Want to see what our first ebike looked like? Made from a used hub motor and surplus laptop batteries and a junky $50 second hand mountain bike, it wasn't much to boast about. However, it sure provided the inspiration for future projects that led to the founding of the club.

My landlord at the time thought that this prototype electric bike was pretty neat and asked if I couldn't make one for his son's christmas present. This was the start of the Electric BMX, something of a legacy.

The hub motor for the BMX was imported along with 2 others, one for Charlie Brinson and the other for Josh Usher. They ended up using these motors for two e-bike projects in a mechanical design course at UBC. The first was the Farad, loaded with six frame-mounted NiMH battery packs.

At the begining of summer, 2004, the UBC electric bike club organized a combined order of 4 more motor kits with an untested but inexpensive brand of prismatic NiMH batteries from GMB. There were many delays but finally by the end of summer most of the pieces came together. Here is just one of the bikes, dual speed 406-408 with a 45km range, and a hazardously fast top speed.

My roommate Pam got very excited with all these electric bikes in the house and quite wanted one of her own. We ended up putting together a very low-cost setup on her road-bike using the Wilderness Energy kit with 36V 7Ah lead acid batteries. For a student budget and a short 10km round trip to UBC it is perfect. It was also our first test of a road bike conversion with 700 cc rims. While road bikes generally have a featherweight feeling, the hub motor and batteries take all that away.

This bike was initially going to run off a custom built 8Ah NiMH battery pack from batteryspace.com similar to the Farad. Those batteries ended up being woefully inadequate, but lucky for me there were two 25V 9Ah lithium-ion battery packs left over from a former project in the UBC power electronics lab. These were borrowed on a temporary basis and proved to be great performers. This particular setup won the electric bike race at the VEVA REV! show in 2004. In real-world usage I got 48km range before the protection circuitry cut out the pack.

Patrick contacted the UBC ebike club shortly after our founding in spring of 2004. He was looking for a convenient and sustainable transportation choice for daily commutes to work. Little did he know he would wind up being our chief beta tester! His bike has seen a melted down NiMH battery pack, several fried controllers, two unreliable lithium-polymer batteries, and a few improvised chargers. Fortunately it looks like this last setup may finally have the kinks worked out. He built a custom frame-mounted cage to hold the 36V 12Ah li-polymer battery. The design has buckled straps for easy removeable so the pack can be brought indoors for charging and to protect from theft.

Bob is another user who built his ebike for regular commutes to work, in this case from the North Shore to Downtown. While I tried to sell him on the lithium packs, he decided to opt for reliable and proven NiCads. He bought a total of 40 5Ah tabbed 'D' cells from onlybattery.com, and soldered them together into a customized frame mounted plywood box. I was impressed, then when he came by a few weeks later the box was rebuilt into a triangle, the cells were heatshrinked, and the whole assembly looked stunningly professional. As an electrical guy, he also built his own battery charger based on a constant current with -dV/dT charger termination.

Daniel is a 2nd year electrical student at UBC and was the first person to get a conversion with the large 504 series hub motor. The problem with these motors is that it is difficult to find a battery pack that can happily deliver the 35Amps which the controller can draw. We did this by paralleling 12Ah and 8Ah lithium polymer batteries inside a bag, for a 36V 20Ah power source. My initial impressions of the 5-series motors was that they were far to massive and heavy to be convenient on a bike. But one second with the throttle on and you're hooked.

One thing that I've been dying to have for years is a small folding bike, so when I finally saw this beauty at a used bike store for $45 it was mine. The Voyageur was made in Montreal, has 20 inch wheels, a 3-speed hub, a folding frame, and big crome fenders. It took just a few hours to electrify with a 20" brushed front hub motor. You can actually get significantly more power out of the motors when you have them in small diameter wheels. This bike has been a bit of a testing vehicle and has seen Li-ion, Li-polymer, Prismatic NiMH, and Cylindrical NiMH batteries. It will soon find itself in SanFransisco as my sister's first ebike.

Kenny is a UBC student who got a fairly typical setup, a 406 front motor with a 36V 12Ah NiMH battery pack. This is a good combination; fast, relatively inexpensive, good range, and in theory pretty reliable. However, one thing that ruined it for Kenny was that the battery chargers that came with these packs were crap. The first ones didn't work. The replacements didn't have temperature sensing charge termination, and the very first time he let it charge overnight one of the cells exploded.