A-Tisket, A-Tasket an E-Bike Basket

We have been loving our  e-JOE Epik SE Electric Bike. It runs great and is probably more powerful than we need.  It is working out great and comes with us whenever we go on a trip.  It fits really nice on the back of the Fuse.

One thing we did need is a good way to carry things back to the camp site from a store or restaurant.  When riding any bike you need to make sure you are doing it safely and without distractions.  Carrying stuff can be distracting if you are worrying about stuff falling out.

The E-Joe does have a rear carrier but it needed something to carry things in.  We thought about getting the college student favorite, a milk crate to put back there, but to be honest that would look a little tacky and not quite our style.

Well Sonya found what we needed.  A removable basket for the front of the E-Joe.   She purchased a
Ohuhu Rust-Proof Quick Release Basket .

The installation was super simple.  There is a holder that connects to the Bike and the basket.  The holder has foam covered hooks that go over the handlebars.  The bottom of the holder is velcroed to the stem of the handlebars.  Just that simple.   The basket is connected to the holder with some hooks on the bottom of the basket.  the basket handles fit into a set of holes on the top of the support so that when the handles are down it locks the basket in place and when the handles are up you can remove the basket.   Sounds complicated, but trust me, it is not.

To put the basket on or take it off you just lift the handles up and tilt the basket forward.  Then it will come off the holder.  You put the basket back by just doing the opposite.   Since the basket comes off you can take it with you to carry things while shopping.

But the bigger question is how much will it hold.  At Ft. Wilderness it was plenty big to hold 4 big bounty breakfasts from P&Js takeout.  To give some more perspective, it will hold a takeout bag and 2 large Ice Dream cups from Chick-Fil-A with a little room to spare. 

E-Joe Epik SE Review - Several Weeks In

It has been a busy few weeks but I figured I would add some comments on the my new E-Joe Epik SE bike now that I have ridden it for a while.   To get the details on the Epik SE you can read the first day review I posted earlier.   I am still very happy with the bike.  It rides wonderfully and is working out exactly the way I hoped.

I have now done several rides of 5-7 miles.  These have been on hard packed soil bike trails.   The bike has handled this environment great!   I was a little concerned since this is not a mountain bike but no issues.  Soft soil would be another matter and riding in the grass is a little much for the narrow tires.

The longest ride so far has been 7 miles.  It would have been 14 but I got a flat tire and had to get rescued by my wife.

I generally have been riding the bike using peddle assist 1.  I have been changing the gears to make it easy to peddle and not place any pressure on my feet and ankles.  I have some major issues with my feet and normal bike riding is out of the question.

The Epik SE has a huge amount of power and it has taken these several rides to get use to it.  On flat  asphalt, peddle assist 1 is too powerful and I have to take great care.  Very little peddling is necessary.  I like to move my legs so in these conditions I have been turning off peddle assist and just using the thumb throttle to give a kick when needed.

On the hills here in Tallahassee, peddle assist 1 is perfect.  Big hills that would have caused me to dismount 20 years ago are just handled and no effort is involved.

I mostly have been riding on the Miccosukee Greenway Trail here in Tallahassee (details).  I wanted to build up my experience and wanted to build up distances to see how far the battery would take me.  I have been very concerned about getting stranded so I have been building up slowly.

My last ride was to be 14 miles.  It  was going great but about 7 miles into it and about 100 yards from my turn around point I got a flat tire.   I had just come off a bridge and am pretty sure I caught a nail in the tire. The air came out as fast as it went in.

The good part was at 7 miles the battery was still reading full.  This was after a ride that was  half up and half down decent hills.   I feel very confident that it should be able to do 20-30 miles on this type of terrain without killing the battery.

A couple of points:

• With an e-bike you do need to make sure you get the feel of the bike.  It is different from a normal bike and can get away from you fast.  
• I am still not comfortable enough to ride it in traffic.  After a couple more rides I probably will be.
• The bike can go 20mph.  This is too fast for me.  
• The breaks work great.  I have had to use them on the hills to keep from going too fast.
• I brought my bike to my local bike shop to take a look over it.  I had been planning to do this and the flat tire moved the schedule up.  They checked it out and everything was in good shape other than a few loose screws.  I asked them to do a tune up and since it did not need one they just charged me a few dollars for labor over the cost for fixing the tire.  Local bike shops are great.

E-Joe Epik SE Review - 1st day

After a lot of research I have purchased an E-bike.  When we purchased the Fuse we knew we did not want to tow a car. We have come to the conclusion that some local transportation would be helpful.

A really good site I used doing the research on E-bikes was https://electricbikereview.com.  I recommend this site if you are thinking about buying an E-bike since there are lots and lots of choices.  EBR does a great job of helping with real data.

Why an E-Bike? I wanted to make sure it would be something we used and not just something we hauled around with us.  I am starting to get old and some electric assist will go a long way to making me want to ride.   If the bike turns out to be work, it will just sit there.  We only purchased one so we can see how it works out.  If it does well,  then we will buy another one so Sonya and I can ride together.

I purchased a E-Joe Epik SE from Amazon.   The exact one is at 2016 e-JOE Epik SE Magenta Pink Folding Electric Bike .   It was sold and delivered from shopebike.com .  I purchased it from Amazon for two reasons:

1. I wanted the protection buying from Amazon gives you.  I was not familiar with these companies so I wanted help if I needed it.    Although, I really wanted to buy local in case I had any problems.  There are just not any places in Tallahassee that had a large selection of E-Bikes.  Several people would order me one, but there were no stores in town that had experts.  The closest stores that seemed to focus on e-bikes were several hundred miles away.
2. Once I picked the Epik SE the best deal I found was on Amazon.   There was a reason for this.  The bike was pink!  They had several different colors on their web site but pink was available for a $200 savings on Amazon.  For a $200 discount we will ride a pink bike.  For that amount of money I can be secure in my masculinity.  And it might turn into Sonya's bike in the future.

So I placed my order and it was at my doorstep in a week.  Why did I buy an E-Joe Epik SE?  

• It was light for an E-Bike - 40 lbs.    I wanted light since I need to lift it up onto the bike rack. Most E-bikes come in at 60lbs.   If I got a second bike the combined weights need to stay under 120 pounds so they do not max out the Fiamma bike rack.
• It got great reviews for a low cost E-bike.  
• It was low cost for an E-Bike.  Low cost is relative for an E-bike.  List price for the Epik SE was $1600.  I paid $1200.
• It came with a larger battery - 12amp hours.  More amp hours = more range.   This bike should be able to do 20-30 miles or more depending on how much the rider helps.
• It has a 350watt/36v motor which was on the large side of the bikes I looked at.  Many were 250-300watts.  I thought this would be important since I am not a small person and I do not want to peddle up hills.

It arrived at our doorstep (thanks Fedex) and it was packed great.  Wrapped in a lot of bubble wrap and some styrofoam.  I think that the company did a great job making sure it did not get damaged in transit.   I had watched the videos on how the bike folded and unfolded.  I pulled it out of the box, unfolded it and it was mostly ready to go.

I did have to adjust the cant of the handlebars using an allen wrench which took two minutes.  A bike tool was even included in the box with the charger.  After that, since the battery was mostly charged it was off to the front yard to see how well it worked.

It worked great! Almost too great.   In all fairness, I have not really been on a bike in 10 years except trying out a couple of E-Bikes in the last several months.  If you are a hard core biker, you may have very different observations.

Using it just as a bike I was pretty happy.  It has 7 speeds and was very easy to peddle.  From a bike perspective, I am sure it is the nicest bike I have ever owned.  It should be since it is also the most expensive bike I have ever owned.  Sitting on it was comfortable.  It has shocks on the front and a cushioned seat.  The seat and handlebars are adjustable for height so it can fit people with a wide range of heights.  It has fenders to keep splashes down and a rack on the back to carry stuff.   All things I wanted in a bike.

As an E-bike, the Epik can be used with just the thumb throttle or using peddle assist.    The maximum speed is 20mph.  This is actually a governed speed since if it can go faster than 20mph it is no longer considered a bike and is covered by laws for motorcycles and mopeds.  By the way, 20mph on a bike seems faster than I really want to go.

Using the thumb switch, no peddling is required.  Control the speed with your thumb.  

Using peddle assist, the motor helps you peddle.  The faster you peddle, the faster you go.  It has 3 levels of peddle assist.  Low, Medium and High.  My initial impression given 1 hour of use is that peddle assist actually assists too much. From what I read, this is probably since I am in a very flat area and the assist is tuned for hilly areas.   How  I actually use the motor is what I will have to experiment with.

There were only two things I put in the minus column on this bike so far.  Both I knew about when I made the purchase so there were expected and not a big deal to me.

1. The bike comes with a bell attached.  It is garbage and they probably should not bother.  If I had not read about it I would not have noticed it.  It does not work well and for a bike that is very well constructed and has a lot of thought put into it, this is the only weak point I have seen so far.
2. The controller is very basic.  Other bikes have speedometers and 10 vs 3 levels of peddle assist.  This controller on the Epik is on/off and 3 levels of assist.   I think that this is a conscious decision that E-Joe made to keep the costs under control.   This is not a big deal to me given my needs. I saw several other companies selling similar bikes with fancier controllers for several hundred dollars more. I think I would rather save the money.

I also wanted to see how well it fit on the back of the Fuse.   It went on fine.  I might try with the handlebars folded down or with the seat removed.  It was not too heavy to get it up on the rack so one of my major factors was addressed.

Riding it around the driveway was fun.  Everyone in the family took a turn.  This is a game changer for me and using a bike.  After an hour of use all I can say is this is great!

Fiamma Bike Rack Installation

I decided to buy the Fiamma Carry-Bike Pro C bike rack after agonizing about which bike rack to buy for a long while.  It sits up kind of high but it does not block the license plate or the break lights.  It holds two bikes high enough so they should not get too dirty from road dust.  The other racks I considered were hitch mounted and I think would have had all of these problems.

This is the bike rack that comes as a factory option on the Fuse.  I purchased it from Fiammausa.com.   The price was $352 + tax and shipping.   I had it within a week of ordering.  It might have been cheaper ordering from Europe, but I really did not want to use my credit card outside the US.   I was also quoted $568 from several Winnebago dealers with a 90 day lead time.

It was delivered to my front door by the nice UPS man nicely packed in a large box.   Most of the rack was pre-assembled.   The first thing I did was to look over the instructions.  Fiamma could do better in this area.  It was mostly pictograms and several of the pictures were not exactly what I had purchased.   Not too bad, but I had to skip to the back several times to figure out where I was at.

To put it together I needed a metric socket set and a drill.   Remember, this is from Italy, metric if in doubt.   I also needed a Torx bit, a small standard screwdriver and an adjustable wrench.   A ruler helped for figuring out which bolts were which, but was not required.  It took me and my son 2 hours to construct.  If I was more mechanically inclined it could have been done in an under an hour.

My Fuse did not come with bike rack option but did come with the mounting hardware already installed.  This made installation really easy.

It went together fairly easy.   You first construct the frame that connects to the motorhome.  It is held to the mounting hardware by 4 stainless steel rods.  Two on the top and two on the bottom.   The top part of the rack slips over the rods.  The rods go through the bottom legs of the rack to positively connect to the motorhome.   In the picture above you can see the rod that holds the lower left support.   The rods on the bottom slide out through the side and then slide back through the legs.

Once we had the frame on the mounts we needed to use the drill.  This was the only scary portion of the exercise. The top and the bottom supports slip together so there was some adjustability.  Now that the height was determined you had to drill a hole through each leg to add rigidity to the rack.  So a hole was drilled on each leg near the red band and a bolt inserted to tie the top and bottom half together.

The next step was pretty easy - attaching the bottom.  Fiamma ships this pre-assembled so all we had to do was to use two bolts to connect the bottom folding portion to the supports.  After that, we were pretty much finished.  We had to snap on the holders that keep the rack up when folded and then add the bike supports to the top of the rack.  Then we were done.

Then it was time for some testing.  Did we build it well enough to hold a bike?  Well we tried it out and it worked!   We still have to see how well it works on a trip, what is the best way to secure the bikes and several other details but that will be the topic of another post.  

I am going to depend on some videos from http://thefitrv.com and I will let everyone know how it works for me.  If you have any tips, yell out.

Bike Rack

A quick little post.   When I do research I will try and include what I find out here.  

I am going to need a bike rack and the Fuse. Mine did not come with one from the factory.   It came with the hardware to mount one from the factory, but not the rack itself.   I am not sure what I am going to do, but I did track down the vendor that Winnebago uses for the bike rack.    It is from a company called FIAMMA.   There web site is at:

http://www.fiamma.com/EN/

I am not sure what I am going to do, but  it took more than a few minutes to track down. the manufacturer and there is not much info on the Winnebago site.

Oh, and by the way, Winnebago included covers for the bike rack hardware in the case with the manuals that came with the coach if you are looking to cover up the brackets.   Not sure they are the most attractive coverings and the bright white does not match the tan of the coach, but should at least keep me from scratching myself on them.