Greetings

[R4yD8R]

Hi all, Ray from Denver CO. here. I put a cheap conversion conversion kit from Amazon on an existing Iron Horse Maverick 1.0 for commuting around for work and trails.

It's a Yose Power kit that cost $400. It's been a decent kit although I had to call them for warrantee items twice. The battery charger stopped working about 4 months after I bought the kit and then about 2 months after that it lost power one day and after a few email exchanges they sent me a new controller and display which fixed the issue. I used the display I had so the issue was the controller itself and I have a second new display. They are a little weird about sending pictures even though the pictures don't show any signs of invisible issues which was the case both times but they were adament about them and after sending the pictures they honored the warrantee without any further correspondence.

Other than that, the kit has been solid and I've put a lot of miles on. I work in construction so I'm all over the place and sometimes have to transport tools with me so I bought a a small utility trailer for the bike and the motor pulls it just fine. It's a 48 volt 13aH kit and has plenty of torque. The bike goes 24 mph top speed which is plenty fast enough on an old mtb, at least for me.

I've ridden in pretty heavy rain and gone through some pretty deep puddles at both slower and fast speeds without any issues. I think it's a pretty good deal for what you get. It came with everything necessary to get me going on an ebike.

My car has a bad cvt transmission and I can't afford to fix it. I was pedaling the bike without a motor for a couple of months and as all these guys were passing me with their ebikes I kept saying to myself "I need one of those " so one day I was riding up hill with my trailer in the lowest gear sweating my rear off and a guy went zipping by me so I decided to drop the money and get one. However as I started shopping around for a bike and seeing the prices for anything with a good rating I found the kits and kept looking for one I could afford and found the one I have.

I've definitely got my money's worth out of it and more so I will recommend it if you are on a tight budget, want or need an ebike, and are good with DIY. If any of those conditions don't apply to you then I'm afraid you're limited to paying at least $1500 for a complete bike of decent quality. That's the very lowest I would recommend going and not all the ones in this price range are good so you have to be savvy while shopping. If not I'd say you'll have to get up into the $2000 to $2500 range to be almost guaranteed to get a decent ebike.

 

[Smaug]

Welcome to the forum, from SE Wisconsin. You'll fit right in.

I'm glad your retrofit kit is doing the job for you. It's nice that you have a good idea of how it all works, from fitting it yourself.

Prices are coming down on good quality eBikes. I think you can get a good one for closer to $1k these days.

As for requiring the pix, they just want you to prove you own the bike and are not just some chucklehead wanting free parts.

What kind of construction do you do?

 

[R4yD8R]

I do commercial, mostly schools and Hospitals. I manage a paint crew. My job title is site foreman, I'm actually more of a project manager, but I get payed like a first year apprentice lol. Typical in the trades around here these days.

It was great a few years ago at the peak of the boom which stemmed from the money associated with the legalizing of weed and a lack of decent workers but between the fallout from covid and the influx of transplants as it seems like everyone from Indiana, Kansas, Texas, and California wants to live in Colorado as well as the governor taking in every displaced immigrant on the planet, things have been going downhill fast.

And with me being the firearms enthusiast that I am and the regulations that I see as an infringement of my second ammendment rights I'm considering moving back to Maine where I spent most of my adult life before moving here so that I'll at least be close to my family. I have 3 grandkids that I haven't even met yet because the money I had saved for a trip back a few years ago evaporated when covid shut the entire planet down and I haven't been able to recover due to the lack of overtime that I was enjoying prior.

On top of that I put all my regular savings into buying a vehicle when my truck decided it had enough and instead of putting the money into fixing it, I took the easy way out and dropped $7500 on a 3 year old Nissan Rogue SV AWD with 32k thinking I would have a decent vehicle that would last me a few years however at 75k it started acting up on the highway but where I don't do too much highway driving it didn't cause me much concern as it was fine around the city until around 90 k which was when I decided to have it checked.

I was thinking wheel bearings or an axle issue but when the mechanic called me back he told me it was an internal transmission issue and that I had to take it to a transmission shop for further diagnosis. So I went home and did a Google search to find a reputable shop and was confronted by the reality of the Nissan CVT crisis and the massive scope of it.

I was mortified because when I googled the car prior to making the purchase there was nothing that raised any red flags. A handful of complaints but with the epidemic of crybabies lately a few complaints is nothing. Somebody's always going to be complaining about something, kinda like I am now lol.

Anyway there is some kind of bs going on with Nissan and how they are handling this whole cvt thing and in the meantime the transmission failed while I was trying to figure out which route to take with the car and now I'm sol and on my bike because I can't afford to put a tranny in the car out of pocket and the extended warrantee period has expired.

When I bought the car I didn't even know that CVTs existed let alone what they were, that my car has one, nor that they needed regular service and there's no indication anywhere visible. There's a very small paragraph in the owners manual but it only informs that the driving experience will be a little different and there is a maintenence schedule in the back of the manual that states that it should be serviced every 20,000 miles but I'm 52 and have been driving since I was 17 and a Nissan Rogue didn't seem out of the ordinary and everything about the car functioned well and it wasn't hard for me to figure out anything about the car so I didn't even take the manual out of the plastic because I know how to maintain a car.

Had there been some obvious indicator either inside the car or under the hood that stated that this new transmission technology needed to be maintained more often than a traditional automatic transmission I more than likely wouldn't be in this situation, but here I am.

Apologies for the lengthy rant about the car but even more than a year later I'm still quite sore about the entire experience. However it did prompt my introduction to the ebike world...

 

[HumanPerson]

Hot damn, Welcome to the forums!!

 

[R4yD8R]

Thanks. I joined because my motor keeps quitting on me. It's intermittent and comes back on after a while. I'm not sure what's causing it because it's not displaying an error code and I know it does because it came on once a while back when the motor quit but that was an isolated incident a few months ago. It just got hot. It was a hot summer day and I had my trailer full of stuff from work and I'd been riding hard to get home for a delivery. I let it cool down and it worked again and I took it a little easier for the rest of the trip and it was fine.

This recent issue started about a week ago. There doesn't seem to be any specific time period, once it did it 5 minutes out the door, another time I was almost at work after a 35 minute trip and the other night it was about 15 min. I've checked and double checked all the connections, removed the wheel from the bike and cleaned and checked where the wires go into the axle, and went into the ui on the display just to see if there was anything off in the settings and there doesn't seem to be.

I'm wondering if one of the brake lever cutoff switches is goofing up. I did a search here and a couple other places and found some info but nothing exactly the same as mine. A few posts also mentioned that the brake cutoff system will have a fault code but those were all bike specific and much more expensive than what I have.

Anyway, I have a basic multi meter but I'm not sure how I would go about testing the switches with it. I have the round connections that plug into each other with arrows on both sides to indicate proper orientation. I can't remember what the interface is called and am at work sneaking this post in. I am still figuring out my way around the site and will post with more specifics when I get home later but I just wanted to throw this out there to see if anyone who may read it has any input that might point me in the right direction.

 

[R4yD8R]

As for requiring the pix, they just want you to prove you own the bike and are not just some chucklehead wanting free parts.

I didn't even think of that. Makes sense though, thanks. I feel bad now for asking them what good pictures will do for invisible issues. They didn't mention it in any of their responses but I assume they wouldn't as they probably do a lot of translation so keep the unnecessary to a minimum lol