That was an oops

I love my Bike Friday, the folding bike that was custom made for me in Oregon. A couple of years ago we talked about getting e-bikes. I found out that Bike Friday could convert a bike to an e-bike and I thought that would be fantastic. I already had the perfect bike and it would, I reasoned, be even better with an electric assist on it.

The original

So, I packed up the bike and shipped it back to Oregon to have the conversion done. There was some difficulty with shipping it back and while I was looking all over for it here it had inadvertently been shipped back to the factory that it had left the day before. Eventually we got that straightened out and the bike came back to me.

It didn’t really look elegant; there were a lot of wires running all over the frame. No problem. It was a conversion after all. The battery and the other pieces needed to run the motor were squished into soft bags on the seatpost and the bag that held the batteriy was difficult to zip up once the leads were attached. The battery pack was made up of three wheelchair batteries.

The motor was on the front wheel. I didn’t think I cared where the motor was. When I got to reading the instructions, it said not to use the two top levels of assist when going up hills. I guess this is a safety thing. With too much torque on the front wheel you might end up going for an unexpected trip over the handlebars. In practice the bike was super on the flats but I had to work harder than I wanted to on the uphills. I would love to have used those last two levels. Last summer I went on a few rides with Richard where we traded bikes half way through. He has a dedicated e-bike and we both found my bike harder to ride than his.

An e-bike is a trade-off. You get help from the motor but you also get a much heavier bike so if, for example, you run out of battery, it’s not a matter of peddling the rest of the way with the ease of a bike with no motor attached.

I found I wasn’t riding my bike much. I can’t speak to the dedicated e-bikes that Bike Friday makes or to how the conversions work for others. It just didn’t happen to be what I had hoped for and I was too quick to jump on something that looked like a perfect solution.

For my birthday last year Richard bought me a dedicated e-bike which is great. That left me with the issue of what to do with my BF. It fits and suits me better than any other bike I have ever had so I started toying with the idea of getting the motor taken off. We could take it with us in the van when camping because it folds up neatly and I would have my bike back to a rideable condition. After procrastinating like mad, I asked the guys at our bike shop if they could do that work. They don’t work on e-bikes they haven’t sold but they gave me the info for Wired Bike. When I looked the shop up online I got a ‘file not found’ error and when I called the phone number the guy gave me it was out of service. (The correct phone number is 587-664-2499 in case you need work done on an e-bike.)

Looking in Google maps showed the address, a photo of the storefront, and that the shop was open. I decided to toss the bike in the van and go for a drive. I’m glad I did. The shop was, indeed, open and Ali said he could take the motor off and put the bike back to the way it was. He warned me that he was going out of town and I probably wouldn’t get the bike back for a week or two. That was no problem because I wasn’t riding the bike anyway.

Ali phoned me the very next day to tell me that the bike was ready. Since I was in Didsbury working on ukuleles, Richard picked it up for me. I have been for one ride so far and I love it. I’m using my low gears a lot and I’d much rather take the e-bike on any kind of a lengthy ride. Nevertheless, for jaunts around the neighbourhood and for improving my overall fitness the Bike Friday is as enjoyable as I remembered it being.

There are only a couple of downsides to getting the bike back to normal. The first one is that I spent quite a bit of money on the conversion, not so much on putting it back; and when I was a block and a half from home on my first ride I made a mistake I haven’t made in years.

I intended to pull in front of a parked car and lift my bike onto the sidewalk so I could push the pedestrian crossing button. When I got close to the corner I noticed a curb cut and thought I’d use that to get onto the sidewalk beside the push button. I wheeled up onto the curb, unclipped one foot and fell over onto the opposite side. The e-bike doesn’t have clipless pedals on it so it’s been a while since I’ve used them. It took me a few minutes to untangle myself and get the other foot out of the clip so I could get onto my knees and get up. In the meantime two people offered to help; one was a young woman walking down the sidewalk when I did my graceful dismount and the other was a young man in a car who actually went around the block to come and check to see if I needed help. I assured them both that I was ok, at least mostly.

The left sleeve of my sweater felt inappropriately wet and I could tell I had some road rash under my jeans on my knee. When I got home and reviewed the damage there was blood down my arm and it had soaked into my sweater. The puncture itself was only about the diameter of a pencil so once I got cleaned up it didn’t look bad. The patch of road rash is larger but not very deep so I’m delighted with the outcome.

Of course, I would prefer to remain upright but I have no broken bones and no injuries that prevent me from going on with my day-to-day routine. My elbow is tender and I will have a new scar on top of the ones I’ve already accumulated from similar incidents over the years. I don’t know if there are guardian angels or not but if there are I owe a huge thank-you to whichever one was on duty that day. I hope to provide my guardian angel with endless coffee breaks and a thoroughly boring existence on all future bike rides; however I’m not ready to send her into retirement just yet.