making more work for myself Archives

Last week I finished converting a Yuba Boda Boda Step-Over from an acoustic bike to an electric bike. I’ve now taken it out on a few rides to the gym and to downtown (once with a kid on the back!) and can confirm that it works very well. It’s quick, quiet, and rides smoothly.

I still need to tweak the speed settings because out-of-the-box it, uh, can go a little faster than I’m comfortable with.

The quick overview:

Motor: Bafang BBS02B 750W (CAN bus version)
Display: DPC010
Chainring: 52-T
Battery: 48v 17.5ah battery

I ordered from Lascycle via Amazon. What arrived was from Varstrom. So it goes.

Why Convert vs. Buy

For two reasons: cost and functionality.

We had a Blix Packa Genie, which is direct-to-consumer cargo ebike that, for the most part, we liked a lot. We (mostly my wife) put 2300 miles on it in around 2 years!

However, it was plagued with mechanical problems throughout its life. A short list of parts that just straight up broke:

Seat
Adjustable stem
Brake levers
Multiple kickstands
Battery

All of that was workable, albeit annoying. The demoralizing part was how the rear hub kept chewing through spokes. Also the brakes kept needing to be bleed and adjusted. It was in and out of the shop constantly. Either my garage shop, or a series of bike shops.

To make matters worse, since everything was slightly nonstandard any repairs took much much longer waiting for parts to ship from overseas. At one point we had to rebuild the back wheel and it took a full month to get the correct spoke/nipple combination sourced.

In spite of all of that when it worked it was wonderful. Here’s a photo of a very chilly 4 year old saying goodbye to Tote-toro when we finally sold it:

After all of that we knew that whatever replaced it needed to be a mid-drive motor and use readily accessible components. A throttle was also non-negotiable for getting the bike going “off the line” (read: slightly uphill with two kids on the back).

We’d been saving money to go buy a new ebike from a manufacturer; however, none of the mid-drive models that come directly from cargo ebike makers have throttles. That meant we needed to look into doing a conversion. This also meant that we’d be saving quite a bit of money.

What did we get?

We have a friend in the neighborhood (hi, MG!) who has converted a few of his Yubas with Bafang kits. Another friend (hi Sam!) has had a handful of Yubas and speaks highly of them. Since two of my bike friends like Yubas that’s what we settled on looking for.

That started a few months of looking at Facebook Marketplace (RIP Craigslist, no one uses you anymore) for an appropriate donor bike. Eventually we found a listing for two boda bodas down in Columbus. I had a day off of work so I rented a minivan, drove down, stuffed them in the back, and drove back up. Both bikes were around $1300. We’ll likely sell the green one.

I waffled a lot on where to get the bafang kit and eventually landed on amazon. You can go cheaper if you order from AliExpress. You can go more expensive and order from an American reseller like Johnny Nerd Out. Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.

For me it came down to ease of ordering and price. Now that I’ve seen what you get I’d be comfortable ordering the motor from wherever and the battery separately from a reputable source.

Here’s the full list of what we got. Total was around $1000:

BBS02 48V 750W Mid Motor, 68mm bottom bracket, CAN bus version – the UART version (if you can find one) is more programmable with a cheap cable. Everything I anticipate doing we can handle via the display. An important note is that Bafang has phased this motor out in favor of new M-series motors. There’s still a lot of BBS02’s out there for sale though.
DPC010 Display – this was an upgrade from the stock display. It looks nice and probably isn’t strictly necessary. Buried in the options on it are ways to tweak the power output at each of the assist levels.
52-T Chainwheel – my wife is extremely fast on bikes and was always wishing she didn’t ghost pedal on our old bike. This should help with that. Plus, we live in a relatively flat area so we don’t need gearing to support steep climbs.
48V 17.5aH Shark Battery – Hailong battery advertised as having L/G cells. This is the size we had on our old bike and it should suit our needs for this bike well enough.
Mechanical brake levers – after my experience with hydraulic brakes on our old bike I have been left fairly unimpressed by hydros. The stopping power on the mechanical brakes on this bike has been just fine.
Gear Shift Sensor – I haven’t installed this yet. I will! Right now to shift gears safely we need to gently hold down the brake lever to cut power to the motor, shift, and then release the lever.
Everything else in the box – headlight, throttle, cabling, nuts/bolts, and tools for installation. It’s way more thought out than I expected.
Cable management – lots of zip ties
Ebike Battery Plate – this is a metal plate that goes between the frame and the battery holder. It gives a little additional clearance since the Yuba Boda Boda has curves on the tubing.

Depending on how much we sell the green step-through model for we’re sitting at around $1600 for a cargo ebike, which is not bad! We paid more for our Blix and I expect this one will have fewer issues.

Installation Process

Installation took me a few weeks because I’ve got small kids and it was frigid outside in the garage. If I did it again I think it’d be 2-3 hours. Maybe a bit less. There are plenty of excellent youtube videos that show how to do the installation. It’s really straightforward!

The only notably tricky things on the Yuba are mounting the battery and mounting the speed sensor. For the battery I got a mounting plate to add a bit more distance between the frame and the battery holder. As it is there’s still a bit of plastic I am thinking about cutting away so it can sit a bit closer to the frame.

For the speed sensor I have it temporarily mounted on a small piece of wood to get it close enough to the magnet on the spoke. I have an extension cable waiting for me to install so I can move it closer to the axle of the wheel.

Should you do this?

I think everyone should try an ebike at least once! They are an excellent way of getting around and, frankly, we all need to drive less so anything that replaces a car trip is good news. For most people they should go buy a decent ebike from a good shop that will service it for you (if you’re in or around Ann Arbor, go to Wheels in Motion or Human Electric Hybrids).

That said, if you like working on your bike and want to save many thousands of dollars on an ebike: yes! I’ll check back in a few thousand miles to see if anything has changed. My suspicion is that we’ll still be pretty happy with it.

Just as a side note: there’s a big jump in price between direct-to-consumer cargo bikes with sketchy quality control and customer service and then ebikes that you can buy at a reputable bike shop. You go from around $2000 up to $5000 (and beyond!) quickly. If you have time and don’t mind having to source components and diy fixes a DTC ebike can be a great value! My advice for a DTC bike is to immediately get your wheels trued and tightened by someone who really knows what they are doing. Those hub motors are not kind to spokes!

TL;DR: It went well and there’s a big announcement about Issue 2 (spoiler: get ready, the rest of Michigan, it’s your time to shine)!

Go read the Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette Issue 1!

Want to make sure you hear about any news about the zine? Sign up here to get updates:

Issue 1 only happened because of people (like you!) submitting their excellent D&D stories and artwork! It was great seeing the D&D Gazette go from half-baked thought to a group coming together to make a thing.

The Numbers

Before publication, there were some soft numbers for what I’d consider a success for submissions and people actually reading it. All told, we hit them, which is heartening! The big banner number was “will 100 people read stories from Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor D&D players?” It looks like the answer is yes! In fact, we reached twice as many readers.

For actual traffic to the zine itself we got a big boost due to timely retweets by friends and by local sportswriter @mgoblog who said the nicest thing about it: “a new challenger for Most Ann Arbor Thing appears… “

Here’s the traffic pattern from May 7th-15th, which was about the only time there was active “marketing.” As soon as I stopped actively pushing it the traffic disappeared:

Note: For those of you who know about analytics I have high confidence that this is mostly legit traffic due to how the URL was shared.

Additional Note: Page value is $0.00. That should read “there is no greater reward than the friends we made along the way (and also pageviews).”

What went wrong?

Oh, so much. Mostly, though, it all comes down to getting the word out. There’s so much happening all the time. In addition to the country burning down, there are a million and one other creative things to pay attention to. Rising above that, even for a minute, is a gift.

The “marketing plan” consisted of a hastily constructed email list, a handful of blog posts, and a few tweets. An anemic plan at best. I did, however, want to see how far it could go with just that, and it went a lot further than expected. When it came time to “release” I did a catastrophically bad job of putting the tweets together. As I noted in the tweet that ended up actually getting shared around, I didn’t even attach the cover image to my initial tweet. So then the one that got shared contained an apology about the cover image. Not the best look.

Issue 2 Will Be Issue 1

Many, many people responded positively to the first issue and that is amazing! One submission has already come in for the next issue, and Hannah Davis reached out volunteering to copy-edit, which is so sorely needed! After launch there were a number of typos that were brought to my attention.

It’s really fun to go from an idea to finished and shipped work. It’s also very hard because when it’s not bringing in money and is entirely a non-mandatory side project, your other options for how to spend your time are “literally anything else.” But, collaborating and making something like this is tremendously fun. We’re going to give it another shot. I believe in me, and I believe in you. Together we can make this happen. Go Team!

So, without further ado: for the second issue we’re going to expand our geographic reach to the rest of the state with the:

Michigan D&D Gazette!

If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you, and roll initiative, because it was absolutely a trap.

I toyed with the idea of calling it “Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette Issue 2: The Michigan Edition,” but as funny as that is, it’s a mouthful. “Michigan D&D Gazette” will work.

Tell all of your friends across this great state that their stories, artwork, DM notes, one-liners, and ephemera are needed. If you have a submission already, send it on over to my email at csalzman@gmail.com. A more formal call will go out in a few weeks.

Thank you so much for following along so far! Sign up for more news, or watch this blog!

See you in in the Michigan D&D Gazette!

Category: making more work for myself

Converting a Yuba Boda Boda into a Cargo EBike