AJMIAC

If you're buying a budget ebike, that costs HALF of those 40lb ebikes, why would you think it would weigh the same?? Yeah it's gonna be heavy. Obviously. It'll probably be a lot of fun, even so.

To make your ebike act just like a pedal bike (at least in terms of power and torque) you don’t need a lot of support. For an extra 20lbs of bike mass, you need only 4-10Nm of torque, depending on how steep the hill is (10-30% in my calculations). Depending on your cadence, that equates to 40-100W. So Eco Mode with 85Nm and 600W is still very much overkill.

@mikekazimer: Sorry, I was unclear. If you had a big bunch of spacers under the stem to raise your flat bar up to the same height as your tall bar, you'd also need a much longer stem to put your hands in the same spot. The higher rise bars, going straight up, move your hands away from the steering axis and so give the same effect as a longer stem.

That backsweep/upsweep measurement is designed-in when the handlebar rise is in a vertical position on the stem... In a couple cases the editor says that they roll the bar to a "neutral" position which puts the grips "level with the ground." If it's level to the ground, then there is no upsweep and the back sweep is actually more like 11-12 degrees. My point is, these back/up sweep specs can get thrown out the window as soon as you roll the bar away from the riser being vertical. I'd guess the 8/5 normal sweeps are pretty ergonomic for pushing DOWN on the bars, to support your weight on flat ground or to pump the bike into the ground. But a lot of the time you are pushing FORWARD on the bars, to brace against braking forces or when the bike is on a steep downhill. So bars get rolled back to give a better grip angle for how we will usually interact with the bars. Let's not get started on how as bars get higher and higher rise you end up effectively lengthening your stem and dramatically affecting how your bike handles. That 50mm or 80mm rise bar with a 50m stem can be mimicked with a flatter bar and a 80-100mm stem. So people may actually be rolling their bars back just to keep the steering feel the same, but now the ergonomics at the grips are pretty bad when it all backsweep and no upsweep...

Hey Everyone! I’ve worked on this bike for a long while now and you finally get to see it! It rides so fun and I hope you like it. My favorite setup is the TR suspension (so good!!) with the long 29” dropouts… that bike rips!!

@geephlow: ...that's the joke

Not Trolldom?? Brage got robbed

Ripple is not a good name, that was an initial development name for the Oso... But in-house we ended up calling it the Emoji. Finding a good name for a new bike is one of the hardest things to do! Also shout-out to JMM for "porridge-powered" LOL

Thanks for the back up! 🤜🤛 ONE MILLION % agree on the power/torque arms race being dumb, I wish Avinox had kept things light and not started us down this stupid path. It’s a rough market right now, best of luck!!

@RadBartTaylor: Bosch had a bike like this, that they designed and made in house. The suspension (140mm travel?) worked pretty well and the geo was dialed. I got to ride it at one of their test sessions, to try out the SX drive when it was new. The frame was gargantuan, and it had fittings to mount every single one of the motors and batteries on the frame. It was a test platform, and it was so far from a sellable product… I think it weighed 15-20lbs for the bare frame. But that’s just one way to do it. Any modularity built into the frame for mounting different motors would increase frame weight substantially, like several pounds. You’d have a triple wall at some point in the assembly (frame + adapter + motor) and these are not thin walls here, they each have to take up the entire weight and force at the BB (which is substantial). There’s usually suspension forces right next to the motor mounting so there’s some space constraints there too. The adapter would need like a 6mm wall of carbon, or a 4-5mm wall of aluminum. Thats a big thick part and gets hefty pretty quickly. Another issue is that the different motor mounts (Bosch to Shimano, say) are not so different that an adapter can fit between them. So making an adapter for a frame that was originally made for a different motor is probably not feasible. Having a modular mounting system so you could take your pick of which motor you like, or a gearbox, sounds pretty awesome, from a “let’s try it out” perspective. The tinkerer in me would love that bike. But you’d probably decide on which motor you like the best, and just stick with that one, and in that case you should just go buy a bike that uses only that motor. This modular ebike setup sounds like something Nicolai would make, they seem to build in a lot of modularity. You should suggest it to them?