rangersac
Medically diagnosed OMS
I've always been a bike commuter where possible as it's the most time effective way to maintain and include a fitness regime into family life. Having moved house a couple of years ago though, it became increasingly difficult to sustain as it was a longer commute and the post school kid activities ate into work time. My commute is a 58km round trip with 700m of climbing which was taking around 2hrs 20 at a minimum, and often longer when weather intervened. So after the last year of being mostly car bound and having the body to show for it thoughts turned to an e-bike solution to get back on the road.
Ideally I was looking for the e equivalent of my commuter, a steel drop bar framed Wayward Cape York which is very much designed for loaded touring. At a minimum it had to be able to accommodate mudguards, lights and a rack as I hate commuting with a backpack. However such a steed doesn't seem to exist, the closest I could find available were the Orbea Gain series but they lack mounting points, and the frames look a bit lightweight to be carrying racks and panniers. The other major consideration was how much time an e-bike saved over the analogue equivalent. If I was going to drop coin I wanted 30kph+ average to get the total commute time under two hours.
As luck would have it an old mate moved from interstate and kindly lent me his Trek Verve as test to compare timings which showed about a 10 minute each way improvement on the analogue bike despite the 25kph limiter on the motor. Nothing a Speedbox chip couldn't improve..
So after all that Black Friday came around and I jumped on a Polygon Path-e at 2.6k. Upgrade-itis followed with a decent saddle, a longer stem, Ergon GP5 grips and hard wired lights in the form of a Magicshine ME 1000 and a B+M Toplight View E. Oh and one of those Speedbox chips... Only done a few shakedown rides so far, but the commute is down to around 1hr 45 now which is a decent time saving. Still playing around with the hand positions, so might end up chucking on some riser bars but it's pretty much good to go once holidays end.
Ideally I was looking for the e equivalent of my commuter, a steel drop bar framed Wayward Cape York which is very much designed for loaded touring. At a minimum it had to be able to accommodate mudguards, lights and a rack as I hate commuting with a backpack. However such a steed doesn't seem to exist, the closest I could find available were the Orbea Gain series but they lack mounting points, and the frames look a bit lightweight to be carrying racks and panniers. The other major consideration was how much time an e-bike saved over the analogue equivalent. If I was going to drop coin I wanted 30kph+ average to get the total commute time under two hours.
As luck would have it an old mate moved from interstate and kindly lent me his Trek Verve as test to compare timings which showed about a 10 minute each way improvement on the analogue bike despite the 25kph limiter on the motor. Nothing a Speedbox chip couldn't improve..
So after all that Black Friday came around and I jumped on a Polygon Path-e at 2.6k. Upgrade-itis followed with a decent saddle, a longer stem, Ergon GP5 grips and hard wired lights in the form of a Magicshine ME 1000 and a B+M Toplight View E. Oh and one of those Speedbox chips... Only done a few shakedown rides so far, but the commute is down to around 1hr 45 now which is a decent time saving. Still playing around with the hand positions, so might end up chucking on some riser bars but it's pretty much good to go once holidays end.