Thursday the 18th of April, 2024 was an adventure day – and not in a good way.
The blame for the adventure is mine; however, before I tell that story, context is needed to understand why this has been so enormously frustrating for me. It comes solidly on the back of me being angry and frustrated about my eBike.
Let me bring you up to speed.
That Fucking RadPower Bike Wheel Saga
I love riding bikes, or at least I used to.
I have 10s of thousands of kilometers in the saddle from the 70s/80s. Partially, perhaps largely because of this, 40 years later, my knees and neck are shot. My knees won’t accept much hard pushing*, and my neck will not allow me to ride “down” on proper drop handlebars.**
When I moved to the Phoenix area in ’82, the horrid bike infrastructure (and the theft of ALL THREE of my bikes) soon got me out of the habit of riding. While Phoenix has improved since then, the ravages of time have kept me away from biking.
eBikes have given me back the fun of riding bikes, but there are big differences between an 8.5 kg road bike with a 43 kg rider and a 25 kg eBike with a 95 kg rider (and not just 68.5 kg.)
It’s not all fun, though.
eBikes have a lot of mass, bigger tires, and move very quickly. This, in my experience, makes them more prone to road hazards. I’ve had more than my share on my RadCity 5+. When I was young (oh, so much younger than today), I road my combined three main bikes (A Centurion Super LeMans, a Fuji America [my favorite], and a Benotto that was stolen so damned quickly I never even bothered to commit the model name to long-term memory) over 45,000 kilometers with only two catastrophic flats. Yes, I had several slow leaks from all the damned goatheads in Tucson, but only two ride-ending, call-for-the-cavalry flats.
Including Thursday’s adventure, I’ve already had more than that in only 6,000 kilometers on my eBike.
The first was a 7 cm long shard of wood that passed completely through the tire, into and back out of the inner tube, embedding itself invisibly within the tire. The tire went instantly flat, and the entry wound rendered the tire itself irreparable. After this fiasco, I had Tannus Armor installed.
The second was more prosaic: I hit a roofing nail with my front tire. You know the nails I’m talking about: the ones with the large plastic caps that help hold the asphalt shingles firmly in place but serve double-duty as a way to make sure the nail stands point up when some fucking careless roofer dumps a box on the road.
Initially, I thought this was a triumph of Tannus Armor. I was riding down the road when suddenly, my front wheel started clicking on every rotation. I stopped to inspect it and found the roofing nail solidly embedded in the tire. There was no leaking. Hooray for Tannus Armor!
Then I got stupid.
Thinking the Tannus Armor had prevented the inner tube from being punctured and not wanting to ride on it and risk possibly driving the nail into the inner tube, I removed it. The inner tube’s sudden and rapid deflation followed. I should have known better. I trusted the technology too much. I walked the bike home and fixed the flat, and I’ll tell you, Tannus Armor is a pain in the ass to uninstall and reinstall. I never wanted to have to do that again.
Then came the rim problem. The rear rim got bent. It’s an oddish-sized rim designed for eBikes. The LBSs “couldn’t” get them. (Or, I suspected, they couldn’t be fucking bothered to try.) RadPower won’t sell you a rim. They only sell the entire wheel assembly… tire, inner tube, rim, spokes, brake disc, and motor, for over $600 when you’re done with shipping and handling.
Sensing my ire on the phone, they gave me the “specs” for the rim so I could find one on my own. That took considerable time, but I finally found eBike-rated rims in China that were the “correct” size per the specs given to me by RadPower. It was reasonably priced, but shipping doubled that cost and took over a month to receive.
And, of course, it was wrong.
- Rim diameter, check.
- Rim width, check.
- Number of spoke holes, check.
- Distance between the rim bed and the exterior rim, off by 2 mm. (The dimension RadPower didn’t give me)
In this case, that means the existing spokes were too long and would protrude into the inner tube, causing flats. And, of course, finding the right-sized spokes seemed impossible, too.
It was at this point I said, “fuck it,” and ordered the entire wheel from RadPower.
When I finally got the wheel, I popped it on the bike to make sure it worked, and, to my amazement, not only did it work, but I got the goddamned hydraulic disc brakes aligned first try. That’s never happened before.
And then I got stupid.
I knew I should take the wheel off, deflate it, pop the tire and tube off, and install the Tannus Armor, but it’s such a pain in the ass, and I knew I’d never get the wheel on twice in a row without having to fight with the disc brake alignment.
I decided to put it off for a while. I was still disgusted with RadPower’s support options, which made me less inclined to ride the bike. However, I do love riding bikes, and I’d take it for a sneaky ride or two here and there, all the while knowing I shouldn’t do it until I put the Tannus Armor in.
Which leads us to Thursday.
[To Be Continued]
* The fact is, I seldom push my knees hard because of the way I ride; however, that is a tale for another day. It’s my neck that causes most of the problems.
** This is why I laugh at acoustic bike riders who sneer at my eBike as I whiz past them. Give it 40 years, and we’ll see how smug they are. (Unless they’re already old, in which case, more power to ’em.)