I asked for your help & with many thanks you did!

Almost a year ago I wrote a blog asking for help "I need your help & hopefully you can" to help me get an eBike to try start cycling to work & with many many thanks a fair few of you did.

And with being so busy with life, work etc (the usual life stuff we all have to put up with). I have been neglectful in thanking everyone & updating as to what is happening so this blog is for you & anyone interested in how it all went & what is happening.

Well with all your help we raised £750 & with help of Cycling Made Easy in Coulsdon who had a customer selling a secondhand one in good condition & with warranty with the shop themselves, it was enough to go buy it.

And as soon as I got it home I used the remainder of the funds (& a bit more) to kit it out with new comfy Brooks saddle, mudguards, etc...

And I did try it out & rode it to work tho found the automatic gears a hindrance on the hills, so upgraded them to a nice Sturmey Archer 3 speed internal hub.

 

And this proved to help the bike & extend the battery life as not fighting the automatic gears. And I have ridden the bike to work a few times now but the route has been worked on in the time I was working on getting an ebike & Highway England made a right hash of it & made the route more awful than ever (A12 survey report of the incomplete & shoddy works between Witham & Marks Tey) which I am trying to get sorted. Anyway despite this I am using the ebike to get to work every now & then, unfortunately not as often as I like.

But I am using it when I would normally get the bus to town when not feeling up to cycling, to carry heavier loads & to do larger amount of shopping & proving an asset to get to work on bank holidays & other seasonal holidays where there is no bus available & trains are a mess.

 

Even used her to do a lovely 20 mile cycle ride on Christmas day to explore areas I haven't been around Colchester.

So the ebike is proving more useful even if the original idea was to use it to cycle to work hasn't gone quite to plan, which I have not given up on doing. And here is my ebike in her glory now after all the changes & now I call her Dutchess. And it's thanks to all of you who helped that made this possible.

But I have plans to still cycle to work & with my disability getting worse, I am now planning ahead by looking at building my own ebike using a similar bike to my Electra Townie which is quite comfortable to ride. So be looking at getting an Electra Cruiser with an additional 11 gear Hub Gear to replace what's supplied on the bike.

And I have already acquired the gear hub in the sales recently so need to get the bike next. Then I will sell Dutchess to cover the costs of the ebike Conversion kit & installation of it as I feel it be unfair to ask for help again.

I'm undetermined where to get the conversion kit from atm but likely go with Cyclotricity as the mechanic I use fits them on other bikes with no issues & would be good to use him for the warranty side of things. Then I will have a bike more suited to my needs & try again to cycle to work. 

It hasn't been as straightforward as I hoped it could be but it's been a learning curve & very productive. And again I like to thank everyone for their support in this goal, it may not gone quite how I wanted it but we knew it was a chance it wouldn't work but it is getting there & learning from it.