November 18, 2021
Electric Bike Fridays! Testing It Out
This was our planned big day to test out the retrofitted Bike Fridays. I was nervous about what Dodie's reaction would be. The first risk was that she would say "This is some kind of a darn motorcycle. It wants to take off, I can't control it, I hate it, I won't ride it". I had tried to guard against that response by ensuring that the bikes have the natural feeling torque sensors, and that the motors are the weakest available. The second risk was that she would say "I can't get up this hill, the bike (and I) are too wimpy, why did we spend big bucks for just this, I hate it, I won't ride it." The guard against this is that the bikes still have their original 24 speed mountain bike gearing. Even without assist, this should get most people up most hills.
As it happens, it went pretty well. I got some grief about why did I adjust "level 1 assist" to be whatever it was adjusted to, and Dodie found the combination of 24 gears and 5 assist levels (120 choices!) to be somewhat daunting when trying to get up the hill. (It could have been set for 9 assist levels, for 216 choices, but whatever!). But overall we think the bikes are swell. Dodie went up our "favourite" nearby 15% hill with no real problem. Dodie did notice that the overall ease of operation, and the sophistication and natural impression of the ride was less than with her Bosch powered full sized German bike, but it was fine. So the Poc Chuc Pursuit is still on!
In fact today gave us a further lesson in why Mexico could be a good idea just now. The pause in the rain after the disastrous flooding of the past week ended, and we again had cold rain. Again, we went out into it, and frankly 17 kilometers was more than enough. Shifting among 120 gear and assist choices became a non-issue, because my fingers were too frozen to move anything at all. Dodie started to shiver, and our main objective became to get home quickly, rather than to keep checking out fine points about bikes. Too bad, because we had planned to go up and down that hill several times, just to try it different ways.
Today's ride: 17 km (11 miles)
Total: 17 km (11 miles)
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