A Beautiful Idea!

[gromike]

Well, I just had an idea. I just finished this build (as if this build will ever be finished):

It was built out of mostly a pile of free parts, a 36v Tsdz2B, and a spare Huffy Oslo battery. The bike is kinda heavy and slow with that 36v motor. I'll fix that, maybe. Why I put this thing together is that one of the free parts was a 24" wheel built around a Nuvinci 360 CVT hub (now called Enviolo). The CVT hub works great, though it's heavy and has a higher transmission loss than a geared hub. But an ebike hides those downsides.

I would say that an ebike is the application that the tilting ball transmission has been waiting for, for 150 years! Anyway, my beautiful idea is to put an Envilo inside a direct drive hub motor. I do believe I have read of IGH's in hub motors, so maybe it's possible.

 

[Dewey]

I have a 36v BBS01b & Enviolo CVT combo on my bike. I agree the Enviolo works well for commuting, and is a lot stronger than the Nexus 8 IGH hubs I tried previously and broke with the torque of the motor. I like how you use a chain tensioner to make it work on your FS bike. Mine is a basic town bike, a Breezer Downtown with sliding rear dropouts so I don’t need the chain tensioner, but your suspension would be nice .

A hub motor/IGH combo would surely need to be pre-built, eg Grin Tech in Vancouver sold a TDCM IGH motor that matched your description, which was a direct drive motor built around a Sturmey 5 IGH, though they no longer sell it. The issue a DIY conversion raises is there would be no way to thread the power cable through the Enviolo hub. I’ve seen front hub motor + Enviolo combos, similar concept to the VanMoof bikes but much more reliable!

 

[gromike]

No, I couldn't ever build the Envilo hub motor combo myself. When I was thinking about how the Nuvinci/Envilo, and the tilting ball CVT, finally found its niche through its adaptation to ebikes, that's when the idea popped into my head: why not wrap a motor around it. Though the mid-drive is probably the natural home for an Envilo.

 

[Dewey]

In the EU there are a few mid-drive with mid-mounted IGH combo motors coming onto the market, That’s nice because it leaves both wheels easy to remove when changing a tube/tire. I’ve given up doing tube/tire changes because it’s very time consuming and I usually end up breaking something, last time it was the shifter after I failed to notice the cable housing had popped out of the shifter on the handlebar when I was struggling at the back of the bike to get the cable back onto the hub. Now I pay my bike shop to do the rear. Next time should be in December when I swap out the tires for winter studs.