Your Creation's Before & After Pics

[Heloc]

]View attachment 291290
Motobecane Hal Boost Eagle 27
I just got into mountain biking last year. My knees aren’t so good so the option of an electric motor made it possible. I paid $1699 from bikesdirect. Seemed like a decent price.View attachment 291295 [attachment=1]1D7CB75A-9B53-43E8-B4DD-41641442C8C6.jpeg[/attachment
I added the 100 mm BBSHD w/42t chainring and 52v 12ah battery. 27.5x3.00 tires
The bike rides very well off road,it works great in all 12 gears. In highest gear I can pedal comfortable up near 30 mph.
Only 2 things that bother me are the battery not fitting within the triangle and the motor hanging a little low. This thing has been insanely fun to ride. And no, it looks close but, the tire doesn’t hit the battery when the fork is compressed.

I'm so glad I found this post!

I've been looking at one of the Motobecane HAL bikes to replace my hardtail. Info on these bikes is somewhat hard to come by so I've been combing Youtube for videos that show the BB area and especially trying to find other examples of folks that have used one for a mid-drive conversion. You're the only one I've found so far!

If you're still around and I'm not just shouting into the void, I'd love to hear what you think of the bike a few years on.

I'm actually looking at one of the HAL5.5s that won't let you use tires as wide but has a 68mm wide BB and the downtube is straight at the BB. They're similar enough that your build makes me more confident the bike I'm looking at is a good candidate. Or if I decide I'm okay with the wider Q-factor and get a HAL6 it'll work at least as well as yours. Battery I have in mind should fit in the triangle too.

 

[gromike]

My before picture starts with a wheel build.:

View attachment 360514

The motor is rated as a 36v 500w direct drive, and cost me $79.

I hooked it up to this battery, after adding a 30a bms. I bought several of these packs from battery hookup, back when I was going to electrify my Grom. I bought a Ryvid Outset when the price got low enough. So, I'll count it as free.



I used this $50 controller, I believe it's for a motor scooter. I wanted to see if it did regen braking. It does!



It's all now on this bike, built from free bike parts. Between the motor wheel build and the controller I have $200 into this thing:



Kinda crappy looking, but it actually works great. I'll probably install a conventional ebike controller and battery at some point, but this was built to be the test mule for a supplemental super capacitor bank installation. I have close to 200 38F not so super super capacitors, and didn't want to burn-up my good ebikes.

 

[Eviltwin68]

I've converted 3 bikes so far, all to mid drives, all are recumbents. I'm all about neat installations and keeping the bike looking as normal as possible so I do my best to bundle wires and route them as close to the frame as possible.

First was a Greenspeed Magnum trike, I put a Tongsheng tsdz2b 48V motor and a battery on a custom mount. Later on I added a SRAM 3 speed internal rear hub on a new wheel to give the bike a bit more top end. I also put a larger chainring on the motor for speed.





The next conversion was a Rans XP which is a long wheelbase bike. I ended up buying a bike that was converted by an 80 year old guy that was afraid to ride it. I got the bike for 350 which included a Bafang BBS02 and a 48v battery. The bike was a thrift store purchase that I pulled what I wanted and ditched the frame. I mounted the battery on a triple bob mount and the did a very low power tune on the motor so I would get some assistance but still do most of the work myself. The other thing with recumbents is that it is sometimes difficult to get going so you have to Fred Flintstone it a bit till you are moving fast enough to get your feet up. No issues with this bike since the throttle takes care of that. I eventually added fenders and it pretty much gets alternated with the Greenspeed for daily rides.






The last conversion is one that will be used mostly for camping trips or any time I need to take a bike somewhere on a rack. The Greenspeed is heavy and unwieldy and the Rans is so long it does not fit in a rack. I picked up a Sun EZ sport which is a bit on the heavy side without any electrification but is a very easy to ride bike and fits on a rack. On this one I mounted a TSDZ8 motor and got a second mount for the same battery used on the Rans. I made a custom mount for the battery out of aluminum angle but otherwise its fairly standard. I swap the battery out when I take the Sun on a ride. I still need to find a set of fenders for it, a bit tough when there are two different sized wheels.

 

[gromike]

So, this past month I put two motors in wheels:




So I now have these two to fit the electronics into:



I bought the front hub motor to go into a Canondale Badboy. It has steel forks.
On the Fisher the motor came from an Adventon Pace 500, and so will it's battery.
I'll be fitting the electrics, because it'll be a bachelor's Christmas. That will be my after picture.

 

[prawn]

Yt industries tues /bafang 52v 20ah,60amp shunt modified controller,lekkie buzzbars,

 

[hillslayer@]

I hooked it up to this battery, after adding a 30a bms. I bought several of these packs from battery hookup, back when I was going to electrify my Grom. I bought a Ryvid Outset when the price got low enough. So, I'll count it as free.

View attachment 361464

I used this $50 controller, I believe it's for a motor scooter. I wanted to see if it did regen braking. It does!

View attachment 361465

It's all now on this bike, built from free bike parts. Between the motor wheel build and the controller I have $200 into this thing:

View attachment 361466

Kinda crappy looking, but it actually works great. I'll probably install a conventional ebike controller and battery at some point, but this was built to be the test mule for a supplemental super capacitor bank installation. I have close to 200 38F not so super super capacitors, and didn't want to burn-up my good ebikes.

I think I have that controller how did you do Regen with it?

 

[gromike]

Switch on rear brake hooked up to appropriate connector on the controller. Provides moderate regen a bit after activating.
Don't know if you can do any customization on this controller. Limited info about the controller.

 

[hillslayer@]

Switch on rear brake hooked up to appropriate connector on the co iontroller. Provides moderate regen a bit after activating.
Don't know if you can do any customization on this controller. Limited info about the controller.

So it's either the high brake or low brake connector. Thanks was wondering what those were for.

 

[gromike]

More of an inbetween picture of one of the two bikes I'm converting:

It's my first front hub motor bike conversion (outside of a motor wheel and rack mounted SLA battery that I used on this very bike in the mid-2000's.)
The battery is one of those 12s4p A123 battery packs with a new 30a bms installed. It's my second wheel build and I'm getting the ebike conversion thing done for less each time, and maybe it looks like it. But this thing will kick ass, that is until the motor burns up.
The weekend started in the fitting of a controller box to the front stem. I really want to build pretty, but the 7a KT controller wouldn't spin the wheel on throttle. WTF! This is my 6th build and I have never had that happen. Like, what am I going to do. Learn how to troubleshoot the controller?
As luck would have it, in the middle of this dilemma, amazon delivered (2) 11amp controllers. Something that I had ordered in a state of doom buying.
Hooked one up, motor spins!
So the thing sits like this until I get the soldering irons out. I'm planning on making a hood made of roofing rubber to fit over the controller and battery. That might work, or might not, but it's what's laying around.

 

[wturber]

I posted more info about this bike a few months back when I completed it. Figured I'd add it to this before and after build for grins. Too bad I don't have a photo of the Trek 820 by itself. The nice folks at xtracycle dug up as many original decals as they could find and that helped me with restoring the xtracycle. Though I ended up making many of my own duplicate decals with decal sheets and laser printer. I sealed the nice note from they sent on the bottom of the FliteDeck. The Free Radical and Free Radical Leap are no longer made and xtracycle only sells e-cargo bikes these days. I find that kind of sad since those bikes sell for $3k-5K - which seems kind counter to the original ethos of affordable cargo bikes. But hey, the market is what it is and you do what you must to survive. Their new bikes look like they are decent bikes. But I still like rolling my own.

More details here:

Cargo Cult

This is a bike that I started about five years ago. It is more about scratching an itch than being practical. That said, the intention was that it should be practical and that it would be used regularly. The itch was that I thought the whole idea of a Stoke Monkey was a neat hack. But when I...

endless-sphere.com

 

[gromike]

The finished bike from a couple of posts ago, with an experimental controller/battery cover made of roofing rubber and tape (i.e. stuff laying around):

Did a test ride up the steepest hill I would ride. The front wheel tended to slip on the steepest part of the hill, but the road was wet. Nonetheless, made it up the hill without too much effort. The bike pedals so well that most of the time you wouldn't even need the motor, outside of the desire for some extra umph. She's a keeper.
I'm going to put this bike in my rotation, probably as a shopper.

 

[NuclearDolomite]

The finished bike from a couple of posts ago, with an experimental controller/battery cover made of roofing rubber and tape (i.e. stuff laying around):
View attachment 363777
Did a test ride up the steepest hill I would ride. The front wheel tended to slip on the steepest part of the hill, but the road was wet. Nonetheless, made it up the hill without too much effort. The bike pedals so well that most of the time you wouldn't even need the motor, outside of the desire for some extra umph. She's a keeper.
I'm going to put this bike in my rotation, probably as a shopper.

Looks like a pretty clean commuter bike! Make sure you put flatout in those tires since that battery tells me you're going to be going distances. I put flatout in mine last year and haven't had a flat since... ever.

 

[gromike]

I have a Schwalbe Marathon Racer tire on the front hub motor wheel, going to put one on the back wheel. Don't think I need sealant. The worst puncture problem I have had in my local environment has been blackberry thorns and I believe these tires are good for that, and I know to be careful after they cut the trail.

 

[Chalo]

Looks like a pretty clean commuter bike! Make sure you put flatout in those tires since that battery tells me you're going to be going distances. I put flatout in mine last year and haven't had a flat since... ever.

What pressure do you use in your tires?

 

[Logic11]

...My knees aren’t so good...

What a coincidence; I just wrote this on cartilage:
??! Magnetic field on 18650 lithium-ion batteries improves them!?

 

[gromike]

Well, I have just competed my finest ebike conversion yet--finest as in least expensive. The battery and motor came out of an Aventon Pace 500, which had rim failure at the spoke holes. The bike stuff came out of a pile of free bike parts. About a two hundred dollars, excluding the new tires and tubes.



I built the bike for a friend who has COPD, so no pedaling is expected. It's a quick bike.
The before picture is when it was going to be the test bed for an experiment with super capacitors, which didn't happen.

 

[jegerjeger]

Built it around 8 years ago. Bought the frame from China and shoped for parts all over. First with a cyclone 3000w motor, but I did not like the flex in the carbon frame from all that torque, so I swaped to bbshd.
Frame photo from the web and the after picture is from last year.