I find the Fusion quite comfortable for riding around Asheville. My rides are quite hilly - typically 800 feet of climbing in 8 miles with 90% of that climbing in the first half of the ride. The most challenging part of riding it on steep climbs is the need for pulling hard on the handlebars when using a lot of force on the pedals.

You seem to think that the e-assist will mean you don't need to pedal hard. That is only true if you don't need to climb long hills.

Another issue, which may not be a problem for you, is that, because of the seat design, I, on longer rides, needed to keep the load very well balanced. I noticed that some the battery mounts you mentioned mount the battery beside the frame. That may cause you back problems.

Thanks for the very helpful picture - tsdz2 mounting looks like it will be same as my tour easy. For battery mount was planning on using a battery mount from t-cycle

https://t-cycle.com/collections/all-battery-mount-parts

I’ve not ridden a crank forward. The appeal is a fusion st would be a lot easier to get on public transportation than my te xl, for trips and recreational riding farther from home.

How comfortable do you find the fusion st for a few hours on the bike? With assist only worried about comfort and ease of getting around.

Many thanks for all the help, jeff

I rode my Fusion this morning on my regular route.

The tsdz2  is designed  to fit on  a regular upright bike frame. The bikes BB is the main mounting point and the rear stays that go from the BB back to the rear wheel are the secondary mounting point that keeps the tszd2 from rotating in the BB. Those parts are are both present on the Fusion frames, both regular and step through so  the mounting process is standard.
See https://ebikes.topicwise.com/doc/page/pic/?o=3d2&pic_id=3940877&size=large&v=3 is an image shoing how the Tsdz2 is mounted on my Fusion. 
There is a different problem with the step through frames. Where do you mount the battery? I don't think there is enough room to mount one like the ones I use between the frame tubes in front of the BB. When I toured on my Fusion, I ended up carrying a second battery on the Fusion's rear rack. That worked fine.  See https://ebikes.topicwise.com/doc/page/pic/?o=3d2&pic_id=3975034&size=large which shows how that battery was mounted under a pack on the rear rack.


             Mark

Hi Mark, love your journals and want to put a tsdz2 on a rans fusion step through -- with the sloping tube that joins the bottom bracket, is there room in the frame for the anchor piece on the tsdz2 that anchors the motor to the frame? aside from the bottom bracket itself, what holds the motor to the frame? many thanks for your kind help on this, jeff baron

I know it is hitting the bolt above the idler on my bike. I can see the place on the underside of the bolt where the chain hits. I have changed to a smaller diameter bolt which reduces the problem. With the larger chainring it hits when under high tension even with the 34 .but the noise is barely noticable.

I discovered the 36 tooth problem right before my summer tour. I went from an 11-34 to a 12-36 and suddenly I had clacking when I was in the very bottom of the granny. I feel that where the chain is hitting is on the bracket that holds the seat in place. You think it is hitting the bolt above the idler?

I like CycleBlaze and reading touring journals on it, but writing on it has been very frustrating. Just last night I was looking the 19 pages I have created here and, when I spotted a typo or grammatical error, fixing it and moving on. I'd gone through half a dozen pages when I realized I had been wasting my time since , without thinking, I hadn't saved any of those pages after I corrected them. I didn't go back and redo the edits. Why should I have to think about saving changes? My job is to make changes to fix or improve my pages. The website's job is to store the changes I made . Last night was just one small example of the many times I've wasted my time making changes here that were never saved.

I have visited your website(s) many times over the last 20 plus years and enjoyed your tour reports and "bike tinkering" immensely. In fact from the your website to Touring@Phred.org to Crazyguyonabike and now Cycleblaze. You really have provided a wealth of information over many years! However, it seems that you had more problems posting on Cycleblaze than on previous platforms?
Similar to you, but not as extensive, I've also "journaled" many of my bike travels (now on WordPress at adamk.ca) and it is a wonderful way for me to relive those tours that have many wonderful memories of places and people. And hopefully, others are vicariously "riding along!"

In Mount Vernon KY, my host - motel owner and now friend - said I should "write a book about my tours". I responded that I already had written the equivalent of a number of books as web pages. My ride reports web pages from 1995 to 2011 are on my university web server and from 2011 to 2018 are on crazyguy. The url for university bicycling pages and my user id for crazyguy are part of my CycleBlaze profile. Both sites have hundreds of web pages That I created on tours in North America and Europe. Those web pages are my collective touring memory.

Good stuff Mark, well done!!!

Well done Mark. I'm addicted to your tour reports.

Keep them coming...

So, I guess you don’t need me to offer advice in the vein of “that thing is not a foot pedal it’s called a mouse”. I for one am expecting auto save to be the default too. Good luck.

a photo of a crank forward, on tour. A rare Beast!

I've tried both ding everything on another text editor and cut/paste it and regular use of the save and keep editing button which requires a major interruption in my work flow every time I use it. In both cases it is a major distraction and, as soon as I forget, I've lost a lot of work.

It the save button was on the screen rather than at the end of the page, which is typically many screens down because I like to put up my images before I start entering text that would be a great help.

As it is, the system is designed - not intentionally - to lose lots of my work, including images that I've uploaded and text that I've typed because I am used to - I've been doing my ride journals online as I toured since the late 1990s. I started by doing it all in HTML and scanning fllm to create the images. As soon as digital cameras became affordable, I was able to eliminate having to develop the film and scan it.
After I retired in 2011, I switched to doing my journals on Crazy Guy. which made things straight forward, did not lose my text unless the connection was cut in the middle of text entry, and never lost my uploaded images or their captions. CycleBlaze's 'everything you enter must be explicitly saved; mode is, as far as I know, unique and I'm a retired university Computer Science Prof. I've lost all of the above multiple times on Cycle Blaze without losing my connection.

http://www.cs.unca.edu/~boyd/bicycling.html - 1995 - 2011 - all of my bicycle related web stuff

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/my/?usr=mjb 2011 - 2019

I had the same problem, lost the entire page! Someone suggested writing on another format, such as google sheets, and then copy/paste. I have been doing as Kathleen suggests above and hitting the 'save/edit more' button often.

Glad to hear you are getting in the groove!