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Last summer, I'd ridden my Abound daily for 20 months when I removed the center stand to clean and lube. Bolting it back on, I crushed the rear light cable. I e-mailed customer service to ask the price of a new tail light. I got a quick response saying a new headlight, listing for $6, had been...

I think my bike weighs 90 pounds. When I recharged last time, the display said the battery was down to 22% and I'd been 270 miles. I pedal mostly without the motor, but a few motor watts help on hills. With my first e-bike, I was totally reliant on the motor until I moved the seat back several...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-22/trump-cancels-trail-bike-lane-grants-deemed-hostile-to-cars?utm_campaign=bn&utm_medium=distro&utm_source=yahooUS NHSTA has suddenly changed its tune. A few weeks ago, their website said helmets were the least effective way to reduce fatalities...

I was not familiar with the term “assumptive.” I assumed it had something to do with making an ass of you and me. That didn’t make sense. I’m not the one who said his batteries had no balancing ability, who recommended slow charging, who said a battery with matched cells would stay in balance...

That's what I thought 3 years ago. I got no answer from Radpower, so I measured broken spokes. My measurements were 5mm too long because the J bends had straightened somewhat before the heads popped. The threaded end of a replacement spoke extended 5mm past the nipple, but the rim, and I...

In my experience, spoke length means the distance from the rim where the nipple comes out, to the near edge of the hole in the hub. It was tricky to get a tape into position to measure a 125mm spoke on my rear wheel. A 240mm spoke should be easier to measure.

I turn my headlight on at sundown or in rain. A motorist or pedestrian might assume the coast was clear after a quick glance from 100 yards, and in low light I’m not as visible as I might think, without a light. I know my headlight wasn’t intended to be run during the day because it dims the...

i’ve analyzed the last 14 times I charged my Abound battery, rated at 47.1 volts and 678.2 watt hours. My display tells me what percent of the charge remains. If I subtract that from 1, I know what percent of the charge I’ve used. Multiplying that by 678.2 would tell me how many watt hours I...

I discovered that the KT controllers on two bikes would draw a little current unless the battery was switched off. If I switched a battery off, I could find the same voltage after it sat a month or more. The battery on my Abound switches itself off when I shut off the controller. I'd had my...

Yes, for example, an M5 x 0.8 is typically torqued at 5 Nm for a clamping force of about 1400 pounds, but my designer used them to clamp a polyethylene chain guard without washers under the screw heads. That would be like driving on polyethylene in a Cadillac Escalade with studded tires. The...

Hi. No offence meant here, either. Just my five cents! An ISO 2936 H8 hex key is only 12.5% longer than an H6, but I can apply twice as much torque with the H8. The slightly fatter handle has a big effect. The screws for my stem, riser, and handlebar clamp are marked for maximum torque only...

In 2020 Radpower said to leave a new battery on the charger 12 hours 3 times. I didn't like that advice, and they now say balancing isn't necessary. I don't think that's exactly true. I like Battery University. They say cells should be matched for voltage and capacity, but for packs of more...

Probably most e-bike batteries lack active balancing, but if they didn't have passive balancing, their service life would be short. In passive balancing, each cell is protected by a shunt which at a certain voltage begins bypassing current. That way, if there are 13 cells in series, you can shut...

I'd see what the watt meter reads with the timer on but the charger disconnected from the battery, probably under 2.0 watts. With the battery connected, that's what the watt meter should read if the BMS has really switched off; sometimes I've seen a green light on the charger, but the wattage...

Not me... I didn't understand how it could be okay. I double checked it with my incandescent lights, which drew 13 battery amps. Clean and dry, I think the drop from post to cable terminal on each side was maybe 2 mv. With silicone grease, it was the same. When my Nissan was maybe 30 years old...

I, too, accepted it. After all, the typical resistance of silicone dielectric grease is about 3x10^16 ohms times the thickness in cm divided by the area in cm^2. How could a film be so thin that resistance wouldn't matter? Yet the electrical engineer said that at RCA they would put it on the...

That happened to me because a bike had sat too many weeks or months. I plugged a watt meter into the wall, a timer into the watt meter, and the charger into the timer. (Watt meters and timers can be under $10 these days.) The watt meter gave me an idea of how much charging was going on at the...

Come to think of it, I have a pound of Deoxit Marine Grease, made for electrical connections.

I replaced the controller on my Aventon Abound. Generally, I find e-bike connectors difficult to disconnect, and this was especially bad. Vaguely I remembered a tool. Later I remembered what it was: my hose removal pliers. Using them might require me to put some sort of hose clamp on each half...

Amazon has lots of "gas can replacement spouts" if you can get one with the right threads. Maybe they're standard. https://www.amazon.com/EZ-POUR-40051-Replacement-Spout-White/dp/B00YP3YTXM I see this one has a flame arrester. In 1957, an older friend stunned me by fetching a tin 1-gallon gas...