Main Parts:

Specialized Bike
Bafang 48V 750W BBS02 Kit with 50V 9.5Ah Battery: (20R)

I just finished Building my first electric bike. I think that this wood panel strategy is one of the best ways to build an ebike kit. The bike is clean, water proof, and affordable. I built this bike for an eighth the cost of a similar powered professional bike. I take 8 miles of surface streets to work every day, usually I can drive it in 25-45 minutes. On this bike I can get there in 29 minutes. I mean think of it, you spend most of the time at stop lights anyways. It cost me pennies a day to take it to work, or out to have fun. I calculated that if I drive it to work everyday for 6 months it will pay for its self in saved gas.

The bike is pedal assist so, the motor turns on when the pedals turn. There is no thumb throttle. I did a ton of research before starting and I think that this is a unique build method. I bought a Bafang 750 Watt mid-drive motor kit and 50 volt 9.5 amp hour lithium ion battery for it. I built it for mountain ridding so I can use the back gears for shifting for power or speed.

The bike is a hard tail with front suspension. I figured if I was going to put a motor on my bike I should make it hard tail so I have to learn how to ride it. Besides, my dad always said it is more fun to drive a slow car fast then a fast car slow. If it had a ton of suspension travel I would want to go twice as fast.

I didn’t want to make a new frame for it and looking at examples around the web that was the only way to make it look good. I decided to carve some panels out of wood that I would "simply" screw to the frame so that it would be wide enough for the batteries. The panels did work great. I fit the batteries inside the triangle, panels around the frame and polystyrene plastic sheets outside the panels to cover the batteries. I caulked all the cracks so it is water proof.

The most dangerous and difficult part of this project is rebuilding the batteries. It would be imposable for me to be able to fit in all the safety instructions for this build, let alone the fact I don’t feel it is responsible to tell people I don’t know to mess around with soldering 50 volts of batteries. If your bike has a big enough triangle to fit the purchased battery pack it would be a much safer build.

Hope you like it.

Step 1: The Quick and Dirty MTV Style Video

Here is the short video. You can turn on the captions for notes or read the transcripts. I think that this is what most people will want to see. Its just me building my bike.