My home made folding one. It lives in the back of my car and gets used all the time to ride around the city and avoid parking charges (I park well out of town and ride in on it).

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Joiner</cite>Pedals = lack of confidence in the technology!

And personalised numberplate? You little poser, you!!<</blockquote>

The pedals have to work to be legal - take them off and it's a motorcycle in law, believe it or not!

The number plate is a long story. Suffice to say it was free in return for a favour and I didn't seek to have it before it was offered to me (around 20 years ago now). Fairly pointless putting something like that on a new car, anyway, you lose the momentary joy of having the "current" year number plate...........

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Joiner</cite>Yeah, yeah, yeah.</blockquote>

BTW, that alloy frame full suspension folding bike cost me £120 (brand new, bankrupt stock, from ebay), plus about £50 for the geared hub motor, around £80 for a few packs of model aircraft lithium polymer batteries and £20 for a bare brushless DC motor controller, with throttle assembly, from China.

Total cost was well under £300 for all the bits. It will cruise (illegally......) at 25 mph with no pedalling (also illegal..........) and will do around 20 miles on a charge. The battery pack is easily removed and is charged using a couple of standard model aircraft battery chargers.

Robin, if you don't have JSHs engineering knowlege, then you could buy a normal bike to suit ,e.g. racer, town bike, hybrid, trail, recumbent, and have it fitted with a heinzmann, or bionX system they are available to buy as retrofit kits or you can have them fitted. We bought a Dawes hybrid/tourer about 4 years ago and fitted the heinzmann system. My partner uses it for Summer commuting, a 28 mile round trip, albeit not powered all the way, just up the hills. Still going strong and shifts along like the proverbial "s..t off the shovel".Can't match JSs price, although for long distance I wouldn't fancy those small wheels.

Last bike I was involved in was this one. Would like to put a 200W motor on it and see how it goes:
http://www.ibikedb.net/bikes/32405-kingcycle-bean

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: SteamyTea</cite>Last bike I was involved in was this one. Would like to put a 200W motor on it and see how it goes:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.ibikedb.net/bikes/32405-kingcycle-bean">http://www.ibikedb.net/bikes/32405-kingcycle-bean</a></blockquote>

It'd probably go pretty well, I'd have thought, as long as there were no cross winds!

BTW, you can fit up to 250 W motors legally, it's only the old UK regs that had a 200 W limit and these have been effectively superseded by the EU regs.

Having said that, my little folder is running around 1100 W maximum into that small geared rear hub. There's no way that anyone can tell that though, as the law is worded in such a way that roadside testing simply couldn't show whether a bike was legal or not. I can say that a kW of power makes for an entertaining ride :)

There seems to be a bit of a LiFePO4 famine. AlienOcean and EclipsEBikes.com both indicate they're out of stock. I tried to order some small cells from ev-power.eu recently but they don't have any in until February, though they have larger cells sooner.

This is where you end up if you get obsessed with turning up the power on your ebike:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk_bmSRog-c

That one is probably about 30kW peak, which is very silly.

ebike building can get addictive :-)

JSH Have I at least got you off the heated (in both senses) glass topic?

Bike buying/building is definitely a not-before-february project for me. Certainly can't afford to risk any new addictions before then.

Thanks for all suggestions.

Hi,

new boy here, I didn't expect my first contribution here to be on a thread about bikes...

I bought new a retrofitted Brompton around 18 months ago and I wrote this review a few weeks after delivery:
http://bealers.com/2010/07/electric-brompton-road-test/

18 months on I'm still pretty pleased with it. I work in London about 10 days a month meaning I do about 100 miles a month commuting on it; I no longer carry it home so leave it there all the time.

I can do 50 miles on it and not recharge though it's not particularly speedy, the assist really is just to take the edge off (which was the main buying requirement when I lived in mid-Wales on the top of a silly hill) and I'd estimate I'm always providing 80% of the motive power.

+ve points are:
* brilliant at the lights, avoiding cars side swiping you at junctions
* great to annoy harcore lycra/fixie bods when you cream them (again at the lights)

-ve points:
* really ruddy expensive
* battery heavy

Reading this thread I'm wondering whether I should try a much larger motor,though the other part of me thinks sell it and go non assist as I've strong legs and I live in a flat part of the world.

Mine is a fully charged one on top of a huge hill

Posted By: JSHarrisThe best Brompton conversion I've seen is one using a very light Tongxin hub motor in the front wheel (cheap, too, at around £150 for the motor and controller) and a lightweight model aircraft LiPo battery pack. The whole thing was probably less than 2/3rds the weight of my alloy folder and still had enough power to perform well.

Looks like that's the motor mine has.

I should qualify 'heavy'. It's not that I can't carry it. I carry it up/down 3 flights of stairs a day either end with the battery in the Brompton bag. It's just that when I lived in Wales I found the Wales->London commute a bit of a drag carrying the bike between train platforms and if - say - I'm going out to dinner somewhere or popping into a supermarket carrying the bag with a battery in can become annoying.