cycle lanes and woodland trails although this year the cycle lanes were worse than the woods with all the flooding we had
What they don't tell you!!!! What you need to know!!!!
- Thread starter Cheekychops1111
- Start date
I believe of the current crop of motors only the Mahle motor in the Levo SL is IP67. The old Gen 3 Bosch was IP54 as is the Shimano. The Brose Mag Drive S is IP56. Dont know about the Yamaha
However as I am sure @Bearing Man can explain a lot of how good the motors are at preventing motor ingress has to do with the seal design.
I thought I recognised that dainty hand! What I would like to add to Cheekychops excellent report and pictures is a little bit of clarity for Brose owners. The picture I took above shows several issues that may help hammer home what Cheekychops is saying.
You can see the damage to the gasket face and the rust around the steel motor surround. This is caused because the paper gasket material used by Brose is not water resistant! The water is drawn into the gasket and attacks the gasket face and anything metal it touches.
The screws that hold the ECU (brain) are not sealed around the head, if water comes through here it is free to enter the ECU itself. This part of the cover should have been solid down to the gasket but isn't.
This is more likely to happen if mud is packed around this part of the motor. If water enters the electrical plugs on the motor (it usually does this when the plugs have been fitted dry and the little red O-rings get pulled out of their correct position, or comes down the main power cable) the water in the plug travels up the electrical wire by capillary action and ends up in the wiring plugs of the ECU, and corrodes the pins.
The most important thing Cheekychops neglected to say was why the ACF 50, or the like, is so important on the Brose motor and no other. The aluminium Brose motors eat themselves due to the electrolysis created around the electrical motor plugs. This is why this end of the motor is always corroded and why the cadmium plated screws turn to lumps of rust.
Again, important to keep this area cleanish without water if possible.
Removing the motor and letting it "dry out" won't achieve that much unfortunately. Once water has entered the motor, it is trapped and no amount of warming will release the moisture, it will just turn your motor into a little sauna. Also if enough water is in your motor and it's sat in your bike, the water will stay around the crank area (this can be replaced) If you remove your motor and tip it the other way up, you may as well drop it in the bin or hold the garage door open with it.
And there lies the problem, most don't have any seals, and currently, the ones that do are poor at best.
There is a small problem with seals... They add friction. If you were reading the specs of two bikes and one claimed 50 miles from its battery and one claimed 60 miles which one would sway you more?
If you were a manufacturer and 95% of your motors were fitted to road bikes that didn't suffer water ingress (even without seals) why would you spend millions on the added design, testing, sourcing, stocking etc. to fit them for the 5% that needed them?
What would have been nice is to just adapt the covers very slightly so that a seal could have been sourced and used!
Hmmm, super hi-tec paper gasket deployed, no wonder these motors are so expensive
you've clearly lead a very sheltered life.
Stuart569
Well-known member
I've done the same to my Shimano e8000 plenty of times... As long as you're not pressure washing and you allow to dry before connecting the battery there's no issues.
Yes it's all my fault; I'm nowhere near tough or manly enough to be on here. I should have known, silly me. In my defence I had assumed that what's billed as "the world's best electric mountain bike community" would be an inclusive place where everyone was treated with respect and even my granny could feel welcome. Stupid of me not to realise that its primary purpose isn't that, but rather a vehicle to showcase the insatiable ego of "Gary", where he gets to "humble" as many folk as possible with his boorish, aggressive, bullying, sexist, disrespectful, often expletive-laden jibes, egged on by his small band of sycophants. Well if you prefer these forums to become a little clique, the sole preserve of you and those like you, instead of opening up to a wider audience then you're certainly going the right way about it. Or alternatively you could go* and subscribe on #WeAreToxicMasculinity instead - just a thought?
* but for sure keep posting all your non-offensive stuff on here. I'm not saying you don't deserve to be "The Goat" for your huge knowledge of electric bicycles. Some of the info you've provided has certainly helped me and I do thank you for that.
I honestly can't imagine anyone's granny being so easily offended on behalf of others.
Block me through the "ignore" setting if you're that fragile.
I certainly won't miss notifications of your replies to my contributions
Block me through the "ignore" setting if you're that fragile.
I certainly won't miss notifications of your replies to my contributions
Not entirely on behalf of others - I know it's a curious quirk of me but I don't particularly enjoy being sworn at, told my posts are bollocks or called a prick. Anyway I didn't realise there was a setting that would make all of your posts disappear so thanks for the info. Doing that now.
GrandPaBrogan
⚡ eGeezer ⚡
A close friend bought his wife a Giant Fathom hardtail. It’s one on the main reasons why I ended up with a Giant Trance (very pleased I did).
One day after a group trail ride she did exactly that at the trail car park MTB wash pad. I was shocked but it was too late for me to say anything. I knew she was a stickler for the operator’s manual rules and looked after her bike like a beloved pet... makes sense now.
I dunno, I just can’t make myself do that... even if Giant suggested I could!
Up in the hills it'll be quite a bit different. The jet stream keeps the weather better for most of the UK. Scotland is often on the edge of the jet stream which is cold and causes very high wind, the west coast of the Highlands usually bearing the brunt of this.
I've spent quite a bit of time up there hillwalking and climbing, so consequently watching the weather.
It can be much worse than the Lakes or Peak District
The weather in Scotland actually has a massive East/West split. The East being far drier (a lot drier than the Peak district and Wales and even North and South West of England) but it's also far windier and can "feel" a lot colder.
Of course temperature drops with elevation, and if you've walked the hills to the west of the highland region you'll have noticed all the lochs and bog land from the excessive rain that area gets. it's no more rain than South Wales gets though.
The East - West split in rainfall is UK wide rather than merely a scottish thing. I lived in South Somerset for 4 years and being westerly the rainfall there was significantly higher than my home town in the East of Scotland.
The English aren't particularly well educated on Scotland (or non local UK geography TBF) and many English printed road maps of the UK don't even cover the far north of the country (The highlands aren't actually all that far north) so I can understand how so many of them get the idea we're all nutters traipsing through puddles and snow 9 months of the year in our kilts. In reality it's only 4 months of the year when the trails are wet and the nights are long. during which time significantly less of us are out riding our bikes anyway. Tourists shouldn't really be anywhere near the mountain ranges without skis during those months unless they're very experienced hillwalker/climbers. (as I assume you'll allready know)
What's your home town fella ?
Andyd68
New Member
I am new to mountain biking not even got my first bike yet as waiting for Decathlon to restock one of their entry level FS bikes. This post to be honest is scaring me and making me start to think not to bother buying an ebike. I am not doubting the person who posted this and understand that general maintenance is required. I was hoping that I can pay someone to service my bike once a year? However If I have to pay someone every month or so I might as well forget it and go and dust down the golf clubs in the garage.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think this thread was mainly something to think about if you wanted to do absolutely everything you could to cover all bases, particularly if you were going to be doing a lot of riding in extreme conditions. There is always the chance your motor might go pop anyway, but that's just the luck of the draw. At least it should be under warranty for the first couple of years.
If you find you really love it and end up riding loads and loads you could well find that it's worth having things like the chain checked out more than once a year though, but you can easily learn to do that yourself anyway.
jaggysnake
Active member
I change my chain every mile , once I went on a monster 58 mile ride and had to have a support vehicle to carry all the chains.
If you did it every half mile, you'd get at least three miles out of your cassette and chainring.
Sounds pretty high risk to me.
I get my support vehicle to go on ahead and lay out a new 100 mile chain along my route.
At the start of the ride I just feed the chain in round the derailleur, round the cassette, over the chainring and let it drop back to the ground from there.
Never had a single chain break. Never had to lube a chain. Don't understand why more people don't do it.
You only have to read the small print on an SRAM power link "1 time use only". Who's going to risk that going round a cassette twice, you're just asking for trouble.
I am going to chip in as a moderator here, I have only logged on to the thread to see what it is about, and have seen the massive derailment. The below isn't aimed at any particular member.
Firstly there is a large section of the forum rules, which very few people seem to bother to read - I suggest doing so.
Rules
Secondly there are tools to report, or contact a moderator if you feel a member is stepping out of line, or being offensive etc etc. I can see that no one has used them in this thread or reported any of its content, so my point is if someone genuinely says something you feel is rude or offensive or out of line, then report the comment, and it will get dealt with - if you don't report it then a moderator doesn't know about it. The powers that be will happily deal with stuff if they know about it and think its out of line.
Thirdly, if you disagree with someone, or don't like their content, you can just put them on ignore, or perhaps being a grown up just ignore it! There are all sorts of folks on here, some can be very blunt, some the opposite, but as with life in general the membership is made up of all walks of life, this happens to be one of the friendliest forums out there, just step over to Pinkbike if you want to get your head bitten off! What is not acceptable is people stalking others round threads just to jump on their comments and keep any perceive beef going, this has only happened very rarely, but please, do not do this.
Lastly the worse thing you can do if you take offence at something is just start a flaming war within the thread - there have been several instances recently of members unnecessarily escalating minor disagreement into full on abuse, often where the response are far more offensive than the original comments, where its clear that some of the stuff written is just baiting the other into a response - this is just as bad behaviour as posting up something stupid in the first place. Just don't bother doing this, as reading through threads it just comes across as multiple people being arseholes and any genuinely offensive post that kicked things off often gets outdone by the responses. If you then come to a moderator and your content is as abusive as the other parties, then its multiple people who are going to get a reprimand.
We apply a light touch here, primarily because we have never needed to get heavy handed, and because the membership have always behaved responsibly, but the forum has massively expanded recently due to the uptake of EMTB during the lock down, so that may need to change.
Firstly there is a large section of the forum rules, which very few people seem to bother to read - I suggest doing so.
Rules
Secondly there are tools to report, or contact a moderator if you feel a member is stepping out of line, or being offensive etc etc. I can see that no one has used them in this thread or reported any of its content, so my point is if someone genuinely says something you feel is rude or offensive or out of line, then report the comment, and it will get dealt with - if you don't report it then a moderator doesn't know about it. The powers that be will happily deal with stuff if they know about it and think its out of line.
Thirdly, if you disagree with someone, or don't like their content, you can just put them on ignore, or perhaps being a grown up just ignore it! There are all sorts of folks on here, some can be very blunt, some the opposite, but as with life in general the membership is made up of all walks of life, this happens to be one of the friendliest forums out there, just step over to Pinkbike if you want to get your head bitten off! What is not acceptable is people stalking others round threads just to jump on their comments and keep any perceive beef going, this has only happened very rarely, but please, do not do this.
Lastly the worse thing you can do if you take offence at something is just start a flaming war within the thread - there have been several instances recently of members unnecessarily escalating minor disagreement into full on abuse, often where the response are far more offensive than the original comments, where its clear that some of the stuff written is just baiting the other into a response - this is just as bad behaviour as posting up something stupid in the first place. Just don't bother doing this, as reading through threads it just comes across as multiple people being arseholes and any genuinely offensive post that kicked things off often gets outdone by the responses. If you then come to a moderator and your content is as abusive as the other parties, then its multiple people who are going to get a reprimand.
We apply a light touch here, primarily because we have never needed to get heavy handed, and because the membership have always behaved responsibly, but the forum has massively expanded recently due to the uptake of EMTB during the lock down, so that may need to change.
That's a fantastic intervention. Completely restored my faith! If I'd known about that the times I was abused I'd definitely have just reported and left it to the moderator to decide what was fair rather than get goaded into reply. As is apparent, I was one of those people who hadn't read the rules - not because I couldn't be bothered, but because I never noticed them in the first place. They don't seem to be in a prominent place or am I blind? Don't know if it's possible, but perhaps the rules could be displayed when you first sign up, and have to tick that you acknowledged them to complete that? Or did it do that already and I just didn't notice that either?
(I know I did say I wouldn't post again, but hopefully no one feels this one counts against that!)
Rosemount
E*POWAH Elite
Possibly the most ridiculous guide* to Emtb ownership I've ever seen.
Well done.
*even for a Levo owner
Jay355
Active member
miPbiP
E*POWAH Master
8. don't sell your lung-bike until you are _sure_ you don't want it any more. I nearly did and I would have regretted it.
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