We were in a bicycle store looking at racks and panniers when they called and said our KMX recumbent trike had arrived, albeit at a different store some 50 miles away! Santa Claus came through at the last moment, and within an hour we had the KMX safely in the back of our rental car.
Of course, we were fooling ourselves thinking that it would stay all nicely boxed up till we got back to Norway. On Christmas Eve we opened everyone's presents, then on my mother's hall floor we pulled it out of the box and carefully put it together. Even standing still the KMX looks like it is fun fun fun to ride.
The ride from Cam's school bus stop to the Language school is a little hilly in places, and so while we were researching recumbent bikes I stumbled upon electrified recumbent bikes, and the little gears in my head started turning...
There is a company in Canada called Bionx, who makes this super cool electric assistance kit for bicycles of all shapes and sizes. The heart of the matter is replacing your back wheel with theirs which has a powerful hub motor installed. Coupled together with a sizable Lithium battery pack, and a smart electronic controller you get varying levels of assistance depending on what you enter on the console mounted on the handlebars. Say for instance you feel particularly lazy one morning, you can tell it to boost your pedal power by 300% (or 25%, 50%, 100%). The sensors in the hub motor measure how much force you are pedaling with and then compensate by adding the extra power from the hub motor.
The really neat thing is if you are feeling particularly virtuous another morning and feel like a workout you can ask the Bionx console to apply an increased level of resistance to your pedaling, thus giving you a harder workout than usual and recharging the battery at the same time! (this same regenerative charging occurs when you apply the brakes on the bike, and can account for 10-15% extra charge returned to the battery pack.)
So we ordered the kit from a store in New York and it arrived about a week after we got the KMX. In order to make it fit within the frame of Yessie we had to do some minor modifications: the battery pack and controller was stripped out of it's original containers and resealed in electrical tape. We then mounted the battery pack to the frame of he KMX by drilling and mounting two right angle bracket, then using some straightened duct clamps, secured it in place. Conveniently enough the controller fit snugly in behind the webbing of the seat, and all the cable were neatly tie wrapped in place.
We had a tricky situation trying to mount the console on the KMX 'handlebars', but as luck would have it, the placement worked perfectly below the gearshift. We had opted for the console with the throttle, which allows you to bypass the assistance monitoring and just use the motor when you really need it: steep steep hills or just for fun. (The console is set to only deliver assistance or boost up to 20kmph, but that is more than enough when you are only 15cm from the ground. And there is actually a software crack available on the web to remove the speed limit if you so desire.)
At full right hand turn the throttle hits the side of your thighs and you end up going a little faster than you expected as the boost kicks in, so we had to get a bit brutal with the hacksaw and trimmed about half of it off. It's still perfectly functional, and much safer now.
So there you have it, the KMX conversion to Bionx electric assistance took about 3 hours to complete, with minimal effort and materials. And the end result has made the KMX that little bit more practical on the hills, and a lot more fun on the flats. We added a rack and panniers, lights/reflectors, security lock and a neat trip computer, so Yessie is fully functional mode of transport for Elsa. Everyday they go back and forth to school, come rain or shine... which given that we are in Norway, usually means in the rain more often than not.
