A Question about Converting the Bike Friday

Beth, who is my bicycling hero, and who has a blog http://bikelovejones.livejournal.com/ that I love to read, has been following my blog and had a question about the Bike Friday conversion:

From: Beth
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 6:47 PM
Subject: e-bikes research and solutions

WOW. You are serious about this, aren't you? Way to go on assembling
the data.

I think it's great that you're able to identify that you're a Bike
Friday "lifer".
This is something I hear often from Bike Friday users; once they get
one and start riding it, they never really want to ride anything else.
I wonder about the ease of getting on and off the bike with where
you've imagined the motor. Also, how foldable will it be with the
battery on top? Will you need to just keep it as an unfolded bike for
the long term? How important IS foldability in your Big Picture?


Hi Beth,

Actually, the battery comes off so the foldability won't be affected. However, in my somewhat weakened state, I won't be able to lift the bicycle into my car without taking the front wheel with the hub motor off the bicycle since the motor adds 13 pounds. But that isn't so hard to do. And I won't have to be rescued so much if I have a motor on the bicycle, so I shouldn't be folding it that much.

The motor is in the hub of the front wheel (one buys the whole wheel with the hub motor already in it - in my case I have a 20" wheel). It's the battery that sticks up lumpily from the crossbar. I'll just have to sling my leg over it like I was riding on a regular diamond frame bicycle. I prefer the step-through aspect of the BF design, but I like that one can lock the battery to the frame with this type of battery - it locks down on the water bottle nuts with a key. Alternately, this particular battery has a handle on it that I can pass a cable through if I want to strap it to my back rack. The battery is expensive and I would hate to have it stolen. It's also 13 or 14 pounds so I don't want to lug it around with me when I park the bicycle. I also have to get a converter for the bicycle motor which is another thing to figure out, but it's a lot smaller than the battery.

The beauty of the conversion is that I can un-convert it at a moment's notice by taking the battery off, changing the front wheel (and leaving all the wires on the bike for convenience) and it becomes its old self again. It's not unusual to turn a folding bike into an ebike but I don't know anyone who has done it to a BF yet. I found a youtube video of a folding brompton turned into an ebike which was pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAM-Oh-gfrM

The odd thing about all of this is that ebikes are pretty much in their infancy. Most people who are converting bikes are figuring this out as they go along. Here's a link to one woman's story about converting a Walmart cheap bike to a 35 mph speed machine: http://www.ebikeproject.com/home.html
Cheap bikes are the best for this because they have steel frames. Converting a Bike Friday is sort of gilding a lily. But I'm not proposing turning it into a speed machine . The motor I'm looking at isn't huge. It should go about 15 miles per hour. And my BF has steel front forks, which is the important thing. Steel fails slowly so one has some warning before it gets critical whereas aluminum will fail all at once.