Electric Bike Conversion Kit

Karl Gesslein / November 7, 2015 Is this nut job of a blogger really starting a build thread for an ebike he calls “My Little Bronie”? You bet your sweet ass I am. This was the bike that started my love of singletrack riding 15 years ago. It was also the first e-bike that I ever built that wasn’t a total piece of crap. There were other DD & geared hub builds that I had done, but none of them felt the way that I thought an electric singletrack trail bike SHOULD feel. “My Little Bronie” forever changed the way I looked at riding in the woods, for the...

Karl Gesslein / November 5, 2015 I realize that nothing is farther from a real fat-bike than my Death Trap 2000 build, but bear with me. About 8 years ago I thought I would buy some spandex grab some power bars and join the road-biking crowd (Insert gratuitous epic rap battle link here). I ended up buying a Dawes 1500 from Bike Island with a replacement carbon front fork for only $400 (they usually go for $550). Unfortudently I found out that I totally hated road biking and my ass looked fat in spandex, so the bike mostly just gathered dust in my barn. A couple...

Karl Gesslein / November 11, 2015 There’s fat bikes and then there is the “what the hell is that?” bikes. The Phat Phuk really deserves a category of its own as the massive 5 inch actual width tires are like nothing else currently on the market. Vee Rubber decided to release a tire so big that it won’t even fit on almost every factory fat bike in production. What a great idea. If you build it, they will come Massive 5.05″ actual width tires paired with a 1000W nominal 1500W peak electric motor makes the ultimate deep powder bike. This thing is over the top to...

was underwhelmed with the street performance on my Death Trap 2000 road bike build with the BBSHD. The next build I did was my insanely obese tired Phat Phuk which was perfectly representative of America’s Fat Epidemic. The Phat Phuk did remarkably well even with the bad joke that is the 46T steel chainring that Bafang ships with it (don’t worry better chainrings and adapters are on the way). The large wheel diameter of a fat bike and a monster 46T chain wheel assures that you’re always riding in the woods on your main granny gear or one gear down from it if you won’t want to deal with...

Karl Gesslein / November 17, 2018 I broke the frame while thrashing hard on my Aluminum framed Phat Phuk last year so I decided it was probably time to switch to steel. There are several steel framed fatbikes that will fit the 5.05″ SnowShoe 2XL, but the one that I could find the cheapest was a Bikes Direct Lurch NOT currently available for $1099 here. I got mine from Bikeisland.com last year for a mere $750 shipped with some scuff marks and a missing front fork. I got a bunch of take-off front forks from Lunacycle for about $25 each so I was able to build my favorite...