Question by Toeki: Electric bicycle converstion kit on aluminium frame?
Hi,i love electric bikes.Currently I own 2 electric bikes. They have a 680watt brushless hub motor powered by a 36votl 12Ah SLA battery. TThey go about 20Mph and have a range of about 15-20 miles. The motor is mounted on the front tire. The bike is an old steel huffy with no suspenstion. I would like to buy a nice bike with full suspention and its made out of aluminium. Would I be able to put a 1000watt 48volt electric hub motor on a aluminium bike? Also can you put a hub motor on a bike that has front suspenstion? Thanks
Best answer:
Answer by Don’t Panic
Of course you can. You can put a hub motor on any bike. It won’t put any loads on the frame, that the frame is not designed to handle.
Are you worried about the front forks being able to handle the torque and the bending? Don’t be, they are designed to handle the forces of breaking, which are even more extreme then the drive motor if it’s a disk break, but disk break or not, the forks are the same.
The best place to mount the batteries on a full suspension bike is on a seat post mounted luggage rack. You just have to adjust the spring for the extra weight.
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Maybe… but there are very real risks of major injury here.
Your beefy aluminum fork may be designed for bombing over curbs and rocks but it isn’t likely to have been designed to absorb the torque applied to front fork dropouts by a powerful motor. There are lots of examples of failures on aluminum forks, and those can be bad accidents. Prudence says that you will want to ask the pros about your fork and use the best add-on torque arms you can find. Jason Le has probably done the best work on this. See his stuff at the reference sites listed here.