Countless companies and industries enjoy making up scary stories when it comes to justifying their opposition to making it easier to repair your own tech. Apple claims that empowering consumers and bolstering independent repair shops will turn states into “hacker meccas.” The car industry insists that making it easier and cheaper to repair modern cars will be a boon to sexual predators.
What I did was get a full rear wheel conversion kit, which comes with the motor speed controller, throttle control, most of them come with some kind of pedal assist sensors, and obviously the hub motor and rear wheel assembly. I already had a bicycle lying around. These are almost always bring-your-own battery affairs. Everything else in the kit just plugs together, and you get to decide where to route the wires down your bike frame. Maybe bring some zip ties. E-bike battery kits are readily available on Amazon or eBay, or you can have a go at making your own battery pack out of bare cells. I was lazy, so I got a premade battery pack. The only real DIY aspects I had to deal with was mating the battery pack connector to the power input on the motor speed controller box, which required some soldering (or you could use crimp connectors, I guess) and also figuring out where to mount the battery pack and motor controller to the frame of the bike.
I also decided to make my life difficult by wiring alongside this an entire secondary 12 volt system to run brake and tail lights, turn signals, a headlight, and a horn from a car (!) because if anyone runs me over they’ll have no excuses. But you could easily omit all of that nonsense and deal with a lot fewer wires in your life.
I bought all of my conversion parts from Amazon. My buying strategy was just to look for stuff that had non-shill looking reviews.
Oh, that makes it real easy! What do the conversion kits cost? Other than installing and fitting, did you have to do a lot of tinkering, or was it basically out the box to go (-battery)?
In my case it was all plug and go, aside from fiddling around finding the best wire routing strategy.
The exact kit I got was this one, which appears discontinued but there are oodles just like it. It’s around $250. The battery was this one, and again you can find tons that are identical and probably stamped out in the same factory. It was around $270.
Ooh, I found basically the same thing for like $180 on Ali! There are cheaper ones, but they look iffy. You can some real interesting kits for $300 lol.