Thorn Cycles Forum
Community => Non-Thorn Related => Topic started by: bobs on November 01, 2018, 11:10:09 am
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After a long test run I've finally decided to buy an E bike. Unless you have tried one out you will never understand the benefits, it's certainly not a free ride with no effort on your part. I bought the bike from my local bike shop, I've known the owner since he was a teenager and I know I will get excellent customer service from them.
I've been told that I'll never use my Thorn Nomad again so wait and see there may be a small excellent condition Nomad for sale soon. I know that I cannot fly with the bike so it will mean a different approach to travelling abroad. Will let you know how I get on.
Bob
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Welcome to the club Bob. Still love my RST for touring (so far !) and when the sun is shining.
It's just another alternative to enable cyclists to remain cyclists when advancing years or infirmities dictate.
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fANTASTIC B 8) 8)OB .
if i could afford one i have it tomorrow ,guy i know has one what he does is load up his ebike on the bus train He has free travel and cycles all the greenways in Ireland north and south he loved his ebike wouldn't be out otherwise.
fair play to you safe cycling buddy enjoy every pedal stroke be it electric or muscle
;D
anto.
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Thanks Anto,
Although I'm still fit and healthy and can still manage to cycle a fair distance. I realise the potential an E bike will give and I'm busy planning new adventures.
If you are not using your bikes you could sell them and use the money for a new bike , they are not as expensive as you might think. The first thing to do would be to have a test run and see if you like it.
Bob
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i don't use them bob tried selling but man some crazy people out there ;D ;D.even went through my local cycling club, guys i used to cycle with no joy few offered me stupid money for my dolan ,just trying there luck.the audax and dolan are to good to sell cheap if i ever come into money i'll buy a quality ebike .
pity u can't post photo here of the new baby love to see it.anyway bob enjoy ride safe.
anto.
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After a long test run I've finally decided to buy an E bike. Unless you have tried one out you will never understand the benefits, it's certainly not a free ride with no effort on your part.
Definitely not a free ride. I took up cycling near enough 30 years ago for the exercise but then came to enjoy it for its own sake, and there's lots of technical interest in bikes too. Any electrified bike is still an exercise machine if you approach it right, just filling in with the motor where you can no longer get to the top of the steeper hills. It takes a bit of discipline not to use the motor all the time, but I ride with unelectrified people, so they soon let me know if they're breathing hard and I'm not.
A really useful facility of an electrified bike that is often overlooked is that the motor helps you get going with a heavy load of shopping or, in my case, often painting gear in the pannier baskets, especially since my house is on a steep hill and at least half the time I want the countryside on the uphill side.
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the motor helps you get going with a heavy load of shopping or, in my case, often painting gear in the pannier baskets, especially since my house is on a steep hill
Yep. Friends of mine live in Nelson, BC, a small town in the interior (on the West Arm of Kootenay), a wee part of paradise that's extremely hilly. (Check it out on Google, and weep.) They use their Pedegos to go to and especially from the centre of town -- their house is a kilometre-plus uphill from the lakeshore, a series of mini-plateaux linked by 15% grades. In 2016, I pedalled up the hill with my Raven laden with gear, and even in pretty good shape after nearly 3 weeks of cycling in the Rockies, I barely made it.
I tried one of their Pedegos on a 20%-plus grade near their place, and the throttle greatly simplified getting under way, even unladen. You don't have to use the e-assist on their bikes, but in certain situations, it's invaluable.
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Please can someone explain the advantage of those massive wide handlebars that seem to be standard on some USA & Canadian bikes ?
They don't seem to be popular over this side of the pond.
Having never ridden with them I wondered why they are so popular.
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Please can someone explain the advantage of those massive wide handlebars that seem to be standard on some USA & Canadian bikes ?
They don't seem to be popular over this side of the pond.
Having never ridden with them I wondered why they are so popular.
On mountain bikes, wider handlebars give better leverage when steering on rough trails. It helps to steer straight when bouncing down the trail. I don't see any advantage when riding on the road. But if someone is used to the wider bars, then they may find the narrower bars to be too twitchy for their liking.
- DaveS
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I use wide-ish drop bars on my Raven: Velo Orange Grand Cru randonneur bars. These are 48 cms wide (centre-to-centre) at the ends of the flared drops; at the widest parts of the uppers, a few cms aft of the hoods, they're about 46 cms, taped, outside to outside. That's my default position, as I like to ride with my palms facing each other. In the default position, my palms are thus about 46 cms apart.
I found my way to bars of this size by experimentation -- earlier bars (not on my Raven) were not rando-style, and were around 44 cms. I have wide shoulders, and the narrower bars felt cramped. And, my knees would bump my elbows when I was on the drops. I find the wide bars much more comfortable -- the whole cockpit feels more spacious -- my knees are now nicely inside my elbows.
Of course there's more wind resistance, but does that matter so much on a touring bike? Handy for slowing down on steep hills :)
My derailleur bike has the 46 cm VO rando bars, and I find them less comfortable than the 48s on my Raven, despite the difference being only 2 cms.
Dunno if that helps? There are other bars which are much wider than mine, the Salsa Woodchipper, for example.
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Please can someone explain the advantage of those massive wide handlebars that seem to be standard on some USA & Canadian bikes ?
They don't seem to be popular over this side of the pond.
Having never ridden with them I wondered why they are so popular.
Ergonomically, your hands on the grips should optimally be in line with your shoulders, or a little outside your shoulders; inside your shoulders, as on too many drop bars, is especially bad. A bit too wide is much, much better from an anatomical viewpoint (pain in the lower back, anyone?) than even a bit too narrow.
Wide bars are good for giving you better control with smaller, more controllable rider inputs to the bars, and wider bars also "slow down" big road or especially track inputs. So narrow bars are okay on smooth roads, but wider bars are necessary on off-road bikes.
The geometry of your bike also implies a given posture of the rider on it, which in turn imposes a relatively narrow range of handlebar widths.
About the turn of the last century, bikes in general offered very relaxed geometry with a bolt upright posture on a shortish top tube: the handlebars were swept back and the grips were almost parallel or actually parallel; the rider's hands were turned as on drops with the flats formed by the tops of his fingers and his thumb circling the grip on a line with the outside of his shoulders, in other words just outside shoulder width.
By the time the road bike took on its present (steel) form sometime in the 1920s, it was basically a contemporary roadster fitted with drops instead of North Road bars. The top tube was very much longer than in the previous generation and the geometry was around 68º, which would today be considered a touring geometry. Now nobody sat as upright as a generation before; on the roadster anything from a 15º back angle to 45º was possible by changing the width of the bars and the angling of the grips in two dimension; on a racing bike the rider was made to try for the desired "flat" back by drops with grips below the saddle nose, and these were made narrower for more extreme angles until they were made narrower than anatomically desirable for an alleged aerodynamic advantage. Notice that the roadrunner leaning forward with a good deal of his weight on the bars has more natural power with narrow bars than the upright cyclist who has only arm and a little shoulder power even on his wider bars -- he really needs those wider bars.
Now we have to step forward in time to the rock'n'roll era, and at the same time back backwards to the balloon tyres on very early bikes. One of the parents of the current mountain bike is the beach cruiser of the 1950's, which had fat, low pressure tyres for functional reasons, mainly to ride on loose sand. The rider sat relatively upright and required wide handlebars to control the bike in the slow going in the sand.
The other parent was a bunch of Californians who rode with Jobst Brandt, an engineer who, besides designing the famous brakes on the Porsche racers, was responsible for many cycling innovations we now take for granted, and some (like treadless tyres) that were so far ahead of their time that they're only now catching on. Jobst had a road bike that Gino Cinelli had custom built under him (Jobst was very tall); of course the bike was yellow. The important thing about these rides, later famous as "Death Rides", was that Jobst would suddenly decide to go bush at the top of a mountain, just turning his racing bike into the rough. I linked some of these stories by some of the still-living survivors of these rides in my obituary of Jobst.
Some of the guys who rode with Jobst were already brazierres of bikes for themselves and their chums, or even in a small way of manyfacturing bikes sold through shops. They weren't as hardarsed as Jobst (in more ways than one, Jobst was a very hard case, as anyone who lost an argument to him could tell you) and the rides, even when they stayed on the blacktop, were tough enough in those mountains; after these offroad excursions they hurt. So an old beach cruiser was modified with narrower tyres, and eventually by small modifications, today's mountain bike was born. Ironically, today's 29er, which the marketers want us to believe is a new invention, is just a less garish (those early beach cruisers and mountain bikes were horribly tasteless concoctions) 1950s beach bike, though some, like my Kranich, are hugely capable touring bikes, so much stiffer that you can feel utterly secure placing it on a narrow road with big drops off the mountain on a high-speed Alpine descent. A Thorn Raven, if it could speak, would say hello to those bikes Jobst's pals built to save their backbones from his mad offroad descents of Californian mountains; the Raven would easily recognise them as ancestors.
So wide handlebars, in the functional sense, arrived on mountain bikes because they were on beach cruisers, where they were necessary to control the bike in loose sand: they were a natural for control on fast descents of mountains. Of course some made, and make, the handlebars excessive wide, as a fashion statement.
Personally, I like the common 600mm or 620mm North Road bars for a back angle of about 15º (which today is "upright" -- compared to earlier cyclists, we slouch comfortably) with a 45º sweepback on the grips which are also turned down about 30º in the vertical plane. This puts my hands on the grips in an ergonomically optimal position for me. Someone said the other day that even a millimetre of difference makes a perceptible difference -- and I found myself nodding affirmatively; that's what I've found too; now I see John Saxby in the post above finding 2cm in width perceptible.
Copyright © 2018 Andre Jute
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I tried one of their Pedegos on a 20%-plus grade near their place
Never having been a bicycle racer, I don't actually know what a 20% grade looks like, but my 38x16 Rohloff on hew-yuge 60x622 wheels used to carry me around the Rome of West Cork just fine, without a motor. But the special feature of Irish hills (or maybe the road designers are all leprechauns) is that within sight of the top, just when you think, Aaaah, soon I'll be able to slack off, they suddenly grow much steeper. It's such a common feature that when the time came I would have been forced to give up more than half of the rides around here, but with the motor to add a bit where the hill suddenly tilts skywards I've arrived at a modus operandi which keeps all these attractive lanes open to me.
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I tried one of their Pedegos on a 20%-plus grade near their place
Never having been a bicycle racer, I don't actually know what a 20% grade looks like, but ....
You do not have to race to know what a 20 percent grade looks like. Put all your camping gear on your bike, the 20 percent grade hills will find you.
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You do not have to race to know what a 20 percent grade looks like. Put all your camping gear on your bike, the 20 percent grade hills will find you.
Heh-heh. Well put, sir!
I know what you mean, though in my case, as a credit card tourer, it is my painting gear that weighs, not the camping gear.
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Just be careful before changing bits onto an e-bike, its very easy to take them out of type approval, see https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uimwf7l3korzwr6/AACdqruNYppBgqtmDlmW8hRea?dl=0&preview=Leitfaden_Bauteiletausch_E-Bike_25_Stand-08-05-2018_EN.pdf (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uimwf7l3korzwr6/AACdqruNYppBgqtmDlmW8hRea?dl=0&preview=Leitfaden_Bauteiletausch_E-Bike_25_Stand-08-05-2018_EN.pdf)
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Just be careful before changing bits onto an e-bike, its very easy to take them out of type approval, see https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uimwf7l3korzwr6/AACdqruNYppBgqtmDlmW8hRea?dl=0&preview=Leitfaden_Bauteiletausch_E-Bike_25_Stand-08-05-2018_EN.pdf (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uimwf7l3korzwr6/AACdqruNYppBgqtmDlmW8hRea?dl=0&preview=Leitfaden_Bauteiletausch_E-Bike_25_Stand-08-05-2018_EN.pdf)
Thanks Dave for that post.
Owning an E - Bike puts one in a whole new ball park of regulations.
If one did change something then I assume that any bike insurance would be invalid ?
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Does some of this also apply to ordinary bikes ?
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bob whats the latest on your new ebike any big miles done.i had a good hunt around on utube wow some crackin ebike out there pedal assisted light weight long battery life certainly sjs would want to get there act together or they will be left behind ;).
anto.
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For our Scottish members, it may be of interest that the Scottish Government has an interest free loan scheme for the purchase of ebikes. This has not been very well publicised even in Scotland.
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/grants-loans/ebike-loan
Jags, maybe check the Irish Government doesn't have any similar scheme running?
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If one did change something then I assume that any bike insurance would be invalid ?
No far worse, you would be riding an electric vehicle on a public road without type approval. I can already hear everyone saying so what, the police wont check... well they didn't check fixie bikes for brakes until recently when someone got killed, and if you did have a serious accident the bike would be quarantined and inspected, hence the industry agreeing to that list in the link I posted.
Does some of this also apply to ordinary bikes ?
Interesting point, not currently as standard pedal cycles don't need CE type approval like HPAC 25kph e-bikes.
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For our Scottish members, it may be of interest that the Scottish Government has an interest free loan scheme for the purchase of ebikes. This has not been very well publicised even in Scotland.
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/grants-loans/ebike-loan
Jags, maybe check the Irish Government doesn't have any similar scheme running?
I wish rual hard to get anything off this shower.I have 2 class bikes gathering dust in the spare bedroom if I had a good ebike I reckon I'd be on every day.
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our Scottish members
Thanks, Rual, interesting initiative. I recall hearing that the Taiwanese gvt has a subsidy scheme by which they take an internal-combustion-engined scooter and give the owner/donor a discount on an e-scooter.
As for "Scottish members", there are some intriguing rumblings afoot here, or deep underfoot: one of the conversations (rumours?) here, arising from the, ah, Constitutional Stuff going on in the UK these days, suggested that we offer Scotland the option to join Canada, as a nice reciprocal gesture for the huge role which Scots played in creating this country. If your gvt brought its creative cycling instincts to the negotiating table, there'd be support in this wee corner of Ontario ;)
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Welcome to the club Bob. Still love my RST for touring (so far !) and when the sun is shining.
It's just another alternative to enable cyclists to remain cyclists when advancing years or infirmities dictate.
Out yesterday on the new bike. I did a hilly circuit I used to do years ago. Enjoyed doing so much that I did it twice with the E smile.
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good for you bob these bike are getting better all the time still way out of my price range but i guess there well worth the expensive ,way to go for sure.
anto.
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bob whats the latest on your new ebike any big miles done.i had a good hunt around on utube wow some crackin ebike out there pedal assisted light weight long battery life certainly sjs would want to get there act together or they will be left behind ;).
anto.
The Riese and Muller uk website lists SJS as a dealer.
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bob whats the latest on your new ebike any big miles done.i had a good hunt around on utube wow some crackin ebike out there pedal assisted light weight long battery life certainly sjs would want to get there act together or they will be left behind ;).
anto.
The Riese and Muller uk website lists SJS as a dealer.
bet they don't know about that ;D ;D ;D
i had a good look at those ebike CLASS expensive but well thought out.
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The Riese and Muller UK website lists SJS as a dealer.
They do indeed, currently we have 2 Superchargers, 3 Delites, a Nemo and a Nevo GT as Demo bikes, feel free to book to come down and try one.