Now that I have decided that I am going to build my own e-bike rather than convert a gas car to an electric vehicle, I need to figure out what I need to make this thing work. This is going to be a basic list of the things I need to build the e-bike.

1. A cheap or FREE bike, 20″ or larger
2. 12v DC Motor that will push around 400-500 watts
3. 4 6v rechargeable golf cart batteries
4. Brackets to mount the motor
5. Bike Basket for the Batteries
6. Wire to run the electricity from the batteries to the motor and back
7. Toggle switch to turn on the circuit. Also will work as an emergency Shut-off
8. Variable resistor to change the speed of the bike. 

There might be more things that I am going to need that I don’t know about at the moment. I will add them when I think of them.

I think the hardest thing to find is going to be that DC motor. I don’t want to pay for an electric motor hub made specifically for a bicycle. They cost too much. I want to salvage one off of some kind of equipment. I am going to have to sit down and brainstorm what I might be able to get that off of.

If you have any ideas, please make a comment.

OK… I know everyone in the world is as annoyed with the gas prices as I am. They just seem to keep going up. Not to mention that the fumes that gasoline engines put out into the atmosphere are really horrible. It could actually be the end of us all.

Alright… I might be exaggerating a little bit. Not by much though. We are definitely hurting the planet with all this pollution. It is time to start finding new ways to commute to work. I found this guy on YouTube.com the other day. Here is his YouTube Page. He shows the world step by step how he converted a gasoline powered automobile to a 100% electric vehicle. Now he is able to drive to work and back on one charge. He says that he can get about 25 miles out of one charge. That is all I want.

At first I was Like I really need to do that. I thought that it would be really easy to find a junk, dead car and pull out all the gasoline components and put in an electric motor and about 15-20 golf-cart batteries. OK I know it was going to be a little more complicated than that. But I wanted to do it. I wanted a car that could get me to work and back everyday without having to stop at the gas station every so often to put nearly $4 per gallon of gas into my car.

Thinking about it, I came to realize that it was going to be very difficult to talk my wife into letting me invest in an extremely difficult project like this, taking up an entire half of the garage if not more. I thought about it some more and thought to myself… “Self? You might just be able to talk your wife into this project if you did it to your own car… the old beat up one you are driving now and will most likely get $100 trade for when you go to buy a new one.” Naaaah… She won’t go for that one either.

My wife didn’t turn out to be my only problem. It seems, listening to some people in the car business, that it may be illegal to own a 100% electric car in the US. I don’t know if that is true, but I am working on finding out the truth, because I really want a vehicle that doesn’t run on Gasoline.

After a few more days of thinking, I decided that it would be a good Idea to downsize my project to something a little more manageable; something that would not take up so much space or cost as much in the long run. I think I have decided that I want a e-bike. This is a bike with a motor either in the hub of one of the wheels or a motor attached to the frame that turns the wheel via a chain. The motor is powered by several rechargeable batteries.

My goal now is to find the cheapest way possible to build this bike. Stay tuned. This should be fun.