Advice on DIY Electric Front Wheel Hub for Adult Tricycle

[m@Robertson]

The danger with such front hub motor conversion is that the fork may not be able to stand the torque of the electric motor & may shear off the fork bottom. This guy CitizenCycle channel on YouTube goes into that where he shears off a fork. The torque arms (even on both sides) can help, tho the torque may shear off the hose clamp holding on the arms (so drilling torque arms & inserting bolt thru the torque arm(s) & washers may be also better than relying on a hose clamp. (I am NOT advising to drill thru the fork!) Another guy on YouTube shows making his own torque arm that does not use hose clamps (maybe he should have added them). It scares me if you add a front hub motor to a mere regular pedal bike.

Done right, there is no meaningful risk. The risks you describe as if they were inevitable are not. They come from someone who doesn't know what they are doing, does the job wrong and pays the price accordingly. Inexperience breeds misconceptions about the effectiveness of the concept, and results in a build that is liable to fail spectacularly. Built intelligently, those risks do not exist.

But installing a 1000 Watt motor onto a regular bicycle or tricyle front fork would be insanity.

No it isn't. Especially if its 2wd and the motors work together as a team. What you need to understand is the benefits of awd are not so much raw power as they are distributed traction. 2x1000 is WAY better than 1x2000 (i.e. just putting a bigger motor on the back). And 2wd means two motors work together as a team. The front motor is not pulling all the weight by any stretch.

Dual Motor AWD Electric Bikes (the good and bad)

I like to build top-quality-component ebikes from the frame up. Quite a few of them are dual motor or AWD or 2WD or whatever you want to call them. Why would you build an AWD ebike?

talesontwowheels.com

As @harryS noted, that Citizen Cycle guy in the video made what is a VERY well known mistake: He put a motor onto a suspension fork. You can't do that. Or rather, you can and if you do, you have a very high risk of shearing the dropouts clean off, which he did. If he had spent a few minutes making one post on a forum heavy with DIY builder experience he would have been educated real fast on this.

So how can it be done on bikes like the ECells awd hub bikes? They use a suspension fork with beefed up dropouts. But there are no free lunches in this world and the other thing they do that is conspicuously absent from their advertising is they pull back the power on the front axle. AWD is so beneficial that even the low power they deliver feels like a miracle. The buyers who just wrote a check and lack the experience to know better ... are still thrilled with their purchase.

 

[kevinmccune]

Done right, there is no meaningful risk. The risks you describe as if they were inevitable are not. They come from someone who doesn't know what they are doing, does the job wrong and pays the price accordingly. Inexperience breeds misconceptions about the effectiveness of the concept, and results in a build that is liable to fail spectacularly. Built intelligently, those risks do not exist.

No it isn't. Especially if its 2wd and the motors work together as a team. What you need to understand is the benefits of awd are not so much raw power as they are distributed traction. 2x1000 is WAY better than 1x2000 (i.e. just putting a bigger motor on the back). And 2wd means two motors work together as a team. The front motor is not pulling all the weight by any stretch.

Dual Motor AWD Electric Bikes (the good and bad)

I like to build top-quality-component ebikes from the frame up. Quite a few of them are dual motor or AWD or 2WD or whatever you want to call them. Why would you build an AWD ebike?

talesontwowheels.com

As @harryS noted, that Citizen Cycle guy in the video made what is a VERY well known mistake: He put a motor onto a suspension fork. You can't do that. Or rather, you can and if you do, you have a very high risk of shearing the dropouts clean off, which he did. If he had spent a few minutes making one post on a forum heavy with DIY builder experience he would have been educated real fast on this.

So how can it be done on bikes like the ECells awd hub bikes? They use a suspension fork with beefed up dropouts. But there are no free lunches in this world and the other thing they do that is conspicuously absent from their advertising is they pull back the power on the front axle. AWD is so beneficial that even the low power they deliver feels like a miracle. The buyers who just wrote a check and lack the experience to know better ... are still thrilled with their purchase.

i did a low power one with a 350 back motor and a 350 watt"imortor" on the front,worked great other than the weight

 

[m@Robertson]

This was two years ago.

I took a bit of a look at this guy's Youtube channel and I have to say I enjoyed what I saw. He's now selling front-wheel-drive add-on kits and the things he is doing are exactly what I was when I got started on my early builds. Thats not to say I'm looking down on what he's doing. I'm seeing a reasonably smart v1.0 approach to 2wd. He hasn't gotten to the point where he's doing dual synchronized PAS, or a single unified battery, and thats probably a bit too much of an ask as he's selling kits that will work on anything, and both PAS and a shared hi-po battery are going to make it tough to sell a universal kit.