At 70, arthritic knees & 6 stents were restricting my cycling & I bought an electric offroad bike. Brilliant! Didn't want to sell my road bike which I had built myself around a Ridley Orion carbon fibre frame so went for Swytch in 2021 after seeing +ve press reviews. 4 month delivery time was fine when balanced against discount. Had two major problems:
1 - Axle flats had to be filed down accurately to fit 8 mm drop-outs. This was not easy and took over an hour - it should be an option when ordering as much better when preofessionally machined.
2 - Sensor could not be fitted to carbon fibre frame as the bottom bracket housing is much thicker than a metal frame. Swytch provided a new sensor that fitted into the bottom bracket, but I still had to cut away the splines on the crank disc to fit it onto the boss of the crankset to avoid the sensor and disc from touching. After a test ride, an extra cable-tie was found to be needed to hold the sensor in place.
Other than these (major) issues fitting was straightforward and neat. I'm also happy with component quality, though disappointed it's produced in China, not UK.
I've now ridden around 700 kms locally on hilly roads and am very pleased with performance. The motor only kicks in on hills or when starting off (my average speed is 27 km/hr overall and 32 km/hr on the flat) and I only generally use the lowest setting, so the battery range is much more than the 50 km quoted - about 20-25% down after a ride of 25 km. Instead of struggling up hills at 8-15 km/hr, I now swan up them at 18-22 km/hr!
Compared with my purpose built E-bike, it doesn't have the same range, but it is more than adequate and the system is much lighter. It is also less easy to increase the power setting while riding, but I rarely need to do this and, of course there is less info on the display (no remaining distance, etc).
Another unexpected issue was that my wireless computer stopped working due to interference from the Swytch system, so I had to fit a new wired computer.
Having overcome the initial fitting issues, I'm very pleased overall and it enabled me to keep riding a great bike at about 15-20% of the cost of an equivalent purpose made E-bike.
Swytch were also very helpful with the issues I had, although a bit more ingenuity was needed than I expected!
1 year ago
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