askchapo

I haven’t done a conversion, but I bought a cheap-ish e-bike. Having not done a conversion, I haven’t really researched what’s involved, but I would be absolutely terrified to ride an e-bike without disc brakes. Does the kit expect you to move over existing disc brakes?

Also, 2000W is either a lie or very powerful.

With the disclaimer that I'm still looking for the donor frame to perform a swap of my ebike crap onto a better frame, I think the key points with retrofitting a hub motor to an analog bike are:

• a hub wheel with cassette will likely be wider than the rear fork so you will probably have to widen it a little bit, but you should be able to do this by hand or with an easy to make tool.
• steel frame bikes can take modest torque without issue (the critical part is the dropout in the rear fork)
• see if a fridge magnet sticks to the rear forks and if so you're good to go (sorry if obvious)
• aluminium frames (or ones with alu rear fork/dropouts) are a bit soft and aluminimum doesn't like repeated stress, so typically people bolt a small shaped steel plate to the fork / side of the dropout to reinforce it and take the torque. Look up "ebike torque arm" to see what I'm talking about.
• people sell custom torque arms online to fit various common / popular frames' rear forks, but this can get overwhelming to try and hunt down and if you are handy you can make them with hand tools and some steel plate from a hardware store.

ummm. only other thing I can think is that I'm not sure how easy it would be to install something into a frame with thru-hole dropouts and have mostly/only seen conversions done on slotted dropouts. Not really sure how common thru-hole ones are, might not even be something you need to think about at all.

Hope any of that might be useful. i can elaborate or clarify if I worded anything confusingly.

Ebikes are great, but don't make my mistake - make sure replacement batteries are either cheap from the manufacturer or that third party replacements exist!

From what I researched, it’s simply not worth it. Better off with used or save up for a new prebuilt

I did the math on this a while back and the cheapest is like $300 for a friction assist (basically a motorized roller with belt sander tape that contacts and pushes your tire, with a separate battery). The next cheapest is a front hub conversion in the $300-500 range. Rear hub around $300-600 and mid drive conversions are $800+. You can score great deals on used ebikes if you know what to look for

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