My Vado renamed again! This time to "Apollo 13"
My answer was:
-- Sorry Jerzy but my Vado
is the Apollo 13 indeed
Why, your Vado is a great disaster? The Apollo 13 had a big explosion and they rode home in the Lunar Excursion module. Sort of the Titanic of space. The crew made it to Cape Canaveral in the row boat of space.
My first e bike I should have named Edsel. Named after the car with electric shift that would change to random gears as you turned the steering wheel. 55 mph, turn the wheel, right into park! Pretty ugly car too, grill like a 1932 Ford V8 roadster to make Edsel Ford happy, body style like a shoebox with chrome ornaments. V8 logo taillights didn't help any.
So the bike that should have been named Edsel I converted a Huffy Savannah with geared hub motor, 30" struts on the front to control the torque & also hold up the 18 lb 17.5 AH battery. 7 miles from the summer camp where I did the conversion on a very safe very hilly road, the electricity quits. I ride 14 miles unpowered to my home in town. Have to push that bike up some hills, it only has 10 speeds and 5 of them are too fast. At home eureka, the battery is measuring 11 volts. Bad battery.
Get my money back from Amazon, order a 18 lb battery from e-bay. Same shape as the other one. Ride 7 miles out towards the summer camp, the electricity quits. Pedal myself out 18 miles, on the flatter Hwy 3, measure the battery, 51 volts. ?? Maybe the controller or motor is bad? Symptom, the display goes blank and power stops. No codes or low battery alarm or anything. So another day I ride that bike out towards nothing much but big hills, and at the bottom of onehill the power quits again. I have to push the bike up 3 hills that time to get it back to summer camp. At summer camp, battery reads 52 v. ??
So I catch a ride to town with a church friend, and ride out in my new cargo bike, shown left. All pedal power at that time. Take the battery off the Huffy, strap it to the front basket of the cargo bike, take it to town for analysis. That is the famous 5.7 hour trip to town, with 25 mph headwinds all the way, 96 degrees in the shade, and that battery sitting like a barn door in the front basket of the bike. 144 bpm all the way, it was horrible.
At home, 3 months of thought. Finally decide to load the battery with 10 ohms (5 amp load) and read the voltage, see if it holds up for 3 hours. Bingo, immediately the voltage collapses to 7. 2nd bad battery!
So I leave the Huffy "Edsel" out at the summer camp, and next year repurpose it as a pedal only bike for riding home if the cargo bike blows a crank or chain or some other unrepairable. Works as long as there is no electric shift.