Electric Bike Conversion Kit

Karl Gesslein / February 25, 2016 “Young fool. Only now, at the end, do you understand. Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the dark side. You have paid the price for your lack of vision.”  – Emperor Palpatine I wanted to do a mid drive build that would be dirt cheap and still work equally well both on single track and on the road as a commuter. In the end, I created a monster that performs well in both arenas, but is the master of none. The old school nuvinci N171 performed well even under tremendous amounts of power, but...

Karl Gesslein / March 19, 2017 Although last time I was in LA I swore I was never ever going back, here I am again at the Lunacycle HQ spending several hours a day sitting in traffic. How do people live like this? No wonder ebikes are so popular here in Southern California. People can get an ebike and commute on the bike paths along the ocean and avoid the traffic completely. If I lived here I’m sure I would do the same. I got my hands on one of the first prototype of Bafang’s 1000W Max Ultra Torque sensing mid drives and I was...

Karl Gesslein / March 3, 2018 The Ultra Max Ludicrous edition (2500W peak) fitted onto a modified FS fatty frame One of my pet peeves about the new torque-sensing 1000W Ultra Max drive unit is that there just aren’t that many frames for it available in the states. The original Bafang Max drive which only sported 350W of power has a totally different mounting bracket than the Ultra Max which means you just can’t fit a round drive unit into a square hole. While there are prebuilt ebikes on the market that you can buy already with the Ultra Max drive unit on it,...

Karl Gesslein / November 23, 2017 There is half a dozen low power torque sensing mid drives on the market right now that advertise themselves as being between 250 and 750 Watts. The one thing that all these ‘low power’ drive units have in common is that there is absolutely no way to program the drive unit to do anything much other than what it is set to do from the factory. The most frustrating part is that often they have built-in speed limiters that you have to install special defeat-devices to overcome. Many of these defeat devices plug-in between the speedo and...

Karl Gesslein / January 15, 2016 Ever since I got my first BBS02 2 years ago I pretty much gave up on pedal assist for anything except riding on the road. The stock programming on the BBS02 from the factory is absolute crap and it takes a lot of pedal movement to get the PAS system to activate and then after you stop pedaling the motor keeps running for up to 25 feet depending on your current speed. Can you imagine going full-bore in the woods and having a problem so you stop pedaling and the motor keeps driving you forward another...