Received converted Ebike, dead battery, brand looks sketchy? Advice?

Posted by snailboyjr@reddit | ebikes | View on Reddit | 7 comments

Moving to a biking city soon, and got this from a family friend who no longer can ride them selves.

I was told the charger/battery no longer works.

when I look up the brand it says it's a "Unit Pack Power", and with further searching, they seem sketchy or even dangerous.

I was wondering if I could simply get a different battery, or am I going to need a brand new kit?

I'm really looking forward to biking and I'm fairly new to ebikes, I just don't have the money for a brand new one, but I am technically inclined and don't mind tinkering.

advice?

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BassesNBikes@reddit

UPP makes good quality batteries and also not-so-good quality batteries. EM3EV is a much better choice. But a janky bike with full "suspension" is a very poor choice for a massively heavy direct drive motor. I'd start from scratch.

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UrbanEconomist@reddit

Question unrelated to OP: What’s the relevance of suspension (or “suspension”)? I’ve seen several posts in this sub where suspension configuration seems to impact someone’s assessment of a bike. I genuinely don’t understand what people are seeing or why suspension is bad for e-bikes. Is it a shorthand or rule-of-thumb for something? To be clear, this is an earnest question and I’m not terribly bike literate. Thanks!

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captfitz@reddit

most cheap ebikes have suspension that is basically for looks and barely functional. actually it's often even worse than no suspension in my opinion, you end up bouncing around like you're on a pogo stick with some of these cheap shocks.

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BassesNBikes@reddit

There's nothing inherently wrong with an actual dual suspension mountain bike. If you're going to get both wheels off the ground from time to time it can be a big help (but plenty of people do just fine on a hardtail).

There are issues, though, with bike-shaped-objects that include a bouncy spring where a shock (with a damper) ($200-500) would go coupled with rear suspension geometry dreamed up by someone with no idea how it ought to work. A real rear shock with damping costs more than a lot of cheap bikes in total. That spring just makes it bouncy.

Then there's adding 30lb of direct-drive hub motor to a wheel that should be as light as possible to minimize unsprung weight.

On closer inspection it looks like whoever built this mounted their DD hub motor to the *front* wheel (looked like some kind of swingarm at first glance), so this may not be quite as horrible as imagined. But it's still suboptimal to mount a heavy, powerful motor to a suspension fork as it applies forces in a direction the fork wasn't designed to handle.

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captfitz@reddit

the bike and hub motor are totally fine for city biking like op mentions, not worth starting from scratch