I remembered there was a commuter bike thread.

I scoured local classifieds threads for a while... building up something that is super cheap but still high performance with mostly parts from my bucket of leftovers or cheap local parts.

Bike as I picked it up. $ investment? FREE (LOL, you think... so did I)



Took it down to the frame, since the whole drivetrain is old, heavy and generally not desirable. Put a pair of $50 wheels (with 10 speed 12-28 cassette) on it with some parts bin tires that may or may not get changed out since they ride like bricks.



Not shown because I don't have a stem/quill adapter is the drop handlebars I picked up with 105 10 speed 5600 STI levers - Price FREE "for being a nice, honest guy"


Lots of little stuff to do still.
-the water bottle cage it came with is coming off... if there isn't any provision for a standard bottle cage I will add riv-nuts for one without bands.
-need to clean and re-pack the headset
-going to see if the local bike project will take some of the components I have removed in trade for a set of full length fenders
-going to weld up an 8"x12" (or so) stainless front rack for a lunch bag or similar.
-I have in my bin a sram rival compact crankset and BB, so im going to put that on.
-hopefully my old mtb 7 speed derailleur in my bin will work with the new road levers... if not I can figure out something else.
-going to use wellgo spd pedals I have in the bin too. they probably could use a greasing lol.

its kind of fun building bikes, especially trying to do it ultra cheap.

 

Hi, can you tell me how you made that basket - what did you use for the tray - thats exactly what I need. I have a mountain bike but the basket from my old Hybrid just doesn't fit the look of a MTB. This looks rugged and ideal to clamp to my pannier for when i carry tools etc on trails. Many thanks

 

Here's my e-bike I built at the end of Christmas and was my daily commuter to work to downtown San Fran. Sick and tired of public transpo, I started using the electric scooters around town, then decided to go ebike to save my sanity. Exercise + sanity + saving time = winning

It's somewhat hilly, so decided I had to go with a ebike, essential for surviving this commute after a long day. After looking at what was available, got some serious sticker shock at $4k price tags. A friend of mine said something about Bafang.. and so the research started there. Read up more about it and seems like this kit would do the trick and not to mention it was programmable for some serious added power. This kit isn't cheap ~$1600, but can outperform anything else out there for a commuter setup.

It started with this $80 donor off of craigslist. It had the essentials ... namely disc brakes and rode just fine.


Finished product below...
Had to make it commuter friendly with addition of lights, fenders, etc.

It's a mid drive 750W Bafang Motor BBSHD from Lunacycle. It goes 32mph pedaling like a squirrel. I could have changed out gears for more top end, but I do have hills to contend with.
I re-programmed it to run at 1000W, 750W is the street legal limit.
What hills? It flattens out most hills on my commute. It goes 20mph up hills with pedaling moderately. Its got tons of torque.
You stay with the same gearing as it replaces your crankset with the motor. (mid-drive as opposed to rear hub).
Battery is good for about 21 miles.
My commute has gone from 50 minutes to around 25 minutes and get some exercise + energy boost at the end of the day

https://lunacycle.com/bafang-bbshd-1000w-middrive-kit/

 

Back in 2014, I did some pissing and moaning about wanting something a bit higher-quality than the K-Mart specials I was riding around on in Manhattan. But a combination of cheapness, apathy, and the realities of bike theft in NYC meant that never went anywhere.

And then, of course, I moved to Chicago, a city not known for bicycle commuting.

Well, the city finally finished the construction of the riverwalk pedestrian / bike trail up near where I live, and it happens to be an absolutely perfect bypass route for my daily ride. They've also constructed curb-separated bike lanes around the road which runs behind the supermarket where I shop which connects to said aforementioned trail. So it was time to re-open that old line of thinking.

And here we are:




Hydraulic disk brakes, Gates belt-drive, Nexus 7 speed internally-geared hub, it's pretty much perfect. This is the L-Train, a partnership between Priority Bicycles and Brilliant Bicycles, both NYC-based companies which strike a good balance between using quality parts and keeping the price reasonable. The base bike was $750, and I've added the fenders, basket, rack, and a seriously impressive headlight. Plus a more comfy seat to accommodate my fat ***.


Just need a set of Panniers at this point, and a permanent taillight. (Using one that clips to my belt right now.)


The riverwalk trail is borderline surreal early in the morning before sunrise.





And quite serene during the day.

 

If you are using it for a work commute, do you think you might want mudflaps to keep your shins/ankles/pants clean and dry?

 

The fenders seem to be doing an adequate job as-is. It rained heavily last night, so I rode through a few puddles this morning. No wetness.


Also, I really cannot say enough good things about this rear hub. It is everything I'd hoped a modern geared hub would be. Quiet, smooth, precise, instant shifts. And you can run the shifter from bottom to top and back again while at a full stop. I will never own a chain-drive derailleur bike again.

 

God that path looks amazing. Didn't you have an ebike in LA? How long is your commute in Chicago?

Those Nexus hubs are pretty slick. I ran them with gates polychains on my senior project/recumbent bike. This was before Gates thought of using their belts on bikes so I had to make pulleys that worked with their unique input sprocket. Getting stuck on inclines/obstacles and needing to shift while stopped was important, as was no dropped chains.



Rohloff had a 14 speed hub IIRC but those cost what the entire project budget was.

 

Interesting. I wouldn't have figured for you a recumbent trike nerd. That setup looks damned interesting. Is that a double-wishbone suspension with U-joint axles?


I build a serious monster e-bike when I lived in San Diego, back before you could buy pre-made e-bikes which were actually worth a **** in terms of torque. This was because I lived in a mountainous area, and just wasn't in the sort of physical shape which made a conventional bike a practical commuting solution.

When I moved to NYC, I initially brought that bike with me, but quickly realized that it wasn't a practical (or necessary) thing to have in that area. So that's when I built the first (and then second) Schwinn. Used those during the 3 years I was a New Yorker, abandoned the red one on the sidewalk when I left (it was used up by that point), brought the black one with me to Chicago, and never used it because I lived in an area in which trying to ride on the streets would likely result in death more quickly than offering to reveal incriminating evidence against the Clintons.

But now I live in a nice quiet neighborhood with nice quiet streets, with the riverwalk path bridging the gap between that area and my workplace / area where I do my grocery shopping. I only have to ride on Addison for about 200 feet in total.


And, yeah, the riverwalk is awesome. Even better, there is a park at either end of it which you ride through to get onto / off of it, and the parks also have paved bike lanes in them. It's a far cry from Central Park, but it still beats sitting in traffic.





The absolute shortest distance from home to work is 1.9 miles. However I prefer the more scenic route, which is 2.6 miles in the morning, 3.2 miles in the afternoon (due to one-way streets.) And it's still faster than driving during the normal rush-hours.

 

It had 4 tires and two riders so a recumbent quad I guess. It was for a NASA 'lunar rover' competition in Huntsville, so it had to fold up into a set cube. The front suspension was double a arms but the rear was trailing arms. I forget why, maybe due to the 4 wheel steering. I did the drivetrain only. The axles had u joints and were telescopic, and I put one way clutches in the wheel hubs so you can take tight turns without dragging the tires. It was surprisingly capable; there used to be a long set of stairs by the library that we would launch off of rapidly, pretty stupid looking back but at the time made a lot of sense. Turn around, shift down, and crawl right back up. The seat positions could be adjusted with pins, and we wore hobiecat harnesses to attach to the bike for back support.




The family stopped by the school about a year ago when we were out in that area. It is still parked in one of the foyers, old and dusty. I should email my advisor offering to refurbish it. EDIT: and never give it back.









Surron type 'e-bikes' are all the rage in Philly. If these existed 10 years ago I'd be joining them. Out in the farm area of NJ I've yet to encounter any on the trails where I ride by bicycles.


That sounds fabulous!

 

That's pretty cool. Impractical as heck, but cool.





Holy cat! Those aren't bikes, they're motorcycles!

Speaking of 10 years ago, that's the sort of thing that the hardcore DIYers over at EndlessSphere were just figuring out how to cobble together. There were some seriously wicked builds going on back then, and I learned a heck of a lot from that forum.

I just went and checked, and yeah, it's still online and all of my old posts are still there. It was like the early days of Megasquirt back then. Assembling battery packs from scratch, getting hub motors drop-shipped from China, figuring out how to interface a Brand X throttle to a Brand Y controller, via the Brand Z interface / monitor.


I am a bit saddened by the fact that so many of the people & companies which were on the cutting edge 12 years ago seem to have vanished. ebikes.ca is still around (yay!) and still selling the CycleAnalyst / Drain Brain, as well as pre-made batteries, hub motors, and tons of other stuff which we had to either fabricate ourselves or try to find a Chinese vendor willing to ship Qty 1 of something. (This was way before AliExpress.)