Electric Elk Blog

 That stupid little key/horn/headlight/battery 'gauge', was really driving me up the wall. That goofy little thing- I get why they put it on though, it's cheap and easy. But Electric Elk seeks to be the Mercedes of Velomobiles so that was one of the first things that had to go.  This did take a bit of rewiring, but not much and all of the components you can buy on Amazon. I'm still trying to find some software to make a decent wiring diagram. As soon as I do, I'll make a post about fixing the wiring / installing headlights and front turn signals, etc.  But this post is about the new speedometer/battery gauge. There is a really good and in-depth thread on E ndless Sphere , but this guide will append some informaion and give parameter settings for the JX Cycle Pickup Trike. The guage is a pretty nice, water proof, all-purpose gauge. They cost about $110 on Amazon (at time of writing), and I would say a fairly good value for the money. The one caveat is, they are not ...

Riot Fest was great fun, as it always is. This year I though I’d push the PX50 to it’s absolute limit and give 4 people a ride to and from Riot Fest each day (+me = total payload of five people). I’m not going to lie, it was a bit scary at a couple of points, but all-in-all the car drivers were pretty cool AND I unlocked a personal achievement: I got a taxi cab parked in the bike lane to move! (I pulled up behind him and kept laying on my phone until they took off). But there will be another post on the fun rides too and from Riot Fest. (I’m mainly waiting for the people I took to post/tag me in their photos.) So day two, we’re getting ready to take off in the morning and the PX50 is dead. Deader than cyclist on Lakeshore Drive. I kind of poke around, to short circuit (pun intended) a long meandering story, I’ll break down the bullet points:   Bikes / Trikes from China may come with cheap lead acid batteries. Note the italics on "may", because life is like ordering something...

   Intro So you’ve seen some e-bikes going down the road and they look like so much fun. OR you’ve been reading about how much better for the environment ebikes/trikes are and you want to jump on this band wagon. OR any one of a million other reasons, but the point is- you have fallen in love with electric bikes and you want to build your own. There’s a lot of reasons to build your own instead of buying an ebike off of Amazon. My big two reasons were I absolutely loathe the fat tires aesthetically, and in the case of my ebike, I wanted full suspension ( speed bumps at 30 mph one a fixed frame- you feel it in your spine). So while building my third ebike (actually a trike this time), I took some pictures an am writing a blog post. Also- at Electric Elk we strongly believe in safety, and I’ll also be putting a full electrical kit on it, but that will be a future post. This post will be about hooking up the motor, battery, and other components on a new model we will be calling th...