aquaratza

My "normal" bike was out of action due to a dodgy rear shock so I rode my ebike with friends who were on normal bikes. One of the guest riders joining us didn't know me and started off our encounter by lightly knocking me being on an ebike... so I turned it off without telling him and then proceeded to chase him up a somewhat steep and technical trail (Hoogekraal). Eventually, on a steeper section of the trail, as he panted his lungs out, he tuned me again about how much I was cheating being on an ebike. At which point I revealed that it had been off since the car park and laughed like a devil. Truth be told I partially wrecked myself keeping up with him while hauling a ~24 kg ebike up the hill, but it was so worth it The ebike came in handy when I found myself hurrying home through the streets of Durbanville after sunset.

Heavy rain, 80mm they said. yup and they love calling the Time Trial a Time Trail haha. There are a lot of people who would have ridden no matter what, possibly in dangerous conditions and they would have peer-pressured their friends into joining.

wow, I posted this event and only DieselnDust commented. They cancel and now you're all here hahahahaha. I wouldn't have ridden on the Saturday if the weather involved torrential rain - I've now ridden a few events in driving rain and mud and I'm over it. I think the organisers made a responsible decision with limited information, although a refund should probably have been offered. In other news, Friday looks like amazing cycling weather

It can take a long time to get over an illness. Some people on the forums have indicated very long recovery times for symptomatic Covid infections and normal Flu can also be very nasty. What doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger.

This event has been postponed until sometime after winter. It seems like a responsible decision.

One of them tried to scam me recently on Gumtree for an old couch. It's not a big ticket item (R 2000) and yet they felt it was worthwhile enough to try and scam for it. The story wasn't quite the oil rig worker, but the core elements were all there just with some colours changed.

Event goodie bags are odd... I want it but it's just more cr*p to throw away most of the time. I think the only goodie bag of interest I've gotten so far was from Sani2C, which had a buff and a USB battery pack in it. Even a lightweight happy-go-lucky event like Houw Hoek Tour does basic goodie bags. On my entry it says "FREE RAIN JACKET" A friend of mine has entered as a single rider - she's wanting to use it to train. My friend and I stay in Durbanville, so we'll be driving to the event each day. No meals or accomodation.

I apologise in advance if this topic already exists somewhere, I did search. Has anyone signed up for the Val de Vie MTB Expedition? It's happening on the 14th to 16th of May (inclusive)? Entries close on the 10th of May. It was originally a team event but now they also accept single riders. My friend signed me up for it It is 127km of riding around Paarl over 3 days. It consists of: A time trial (in their emails they keep calling it a Time TRAIL, aaaargh): 20km on the 14th Stage 2: 75km on the 15th 1650m ascent Val de Vie Estate| Hawequa Forest | Wild Hog Welvanpas | Drakenstein Mountains Stage 3 – 77km 1800m ascent Val de Vie Estate| Banhoek | Helshoogte | Boschendal | Plasir de Merle Idas Valley Dam Skyfall | Camissa | Klipwerf | Afterburner | Inferno | Sugarbowl

My 2017 Levo came with Guide Brakes. They were okay, but I found them to be inferior to my Stumpjumper's 2-pot Formula Cura brakes, so I treated myself and upgraded the SRAMs to Formula Cura 4 Black units, which are four pot. The guy that installed them didn't bleed them properly and for 4 months I thought I had wasted my money. Then I bought a bleed kit and bled them myself and they've been AMAZING ever since. I have allowed normal bikes to draft me up parts of Vissershok Road before (a steepish climb if you aren't from the WC). I'm a kind ebiker plus I have respect and patience for anyone willing to try and improve themselves. My friend ran out of battery recently about 15km from home, 70km into a ride. That was fun. The local troop of Veloworld kids were able to keep up with him during some loops on Lombard's Terra, but only after a few laps when he started getting tired.

Took me a while to figure out what was going on here ^ Dominic/Summit Bikes has been amazing; awesome service, super friendly, great prices, goes the extra mile, hand delivers my orders. Happy.

You don't have to be handicapped to own, ride and enjoy an ebike. I am in my 30s and I can outride all of my main cycling friends on the uphills on my manual Stumpjumper, but when I jump on my ebike and ride with another ebike it's a whole different sport. I work just as hard, if not harder and suddenly I have different challenges to deal with, especially around power management, upper body strength and routing. When you ride with another ebike power management becomes key - if you don't think about it you'll run out and be sad. It's a different sport and it's awesome, but out of respect, practicality and calibration I still ride my Stumpy regularly. I am always polite and I always greet others.

haha Thanks RocknRolla... I didn't want to feed the trolls Yes, agreed, unfortunately the vast majority of bike shops have very limited experience with eBikes but happily pretend they know what's going on. But this isn't an eBike specific thing, I've had some very dodgy service from various shops on my _normal_ bike. Thanks for that LazyTrailRider - yes, actually I've had the same issue. A bike shop accidentally over tightened the motor cover screws on mine and that caused the cover to come loose. The covers are difficult to get hold of now. I've thought about 3D scanning and printing replacements, but that hasn't been necessary so far luckily (Knipe Racing found a way of recovering the cover enough for it not to rattle against the chain). Very interesting. My eBike would take a moment to start accelerating when I first got it. I could hear and feel the motor starting to turn but the acceleration would follow a few milliseconds later. I thought this was how it was designed. I took the bike to Knipe for a service and when it came back the acceleration latency was gone... it was an awesome feeling to have "bionic" acceleration after that. The bike had previously been through both Specialized and another shop and both missed the problem. My bike also came to me with a loose motor mount bolt - another issue the local Specialized shop failed to pick up on during a full service. This will naturally depend on the specific bike, but Turbo Levo batteries are filled with common 18650 Li-Ion cells and should be repackable. The only concern is that the engine control unit is embedded in the Levo battery and it's not entirely known what might happen if that unit loses power during cell replacement... but it will probably be fine. Levo batteries have an integrated battery management controller which exposes cell charge data via Bluetooth. Using the BLEvo app you can get an exact indication of the actual capacity of the battery vs its design capacity (in Wh). The Specialized app will happily report "100%" battery health when the BLEvo app reports, say, 473 Wh of 504 Wh design capacity available... which is about 6.2% capacity drop from design. I think this is good going for a 3 year old Li-Ion battery.

I've entered and paid - seems good so far.

Thanks Zebra [bafang]. I'll add Bafang to the Poll list. Haha, thanks for the info Paul Ruinaard. I actually turned off my ebike yesterday and climbed several hills in Jonkershoek, which was fun. So mine's still rideable when completely unpowered but you do notice the weight when climbing. I've had a 2017 Specialized Levo for around a year now. In that time I've put roughly 1800 KM on it. I got it with about 900 KM on it, so in total it's now on about 2700 KM and so far I haven't had any issues with it. I tend to do long rides with it (70KM+), which means I have to work a lot to not run out of battery. This of course places additional strain on the bearings, which seems to be one of the main failure points of these motors (based on videos by Performance Line Bearings in the UK). I've got two batteries, neither have failed, both report > 95% capacity (in BLEvo). The one battery is a 2017 battery, the other 2018. PLB videos indicate that the main failure points on the Brose motors are due to water ingress (as the bearings exposed to the outside aren't sealed on 2017, 2018 and 2019 motors) and also due to pedal strikes damaging the sprag clutch. I've found on my batteries that the rubberised control panel is not sealed, so I removed the panel, put a small amount of silicone on the mating surfaces and reinstalled it. One of my batteries came with oxidation from water damage on the control panel LEDs, but the damage is minor. Thanks again for your posts.

I'm curious about the failure rates of eBike motors locally. Have any of you owned an eBike and had the motor fail on you? If so, how did it fail? How did you fix it? If you'd have a "smart" eBike battery fail on you that would also be interesting to hear about.

My one pedal somehow got severely cross threaded I think: the pedal was skew, I must have knocked it somewhere or perhaps it become loose on the trail. I took it to the shop and they fitted a helicoil, it's been good as new since. It didn't cost much, R 185. This was Knipe Racing.

I ordered a second one for my Stumpy and installed it at 23:30 for a ride the next morning hahaha... the AXS units work so well. I barely had to do anything (I replaced a normal GX Eagle derailleur).

That press release is hilarious: They "identified" the need for greater profits - and you don't need to partner with an ebike manufacturer to have a cycle tour that includes ebikes. Nothing says innovation and unparalleled quality like Bafang. Bafang is hackable though, at least the old motor controllers were and it's probably good value for money.

I visited Jonkershoek yesterday. Just wanted to say a big thanks to those who helped make the trails rideable again. I noticed lots of new bridges, lots of replaced signs, lots of trail maintenance. It was great to ride. The area has quite clearly been burnt, but there are loads of signs of life. Lots of plants are pushing through the scorched ground. There are a lot of flowers out. I thought it might be a depressing visit but it felt good to see so much new life.

Knipe Racing yesterday installed the GX AXS unit I got from BikeMob, along with a 10-52t GX Eagle cassette. I took it out to Jonkershoek today. It replaced an 11-speed XO1 derailleur and an XG-1150 cassette. It's a massive upgrade. Shifting was extremely smooth, quiet, fast, intuitive. The paddle position is different to what I'm used to so I found myself having to think about how to change gears many times and my thumb going somewhere where there was nothing. My cycling friend, who's been riding an AXS for over a year, said I should swap out the paddle with an alternative SRAM made option, which was on sale recently at Evobikes. But yes, massive upgrade, super happy, glad I waited for SRAM to bring out an affordable option. It talks to my Garmin Edge 530 too, pretty cool having the gear number on the screen.

Initially the range anxiety was really bad - mainly caused by my speedy ebike cycling friend having a lighter ebike (24kg vs 20kg) with a more efficient motor (20%) and a 40% bigger battery (500Wh vs 700Wh)... but it's getting better now. I haven't run out once to date and we do long rides (65km+). Range anxiety is really illogical because, while it sucks to have no assistance on a 24kg bike, it's really not that bad (unless there's a strong headwind home as there so often is). You definitely get better at estimating power usage, power remaining and planning your efforts. Also, the assistance the bike gives has a seemingly almost exponential relationship with battery usage - so TURBO is a fast way getting to 0. It's fun, adds another dimension, a different challenge.

I've found people on the Tygerberg trails are generally friendly and not phased by an ebike overtaking - or maybe I don't hang around long enough to find out haha. As an ebike rider, just gotta be kind and respectful, most people respond in kind. I'm polite on a normal bike too... mostly, but on a normal bike I feel compelled to overtake haha, just a question of when.

Boxerulez is correct; it is a pseudoscience and a lot of people don't realise that, which is unfortunate. It's all very well detailed by the Illuminati on Wikipedia.

Ordered mine from BikeMob late last night, it arrived earlier today, woooohooo

You don't need to be injured to make it ?morally? acceptable to ride an eBike. If you're able bodied and strong, riding an eBike makes you feel superhuman. It makes me want to push harder. It's just fun. A side effect I've found of riding my eBike is that my arms are getting stronger; my eBike is very heavy so I have to put more work into steering and centre of gravity/balancing maneuvers. It is very noticeable on climbs with lots of pebbles (like some of the Jonkershoek jeep tracks).