Motorizing a Madsen Bucket Bike

We have just finished attaching an electric motor to Mrs. True's bucket bike.

Here are a few pictures of the bike as it currently stands:

The process that we went through to get it all put together was as follows:

Mrs. True researched what type of motor she wanted. We found really good reviews for a few types of electric motor kits, so we went with the cheapest one that looked like it would do the job.

It is a mid drive kit from gng electric. Mid drive motors attach near the pedals and drive the chain, as opposed to hub drive motors, the other main affordable option, which replace a wheel with a battery-driven wheel. Mid drive motors allow different gears to have an effect while the motor is running and tend to be the more powerful option. For moving a heavily loaded cargo bike up hills, this seemed like a good idea. Also, with a front disc brakes and a bucket over the rear wheel, a hub motor would have been hard (and more expensive) to install.

The cheapest hub motor that Mrs. True found was $500 including the battery, so her goal was to get a mid drive and battery for that price. The name brand mid drives are at least $600 without the battery, but we found a cheap kit from China for $288 including shipping but not the battery.

Many people on the internet advise against the cheap Chinese kits. We will see in a year if we end up agreeing. There were certain penalties associated with it from the start, but they did not outweigh the price savings to us.

The main problem with the kit was the bottom bracket they sent. Despite the seller asking for the measurement of the bike's bottom bracket, the one they provided did not fit at all. We had to order a separate bottom bracket, and it had to be a very unusual shape to allow the motor to attach. We ended up finding one that would work at SickBikeParts.com. They have a variety of bottom brackets in odd sizes and fast shipping. This cost us another $23.

The plug the kit provided to attach the motor to your battery was very strange, so I bought new plugs from the Home Depot and wired them on. A more expensive kit may have used a more regular plug, and of course buying the battery and motor together would ensure that wiring was not a problem. It was worth the money to us to do it ourselves. We also had to buy longer bolts to hold the motor to the bike frame, but we can't really blame that on the cheap kit. The Madsen has a very large frame; the supplies they sent would have worked on any normal bike. Both of those together added another $5.

The last problem we ran into was the idler wheel in the motor. It's not in line with the path of the chain, so sometimes it derails. We have not yet resolved that issue, but we don't expect it to be an expensive fix; it will just take time.

We had to take the bike to the bike shop to get the bottom bracket removed and the new one put on, since we don't have the right wrench. Our local bike shop guys were very nice and did it for free. That was awesome. If you're near Salt Lake, check out Revolution Bicycles; we like them and will continue giving them our business.

The other major part was the battery. Mrs. True tried to argue that since we'd only paid $200 for the motor, we could afford $300 for the nice batteries. I argued that it would be easy to chain together three batteries made for power tools to get the correct specs (36V and 20 amp hours) and it would only cost $114. We went with the cheaper option, which will probably not surprised readers. Here are the batteries that we bought, as well as the charger.

Mrs. True had second thoughts on seeing the batteries, which were 3 times as big and 5 times as heavy as the expensive ones, but I was confident. And once they were attached to the bike, she agreed that the weight didn't make that much difference.

However, attaching them was an interesting problem. We engineered three different solutions before finding one that we think will work. The first try was too bulky to fit in the available space. The second looked like it worked, but pedaling became an art form to keep your shoes from hitting the box. This is our current solution:

We bought 4 L-shaped brackets and two mending plates and eight bolts and eight nuts and a slew of bungee cords, all at the Home Depot for about $20. First we formed shelves for two batteries with the mending plates and L brackets. It looks like this:

We then bolted the shelves together, straddling the bike frame behind the seat, as you can see above.

We drilled holes in the bucket and attached U-bolts as anchor points for the bungee cords and bungee corded the batteries in place. The third battery was laid on top of the other two and bungee corded to the mending plates below. The final arrangement looks like this:

The controller, a very small box, was zip tied to the frame in front of the batteries and all the wires were attached. We also had to cut off one handlebar grip to replace it with the twist controller for the motor. We still need to come up with a way to make it all waterproof, but in Utah that is less pressing.

All this took a couple of days of work, three trips to the Home Depot, and two trips to the bike shop. Most of the time was spent on the battery holder; the kit was simple to install with the exception of the bottom bracket. I enjoy this kind of project, so this was a good choice for us. We saved at least $200 over the cheapest simple install kit and got a more powerful motor.

It has worked on an unloaded test drive around the neighborhood and once we adjust the alignment of everything on the chain, we expect good results. Mrs.True plans to bike the kids to the library this week (3 miles with several hills). That will be the test. We'll report the results.

Bees, Bikes, and Broccoli

Saturday I tended to our bees. We have a top bar hive and they had all 18 of the bars that I had in there full of comb. I added two more bars just last week, and since they already filled them I added four more bars yesterday. I am no bee expert (I recently inherited the hive from my father in-law), but with such a big hive I am starting to feel excited about the production capacity that we'll have.

For those that do not have a bee hive, it is way easier than having any other animal that we have had (including cats, dogs, birds and fish), or any other livestock that we have had (chickens and goats). All I have had to do so far is keep opening up more room for them to build comb in, about once a week. Once the hive is full, all that I'll have to do is harvest the correct amount of honey each week until winter rolls around.

Once winter is here, apparently I need to do some more work to prepare them for winter, but not really that much relative to the amount of work that other animals take.

Either way, I would recommend bees to anyone that is on the fence. They are great.

Our peas are finally producing (we got them out a bit later than the old folk that I talk farm stuff with, so it isn't too surprising that they took a little bit longer than some other people's).

Today we also discovered a rapini broccoli that volunteered. This is a bit of a mystery, since we have never grown broccoli in the front yard before, and none of the mulch that we used was from our back yard. We love all broccoli, so we are going to tend it and hope that it goes native. Having broccoli all over our yard would be a great thing.

Mrs. True has been looking for a while at alternate means of getting around with three kids. One thing that has been useful to her is our bike trailer. She really likes being able to take the kids around on the bike and not only conserve gas money, save the world, and get to where she is going easily, but also she likes not having to buckle five point harnesses on all the kids while bent half over in a minivan.

She recently found a used Madsen Bucket bike for sale, and we decided to get it. It fits all of the kids in it easily, and it drives pretty well. The bike is made using solid construction techniques and handles pretty well considering the fact that you are carrying around 60+ extra pounds in the back. We are considering making it into an electrically powered bike. We will post about that if we decide to do it.

We found a few new mushrooms growing in the yard today. We must have imported them with the compost that all the new gardens are composed of. They are deliquescent (which means that they dissolve into a black inky mess pretty quickly after sprouting up), so I have not tried to identify them, however they are not really growing in that big a quantity either. Next time that one sprouts up I will make sure to take some pictures of it and try to identify it.

I have eaten field mushrooms, and scotch bonnet mushrooms that grew in my yard, and have some other varieties that grow in my yard that I have identified as poisonous. Make sure that you identify any mushroom that you are considering eating before you try it out. Eating random mushrooms will probably kill you.

My go-to identification book is North American Mushrooms: A Field Guide To Edible And Inedible Fungi, which has excellent pictures of all of the mushrooms that it tells about, and is very thorough at explaining the characteristics and pointing out other mushrooms that are similar. My biggest beef with the book is that it uses really long words when shorter ones would do. You will have to memorize the glossary, or you will have to leave a book mark in it.

I would not, however encourage someone to eat mushrooms that they have identified using just one source. A Field Guide to Mushrooms: North America is my second source that I use. I also like the MycoKey, and Roger's Mushrooms websites (both of them provide excellent keys that can help identify mushrooms). Finally, for those who haven't heard the old mushroom hunter's adage "When in doubt, throw it out". Don't eat anything that you are not entirely sure of. Lots of people die every year over bad identifications.