My full suspension candidates for my planned ebike.

B

bumper

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I'm looking at the following bikes for a planned ebike conversion. All have front discs and are full suspension. I plan on doing a rear hub.

I think front discs are extremely important because of the weight I'm carrying and the speeds.

I am a little wary of these xmart bikes because my last one was ill fitting and the chain kept falling off.

S40. I like this one the best. Seems to have room in the triangle for battery placement:
http://www.target.com/Men’s-40-Schw...riginal-keywords=s40 bike&rh=k:40 bike&page=1

walmart mongoose. http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=3610588

toyrus mongoose. http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2929042

Any other full suspension with front disc and regular rear vbrakes? I don't mind looking at some older candidates but need some model numbers. Thanks in advance.
 
Check out the bikes at Performance if you have one near you. Some of the Iron Horse Warrior FS bikes are decent quality and don't cost much more than the department store junk. Bikes Direct and Ibex also have some good deals on internet mail order bikes that are better designs and have much higher quality components than the low end Walmart and Target bikes.

Where are you planning on putting the battery?
 
Thanks for those tips. I'll check them out.

I planned to put the battery in the triangle hopefully in one of those "wedge" shaped packs. that's why the schwinn looked good.
 
I'd say one of the key criteria is a steel rear swingarm. The weight doesn't matter near as much as the hub motor staying on the bike, and if it needs a tweak to fit that is possibe. measure carefully whether a big x5 motor has the clearance too. Once you have a decent frame, all the components can be replaced later. Good deraliurs and middle of the road forks aren't so expensive. Most peoples dissatisfaction comes from not knowing how to tune a cheapie bike. The bike shop guys may hate you for bringing in a wallbike to tune it up but they will do it. When I walk in the door with a new hub wheel to be trued, they just about throw holy water on me and shout heritic!
 
Its not just the main components that are lower quality on the department store specials, its the headsets, rims, cables, wheel bearings, crank gears, overall welding, etc. In my experience, Those cheap Promax disc brakes work worse than rim brakes, and they will be stressed out more on an e-bike than a human powered one. it cost more to upgrade the bikes later than to get a close out on a better made bike that already has decent stuff. I don't understand the putting-high-power-motors-on-a-super-cheap bike thing I see in the forums here. If anything, the motors and higher speeds are going to stress the bikes out more than human power, and the buy-the cheapest-bike-save money -for-the-batteries thinking isn't sound in my opinion. No need to get a $3000 bike with XTR components either, but I wouldn't trust a $229 FS bike rigged up with a powerful motor to get me there in one piece and to last more than a few months before things start breaking on it.



here are a few bikes you may want to consider. They are better designed suspensions and have a noticeably better disc brake set up.

http://cgi.ebay.com/2008-ALUMINUM-FULL-SUSPENSION-MOUNTAIN-BIKE-ROCK-SHOX_W0QQitemZ130229162227QQihZ003QQcategoryZ98083QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-ALUMINUM-FULL-SUSPENSION-MOUNTAIN-BIKE-DISC-BRAKE_W0QQitemZ370058606145QQihZ024QQcategoryZ98083QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Also, most of the batteries will not fit in the small inside areas of the frame on the FS bikes. be sure to spec that out carefully. Ebikes.CA has a Lipo pack that is currently on backorder that might fit, but it is not powerful enough to supply a super heavy duty hub.
 
andys,
those 2 bikes have discs in the rear. I was hoping that the rear would have v brakes. that way all I had to do would be to drop the hub with a ready-made cassette and utilize the supplied brakes. I'm not technically proficient (yet) to be able to install v brakes on those bikes and feel confident about it. Besides, that would be another expense.
 
I would forget the Toys R us bike outright, its a toy, the componants are .. well, its a toy.

The Walmart mongoose I actualy bought to evaluate. I have since dismantled the bike as I decided it was too poorly built to even give away to charity. The welds in the aluminum were contaminated with iron.

On the other hand, the Schwinn S40 is a nice bike for the money, and the Mongoose Blackcomb is about the same quality from what I've seen.
 
I'm sure you are right about the cheap components, Andy, but it seems like a whole lot of the better bikes don't have steel where you need it. I've broken alloy stuff enough in my life to appreciate how one bubble in there in cast stuff is all it takes to be a problem. i'd have gotten an all steel bike for my ebike, except I drew the line on the one piece steel cranks. Those roadmaster really are junk. At least on the mongoose, you can upgrade. Lotsa folks are just going hardtail since they want that steel but I love my full suspension even if it is funky 2 inch travel junk. Used, I could afford two a year to keep myself going. The v brakes are fine here in the desert. Looking at the motobecane that might be steel in the back, and if so maybe somebody could weld on some v brake mounts cut off of a ten buck front fork.
 
I don't know what Hub you are using, but The bMC geared hub motors from EV Tech have disc brake mounts on them, and come with a good quality torque arm so the hub won't rip out alloy drop outs. I think a decent quality FS bike with disc brakes (like the Motebecane) with a compact 10Ah Lipo battery and BMC rear hub would make a terrific e-bike. Total weight would be well under 50 pounds, and it would be well balanced and have great stopping power. I am going to be building one with a friend soon out of his Cannondale lefty FS bike and will post photos when we are done.
 
I bet it would, especially for hills or towing with the geared.
 
Still haven't decided, but I can add another candidate. It was a Magna Excitor at Target (no link). I can verify that it was steel since I took a magnet with me. However, it had caliper brakes and no holes in the front to put disc brakes on.

How easy is it to add discs if you don't have those holes? Is it even possible?
 
You can't add a disc to a hub that doesn't accept one. It's pretty easy to find wheels already like that, though.

The question really is: Did it have a place to mount a disc caliper and is it worth the added cost?
 
You'd have to get a fork with the disc mounts to convert the front to disk, and the breaks themselves of course.
 
Magna is a very low quality, cheaply made brand of bikes. super low end components, and it weighs 40 pounds.
 
It seems that there's 2 schools of thought here: 1) LBS-type newer full suspension bikes that are usually made of aluminum and 2) cheap xmart type bikes made of steel that can be bent or spread to fit a rear hub. If I put a rear hub in a aluminum bike, don't i have to make sure it fits snugly. I mean if you spread or bring rear dropouts together on an aluminum bike your already stressing aluminum, right? Doesn't matter if you have torque arms or not.

Am I correct here?

Or, on an aluminum bike, do I just have to make sure that it fits between the dropouts and install washers and the like to make it fit snugly (with the torque arm)? Thanks.
 
All current mountain bikes use a standard 135mm drop out in the back. The rear Hubs are made to fit that size and should come with a torque arm or have one available as an option. The alloy frames on the better bikes are probably stronger than the cheap steel frames on the Walmart bikes. Better welds, better frame designs, better quality control. Like I said in an earlier post, Cheap full suspension bikes going fast are dangerous and will not hold up. Even better quality mountain bike components fail under hard leg power use, and the cheap shiny junk bikes that they sell for a couple hundred dollars won't take 20 MPH plus e-bike speeds over bumps and potholes for more than a few hundred miles before all kind of problems. God forbid you ever actually take it on the dirt trails. You will wear out those cheaply made shocks, forks, suspension pivot points, wheel bearings, cranks & bottom brackets, brakes, headset bearings, etc in short order on cheap bike. The bike you start your e-bike build with is the foundation of the entire e-bike package. Don't skimp on it.
 
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