind direction and temperature. The only reason for topping up at work is to keep the charging time down so the bike doesn’t get charged unattended at home. That being said, I built the latest battery into a metal box lined with fiberglass exhaust wrap to give it some rudimentary fire proofing if the worst were to happen.
So interesting technical stuff….. the frame is a 26 Inch steel Cotic frame (a local design), 17 Ah homemade battery (50x18650 Panasonic cells), controller and motor are 36V, I’m not totally sure what the motor power is, its certainly less than 500W, there is a rating plate on it that says 250W so lets go with that.
Tires are Schwalbe Smart Sam plus’s with 4mm thick inner tubes to give the best protection from glass, screws and broken car springs that litter the roads, the gyroscopic forces are insane making the steering quite heavy at speed! The quality of the Schwalbe tires seems to have nose-dived, I had 2 beads break within a coupe of months, I once had to ride 6 miles with an inner tube hanging out until some clown made me brake hard then the front tire finally popped off completely, that was an interesting ride home!
Brakes are Shimano Deore 4 piston, 203mm front and 200mm rear rotors. (I need regen braking….no I really genuinely need regen braking! These brakes are awesome but braking from 30- 40mph to a stop several times a day tortures them, I’ve cracked more than one rotor. Originally, I used mechanical disc brakes, these were awful, they had no feel and would just grab, once a car pulled out in front of me on a roundabout, hard breaking launched me freestyle over the handlebars and into an unconscious heap on the road which made other road users angry as they were trying to get to work.
Gears are 9 speed sram with a twistgrip change, this is essential, it lets me go from top to bottom gear in around a second, which is ideal for hardcore city commuting, I have to cross 4 lane freeways about 4 times a day, for this I need the acceleration of a scolded cat, gear changes are hard, fast and several at a time! The throttle is a thumb throttle on the left handlebar, this allows me to change gear with my right hand. There is a push button for the cruise control so the throttle doesn’t need to be held open for the entire commute which gets incredibly painful, it also saves breaking the throttle when hitting potholes / kerbs etc. The throttle only ever gets used in 2 positions, 0% and 100%, never anything in between. The front mech gear change has been relocated to under the seat to free up real-estate on the handle bar, this is only ever needed when the battery runs out of charge. Rear mudguard is homemade Kevlar composite, I tried carbon fiber a couple of times but it was too brittle and kept cracking. Front mudguard is hand formed aluminium and plastic, the center mudguard is carbon fiber, the pretend water bottle (controller housing), switch enclosure and junction boxes are 3D printed from ABS. There are several titanium bolts used as a token effort to try and keep the weight down, the bike weighs about the same as a small planet! Actually the water bottle is 3D printed ABS with an painted carbon fiber skin.
There is a guard to help protect the rear mech from weeds or when the bike slides down the road on its side. A small chainguard keeps a decent amount of debris off the chain, the chain is lubricated with wax as oil often gets washed off in a day.
Lighting, I could write a small book about that. In the depths of winter out in the boonies my whole life is contained in the patch of light being produced by the front lights so they’re quite important, also with the rear, if they go out I’m likely to get killed so there is a fiber optic telltale that runs from the rear light to the handlebar so I can see the rear light is working, this is also good for fault finding, if the motor wont spin and the brake lights are on it means one of the brake hall sensors has moved out of position.
Front lights are cast aluminium Magicshine knock offs, I throw the circuitry away and build my own drivers that run directly from the 36V battery, I can set the two front lights to flash 3 times each similar to recovery truck strobes, they can be set to static low beam or high beam, there is also a rotary knob on the handlebar that lets me adjust the brightness from min to max, if the roads are wet you need more light as it just bounces off.
Rear lights are cheap eBay led motor cycle lights that I gut and make my own circuit that gives way more brightness and crucially a wider viewing angle. I have incorporated brake lights which I feel greatly improves safety especially when hoofing down a hill at traffic speed and wanting to turn right. There is also a flashing fog / rain light but that’s yet to be wired up.
I have turn signals fitted, on dark winter evenings these are worth their weight in gold, they have massively reduced the abuse from drivers when I’m stuck in the middle of the road waiting to turn right, also some of the roads are so poor that both hands are needed to hang on to the handle bars when turning or braking. The front indicators use 3 x one watt LED,s with separate lenses, at this latitude the sun is often low in the sky so they need to be mega bright, none of the eBay offerings came close, in fact every one I tried was downright dangerous.
I have a motor cycle horn, some of my routes are shared walkways / cycle paths, occasionally I get joggers or people walking who ignore a polite ting on the bell or an ‘excuse me’, so I give it a second then give a load blast on the horn and watch them leap into the bushes!!
I use a Thudbuster seat post after damaging some internal organs when I hit a pothole with the back wheel sending the shock up into my body, that was a fun bit of time in hospital.
The controller (disguised as a water bottle) is mounted via rubber shock mounts, the battery internals are protected by foam.
The handlebars are a kind of Dutch design, I bought them by mistake but I really like them, the roads in the UK are very narrow, therefore wide handle bars tend to get you killed, there often isn’t enough room between lamp posts or trees and overtaking traffic. I welded a cross brace to the top and fitted rubber bushes, this makes the bike stable when upside down at the side of the road fixing punctures, it also adds protection for the gauges and allows mounting of the front turn signals.
A bag mounted to the front houses the wet weather gear, often the forecast shows 0% chance of rain only to be caught in a heavy downpour on the way home. The only thing that tends to be fully waterproof here is polythene however this kind of works like boil in the bag and can make you wetter with sweat than the rain would have done so is only used in very heavy rain.
Future mods include an integrated lighting driver that sets the strobing headlights to static when the turn signals are operating, Canbus networking for rear light, battery monitoring and gauges. I’ve made the circuit boards but have just too many other projects on the go. The front of the bike badly needs a tidy up.
Most of the electrical add-ons are pained in NATO green to try to hide them as at some point the government / police are bound to clamp down on homebuilt eBikes so I’m trying to stay under the radar.
All in all I’m very happy with this bike, it makes commuting sooo much easier.
Top left - Rear mech guard and chain guard
Top right - upcycled clock made from chainwheel and chain
Centre left - solar charging at work
Centre right - the Konerator under test
Bottom left - rear lights and turn signal
Bottom right - front lights and turn signal
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