In BBSHD Programming for the Pedaling Cyclist, I laid out what my preferred settings were for my ebikes. I have settled upon them after a fair bit of tinkering over time. Since that was published, I have made some refinements.
In August 2023 I published another update that passed along some new things I learned since the two original articles came out in 2021.
I’m going to skip all the background I went into before. None of those details have changed. I’ll just note what I have done, and what it seems to accomplish.
Remember, There is no one perfect suite of settings for the Bafang BBSxx series of motors. Most likely, your perfect setup will take a bit from here and a piece from there to give you exactly what you want. Use what you see here as a basis for your own experimentation..
In fact, I don’t even have a single flavor I stick to as you will see below.
The Basic Screen
From then to now, I changed nothing on this screen, and I’m only showing it here to give you a complete settings reference in one place.
Figure 1: My standard Basic screen settings
The Pedal Assist Screen
There are several changes here, all geared to toning things down and making behavior more gentle. I have two versions of this screen in play on different bikes. The first is the more general-use, but the things I get from Version 2 could be very desirable on any bike.
I can’t say enough that there is no one best choice of settings for your BBSxx motor.
Version 1
This config change is just here to show a couple of settings and discuss what they do.
BEFORE on the left. AFTER on the right
Pedal Sensor Type
Some motors come programmed with BB-Sensor-32, others with DoubleSignal-24. Depending on who you ask, BBSHD motors have 24 sensor signals per rotation, which seems to indicate DoubleSignal24 is the proper setting. I have tried them both and can tell no difference from one to the other.
Start Current
This has been reduced to 4 from 6. Start Current dictates how much juice goes to the PAS system when it initiates. A lower number means a lesser ‘jerk’ on the drivetrain as the PAS system engages. This is a percentage number, so we are going from 6% to 4%. Restated, that is from ‘gentle’ to ‘more gentle’. Still, as small of a change as is indicated by the numbers, its effect is noticeable.
Start Degree
This has been increased from 4 all the way up to 10. Start Degree is the number of signal points that are crossed (as you turn the crankarms) before pedal assist engages. A full rotation of the crankarms equals 24 signals, so I have kicked up the pedal assist engagement from a 1/6 turn to almost a half-turn.
This can come in handy when I am at a stop light, but I stopped several car lengths back from the actual intersection. I can then stay in the saddle, balanced, and slowly turn the crankarms a bit at a time to maintain my balance and crawl forward. If I do it right, the light turns green before I reach the edge of the intersection, whereupon I can start pedaling in earnest to move forward, without having to dismount (and then re-mount) the bike.
NOTE: This technique only works when you are on flat ground.
Current Decay
This is set to maximum now, meaning the system pretty much doesn’t want to cut back power as cadence increases; virtually disabling the cut-back feature from the Basic screen, which conserves power (if you can spin the crankarms superfast, you don’t need assist). This is a setting I will very likely continue to play with. If I set it to the minimum of 1, then the motor will aggressively reduce the provided power as cadence increases. A lower setting is much more in tune with the pedelec ‘philosophy’ which I usually stick to. So don’t be too surprised if you come back in a month and this text has been supplemented with talk of a different, much lower setting.
UPDATE: May 19 2023 – Its been a lot more than a month, and it turns out Current Decay is not well suited for hill country, where it is part of a suite of settings that cut power when cadence is high. Crawling up a hill in a granny gear – both on a hillside singletrack and on a city street – is not the time for a power cutback regardless of your cadence level. On flat ground, a Current Decay of 4 is indeed part of a cyclist-friendly exercise regimen where power gets cut as cadence increases.
Version 2
Version 2 is a riff on Version 1 above. Its what I use on my flat-land-bound 2wd/awd Bullitt cargo bike.
‘Before’ on the left is the Version 1 ‘After’ screen just above in Figure 2. On the right is Version 2
Start Current %
This value is reduced to two percent. Gentler is better for startup, with no real downside. One thing I have noticed, going down to 2% versus 4%: pedaling there is a slightly noticeable lag in performance; ever so slight. I’ll take that as it is a sign my motor settings are taking it very easy on my drivetrain, and this is part of why I have such long-lived chains and cassettes (3400 miles and counting on my Lizzard King’s original 11-speed chain as of May 2023).
Slow Start Mode
The slow start mode – the strength of the initial punch the motor gives out when it fires up – stays down at ‘3’. This is the lowest number that is agreed to be safe for the BBSHD controller based on other sources. This setting is part of keeping the BBSHD gentle on your drivetrain and eliminating wear and tear.
Start Degree
In Version 1 I have this set so that there needs to be just under a half rotation of the cranks before the slow-start of pedal assist engages. When all of the settings are taken in together, it typically means pedal assist doesn’t begin to be felt until the bike crosses a 5 mph speed (If I want assist earlier there is always throttle).
In Version 2, I have reduced this to a 1/6 turn of the crankarms. The idea with all of these settings put together is that assist from the rear motor starts faster – Remember, on this bike the BBSHD is supplemented by a front motor that starts almost instantly from a stop, so the BBSHD is not trying to haul a bike up from zero on its own. On such a big, heavy cargo bike, some assist from both wheels asap is a good thing. Net result is that with two motors, I can get a good result from pure pedal assist without having to resort to the battery-sucking throttle. I start pedaling and the bike safely glides forward even if its weighing 400+ lbs.
Current Decay
This is a full 180 from Version 1, where Current Decay is set to do as little as possible, meaning the motor is the least likely as it can be to pull power as your cadence increases. Here, it is at its next-most aggressive setting. In part this is informed by the fact that there is a front hub motor (running off the same common battery) that – if faced with a sudden power drop from the rear motor – will still provide forward assist, and in practice that means it will increase wattage as its workload increases. This is part 1 of 2 of this story, with Part 2 being …
Keep Current %
The amount of assist that is retained when Current Decay pulls power back has been reduced to 30%. So the two settings together make it more likely that, as cadence increases, power will be reduced, and the amount of power that will continue to flow has further been reduced by 25% from its previous (fairly low) value.
Got all that? Here’s what the rider feels: Not much. Despite my characterization of these changes as ‘aggressive’, which they are if you just look at the numbers onscreen, reality is the result is muted. We’re using a little less power, which we don’t miss much, and that is going to give us a bump in range. At 20-25 mph, pedaling strong at 60-70 rpm cadence, the BBSHD on flat ground is eating about 200-250w on the typical Assist Level 4 and 225-275w at Level 5. Thats pretty light (power consumption will be more on a bike with just the BBSHD for a motor!)
If you want to have the motor back off when you demonstrate you don’t need it (if you did you couldn’t spin your legs and the crankarms) the Keep Current and Current Decay settings are your go-to’s to reducing power consumption and increasing range.
Thats It?
Yup thats it. At this point in the development of what I like and dislike on a BBSHD setup.
What is necessary to transform a Surly Big Fat Dummy into an electric bicycle? I thought my BFD series was finished until I realized I left this part out.
On the surface, it seems I left a hole in my description of my Surly Big Fat Dummy build. I omitted this episode and thought I was done. In my defense, there are zillions of BBSHD installation tutorials out there, and I have described a BBSHD install myself – on a cargo bike no less – right here in this blog.
However, I haven’t done a writeup geared to THIS bike. Since this blog is dedicated to answering questions that I see asked a lot (and I have seen this one more than a few times), I’ll do something a little more focused on the BFD.
Bear in mind the bike has been in near-daily use for months already. I had to dig thru my archives for pics rather than taking them as I went along. So illustrationwise, there’s not much to see. On the flip side of that, there doesn’t need to be as the Big Fat Dummy is an easy (easy!) build.
Since I have covered this ground elsewhere, I’ll be leaving generic details out, and providing links to related content more so than I will be doing in depth step-by-step instructions.
Get On With It Already!
Yeah, yeah sure … here we go.
Step 1: Buy What You Need
This can be very simple or very involved. Especially if you are a first-timer and don’t know what you need and maybe not even what you want. In my opinion the best motor for the job is a Bafang BBSHD. I typically buy my motors from Luna Cycle, and here is their page for their kit. They may or may not be selling a battery along with that kit. I am using a different source for the pack as you will see further below.
If you buy the kit, you don’t have to worry about buying individual bits, with the exception of needing a speed sensor cable extension, and a proper chainring.
But, lets go over the individual bits. Myself personally, I just buy the bare motor from Luna, and add the parts I need to complete the installation. This lets me use exactly what I want, which is not quite possible if buying the packaged kit. Here are all my parts:
Bare Motor: Purchased from Luna Cycle here. The Surly Big Fat Dummy requires the 100mm sized motor (It will be a perfect fit). if its available you can buy the optional spacer and mounting kit on that page. At the moment, Luna is not selling the 100mm mounting kit – the only difference is some M6 bolts and spacers… you can source that yourself to the correct size if needed. Or just buy the needed parts separately. Go ahead and accept the 46T chainring (aka ‘The Disk of Death’) as its a free throwaway item you would (should) never use. Secondary Source: California Ebike is a reliable alternative and one of my go-to sellers for parts, but their motors cost an additional $100 or so. Here is their BBSHD motor page. Note that Cali Ebike offers users who may need it service after sale. Luna is a better choice for the confident do-it-yourselfer who can diagnose and fix most issues themselves, and save a hundred bucks by taking on that risk.
Motor Mounting Parts:
Triangle Mounting Plate: This is what puts the bite on your bottom bracket to firmly affix the motor. You can buy these plates at Luna Cycle, BafangUSA Direct or Amazon.
M6 bolts, washers, spacers: Needed to affix the Triangle Mounting Plate, these are commonly available. If you work on bikes you probably already have them in the garage. If you buy a mounting kit they may have them but in all cases I recommend you do not use them and instead go out and buy stainless hardware.
Lockrings: I use two inner rings stacked atop one another. If you like, you can buy the more conventional inner and the aesthetically-pleasing outer. More on the reasoning behind the choices below. Buy the rings at Luna Cycle, Bafang USA Direct or Amazon.
Speed Sensor & Cable Extension: You will need the sensor (which integrates a length of cable to plug into the motor), the sensor magnet and an extension thanks to the Surly Big Fat Dummy’s long tail. I have seen builders route the sensor to the front fork but by necessity this puts the sensor inside of the tire rim’s width, which makes for issues taking that tire off. Put it on the back where it belongs and forget about it. I described the sensor in a fair bit of detail here. Don’t mess with multiple magnets unless you feel a need to experiment, but I do provide a link to what I think is a lighter weight, superior magnet that you may want to substitute for the Bafang wheel weight that comes with their sensor. The speed sensors themselves are available in a wide variety of places, cheapest at Luna but also at California Ebike and many other sources. You can get the speed sensor extension anywhere you can find the speed sensor. California Ebike or Bafang USA Direct or many other sources, including Amazon with Prime Delivery. Notice all of the options I linked are different lengths. Measure the gap you have when you are routing your cabling and decide which one you want, accordingly.
A Proper Chainring: I am going to skip most of the detail here and refer you to this blog post on BBSHD chainrings. It was written with the Mongoose Envoy build in mind but the Surly Big Fat Dummy has essentially an identical set of problems and solutions. I will say this: For a combination of mostly street with some mild trail use I settled on the 46T Lekkie Bling Ring, which biases chain line towards the bottom half of the 11 speed cluster. This is the ring that has the most miles on my bike and its the best all-rounder. At the moment I am set up mostly for trails, though, and as such I am running the Luna Eclipse 42T which biases chainline heavily toward the inner half of the rear cluster, giving me the best possible access to the inner cogs.
UPDATE: I changed the config of this bike in the latter half of 2021. Its now a remote-hillside bike. Gathering wood for the campsite thru the forest kind of stuff. I put on a very small Lekkie 36T ring on the front in anticipation of some very serious trail rides in the Lower Sierras. You can go smaller than a 36T but this ring – which is a little smaller than the secondary housing of the motor – is regarded as a very good sweet spot. A 28T is so small it can contact the motor housing, which is bad. The 36T in conjunction with the biggest rear gears on my rear cluster (46T) can climb anything possible to climb at all on two wheels, while leaving the motor in a good place, power-wise.
Note with a BBSHD, the stock My Other Brother Darryl rims and the stock Edna tires, you may not be fully able to use all cogs simply because chainline will not be acceptable for a 1x drivetrain pumping out 1000 to 1750w. You can do it, but the chainring teeth and maybe the chain will not last very long if you run at either extreme – say… the smallest cog and the Luna chainring. It all depends on your final component choices, so just be aware of the issue and check for it to make sure you don’t have any issues that you need to compensate for when riding.
Two of the pics below show a 130 BCD adapter which really biases chainline to the lower cogs, and is best for the street. Both of these use 48T, 130 BCD chainrings. Even though most of my mileage on this bike is with the 46T Lekkie ring, it doesn’t appear as if I ever took a picture of the bike with the thing installed.
Crankarms: In two of the pictures above you can see I used Lekkie Buzz Bars, and with their forged construction and left offset to correct the misalignment under your saddle that will happen with standard crankarms. Luna Cycle sells a less-expensive clone worth looking at if you can’t handle the price of the Lekkies. As a last resort you can also use the standard Bafang crankarms that are cheap and cheaply made, but good enough for many riders. Make sure you buy BBSHD-specific arms or they will not have the left offset.
Display: I have used many displays and hands down, at the present time the Bafang/Luna 860C is the best out there. It is fully visible in blinding sunlight and can be set to display both real time amp output as well as real time wattage. The Luna version reads battery voltage level accurately up to 60v, meaning it works with 52v batteries. Bafang versions of the 860C may not. There are many other options for a display including a low-visibility-but-clean/low profile EggRider v2. For my money the 860C is worth waiting for if its temporarily out of stock, and its now my go-to for bikes I build.
Throttle: I like the basic el cheapo Bafang universal thumb throttle. Its an easy fit and unobtrusive. If you follow my lead on BBSHD settings for it, its annoyingly short throw will still be well controllable and allow for fine adjustments while riding. Buy it at Luna, California Ebike or Bafang USA Direct.
Main Bus Cable: You have options here. the main bus cable is available in short and long lengths, and there are also extensions available. However nothing fancy is required on the Surly Big Fat Dummy. You can buy this standard one from Luna or many, many other sources. If you opt to use Magura MT5e brakes, California Ebike has a specially modified harness to plug in the red Higo/Julet cutoff connectors the MT5e uses. I am using this bus cable and MT5e’s, myself. NOTE: If you opt to keep the SRAM hydraulic brakes you will not have brake-actuated motor cutoffs. This is no big deal. They’re nice but the stock brakes can overpower the motor in a pinch. If you like, you can invest in some hydraulic cutoff conversions that involve gluing on a magnet to your levers and strapping on some wires. the alternative is a brake upgrade (not a bad thing, but not cheap, either).
Installation tool(s): Using one of the many Bafang-inspired toy wrenches to install a BBSHD is a cruel joke on the inexperienced. You have to use a proper torque wrench and special socket to do the job right, where the motor doesn’t move. I’ll leave the torque wrench choice to you (I use a Wera B2). The socket you need for the inner ring is often out of stock. Buy it here at Luna Cycle or hunt around… its available elsewhere if you look. The tool for the outer ring can either be hand-tightened – if you must – with a stainless steel version of the cheesy Bafang wrench. I bought this one on Amazon so I know it fits. But it is absolutely a sucky solution. Better is to use a 16-notch bottom bracket tool that you can fit onto a torque wrench and do a proper job of applying the manufacturer’s torque spec, written right on that outer ring. Note if you use two inner rings stacked on top of one another like I do you do not need the special outer ring tool.
The Battery: There are a bunch of different ways you can play this. Among others you can plant one on the bike on the framework just behind the seatpost. At present mine is in the triangle in a bag. My size Medium frame can just barely hold this 21ah, 52v battery from Bicycle Motorworks. ‘Barely’ means after I have added some padding. I also keep the battery in a quick-detach bag inside the triangle. I described the quick-release setup with pics in detail here.
I’d like to have more room for padding, so I am exploring a shift to that framework as an alternative. We’ll see as its a big change.
OK so you have all of your parts for the motor… Time to take things off so you are ready to do the installation. Its a simple list: Remove the crankarms, bottom bracket and chainrings.
You’ll also want to pull off one of your handlebar grips in preparation for installing your throttle. Which one depends on how you want to set up the bars. You will also likely want to loosen up and shift around your brake levers and the remaining rear shifter so your throttle is butted up directly against your hand-grip, rather than the brake being there. this is a bridge you should cross when you come to it, disassembly-wise.
Initially I used a Luna Wolf Pack, as shown in this picture. Thats another option for your build.
Thats it. You’re ready to install your motor.
Step 3: Install The Motor
Here again I’m not going to get too deep into the specifics of motor installation. I’ve already covered it myself elsewhere for a similar bike, and God knows there are plenty of video and written tutorials out there on the interwebs. However I will note that the 100mm motor is a perfect fit on the Surly Big Fat Dummy, which requires no spacers of any kind. Just put it in like it belongs there and clamp it down tight.
About that clamping part, I will go into that a bit:
Lockrings
I mentioned above that I like to use two inner (gray) lockrings: I stack them atop one another in jam-nut fashion where each is tightened to 100 ft lbs. Thats quite a lot more than the Bafang specification for using just one inner lockring. I am going off of installation advice provided by Luna Cycle – not in their official installation video linked above. At one time there was a supplemental vid made in their shop that discussed their learning experiences assembling their shop bikes. It went hand in hand with the use of a big 1/2″ torque wrench to apply the necessary force, and that wrench in turn used a specially made Luna tool for the lockrings (that sadly is no longer available, although you can see them on the site still). The use of 100 ft lbs and some additional info on it is in the link to the tool above.
I have stuck to that 100 ft lb specification and it has never let me down. I have also added to it by using a second inner lock ring rather than the ‘beauty’ trim ring that is more typically used. The number of threads needed for another inner ring is about the same. You gain the benefit of a serious jam nut holding down the first ring. Also, something we are not doing here but you can see elsewhere: If you are building an AWD bike, the use of two rings lets you mount the front wheel’s PAS ring in between the two.
I do not use the outer trim / beauty ring at all.
Lastly on the subject of lockrings, here’s a technique to tell at a glance whether the rings are loosening or your motor is shifting (or about to): Make a registration line along the frame and the lockrings. If the line ever breaks apart, something is loosening. You can tell with a simple glance down as you are mounting the bike.
See the registration mark (aka the black Sharpie line)? Also note there are no spacers needed on the locking plate under the M6 bolt on the left. Perfect fit for a 100mm motor.
Next, I’ll make note of how I did the speed sensor installation, both with the factory SRAM brakes and my later MT5e upgrade.
Using the SRAM Brakes / No Helpers
Attaching a speed sensor on a Surly Big Fat Dummy is not as straightforward as it is on a typical bicycle. In addition to the added distance – addressed with an extension cable – there’s no place to put the thing! The frame is different enough that nothing appears to work – on first glance.
Keep looking! The SRAM brakes that come stock with the bike have a weird sort of tail hanging off the caliper, and this is a handy, if unusual, place to mount the speed sensor.
I first wrapped this tail with a length of 3M mastik tape to enlarge its diameter and give the sensor more to grab onto. Then I simply zip tied it on as if it were a chainstay, and aligned the magnet as usual. These pictures show a dusty bike as they were taken just before I uninstalled the sensor and upgraded the brakes to the Magura MT5e’s.
Using Other Brakes – And a Crutch
For the Maguras, there was no such luck as the calipers have no tails or anything else I could glom onto. So I had to add something: I used a simple small handlebar extension, and built up the frame to a proper larger diameter to mount it by wrapping the frame with gorilla tape, which I then faced with silicone tape to provide a grippy surface for the bar mount. Next, I used more zip ties (!) to clamp the new ‘frame tube’ to the upper part of the Big Fat Dummy’s … superstructure. Once this was done, I had a tube close enough to the spokes to re-mount the speed sensor as shown.
Well, a bunch I suppose if you were looking for a bolt-by-bolt conversion tutorial specific to this one bike. But really, between the other pages already on this site and the links I have given off-world up above, you’ve got everything here that you need to buy – and build – your own.
Built to conquer the weakness of twin hubs in hills – and eliminate the damage a mid drive does to an ebike’s drivetrain. The bike I call 2Fat did all that.
So, my Gen 1, 1.5 and 3 bike layouts are all twin geared hub designs. What was Gen 2?
2Fat
750w, 35a geared Bafang G060 front hub motor
30a BBSHD mid drive
52v, 12.5ah rear motor battery in triangle
52v, 12.5ah front motor battery on rack top
Batteries connected in parallel to form a single ‘virtual’ 25ah power source to both motors
KT and Bafang displays
160Nm rear… 80 Nm front (do the math on that one!)
I live part-time in two towns: The first, an extended work visa, is in Fresno California, smack in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley and flat as a table. I built The Colonel, The Purple Thing and The Great Pumpkin for commuting in Fresno.
While I most often take pics of it in a wooded area, 2Fat is just as happy on paved, hilly roads. Shown here with front panniers, its 4-bag carry capacity makes it a quasi-cargo bike.
After a fashion, I finally was able to get a big enough bike rack on the back of my SUV to bring the Colonel to my actual home in Pacific Grove, California. My house is at the top of the hill there. Unlike in Fresno, nothing in or around the area is flat. You are either going up a steep hill, or down one, or both.
My intention was to be able to use the Colonel like I did in Fresno, as local errand transport and a light duty cargo-shopper. Unfortunately, I found out the first day about the limitations of hub drives: They suck in hills.
Hubs are Single Speed
Hub drives power an ebike via the axle. They don’t – and they can’t – use the gears of the bike. Forcing a single speed hub motor up a hill makes it just as miserable as a human stuck with no gears. So even though I have very powerful hubs, and they were geared hubs that put down the most torque of any on the market… they still struggled. Even with two of them. I could hear the gears groaning inside the motor casings and I could tell that, while I could get up the hills, my motors were not happy about it. I did not want to lug them into an early grave. I had already gone to a lot of trouble to make the bike bulletproof and had no desire to ignore the problem and inevitably kill it.
These twin 80Nm hub motor wheels were on The Colonel in 2017 at the time of my first hill country ride (above). Now they are on the Great Pumpkin.
The solution?
I Need To Build a New Bike
Everybody knows mid drives are the solution to the hill problem for an ebike. A hub motor is single speed and at least relatively weak on torque, but a mid drive uses the gears in the drivetrain, plus it has double or more the torque output of a hub, and thats before you factor in the multiplier of the gears. Wonderful right? Except mid drive motors – especially DIY builds – are notorious for putting drivetrains into an early grave. Why? Well because they pour a LOT more power through the chainring, chain, rear cluster and cassette body (i.e. “the drivetrain”) than a bicycle was ever meant to withstand.
A normal cyclist can pump out maybe 300 watts for a minute or so, but typically normal sustained – strong – output is about 100 watts.
EU-market electric motors must peak at 250w of output to stay legal (pssst… they don’t).
A 25-amp BBS02 on a 48v system puts out in excess of 1250 watts peak
Your garden variety 30-amp BBSHD running under a 52v battery is peaking – and can sustain – about 1750 watts of output.
My rear rack trunk battery. The capped red wire is for charging. The black wire on the rack stay is power output to the front motor. This is the original dual-separate-battery config
That gives some perspective on how much abuse is heaped upon a drivetrain with a mid drive. Coming off the successful builds of The Colonel (v1.0) and the Purple Thing (v1.5), I knew AWD reduced load on the individual motors dramatically when they work together as a team.
Given that, I thought about how I could use a front hub to reduce or eliminate the shock that a mid-drive puts onto the ebike’s drivetrain. Not only would I gain the traction benefits of AWD, and the benefit of reduced load from the team effort – things I already knew were a big positive – the front hub would also, if used in a slightly different way, provide an important added benefit: eliminating all the extra wear and tear that goes with having a mid drive.
If it worked, it would give me a bike with all the original AWD performance benefits, plus the ability to effortlessly climb walls, without tearing the bike up.
SPOILER ALERT: It worked unbelievably well.
New steel on the right, used alloy (1000 miles of use) on the left. And this was WITH AWD to reduce the wear and tear. Ordinary single-motor systems with this mileage would be dramatically worse. Substituting the steel body eliminates all wear.
In fact this bike is a showcase on how AWD can almost eliminate mid-drive wear and tear. Making a bike that climbs hills and bombs trails really well is almost an afterthought.
So that is what I am going to focus on here in this article. What was built and how was it used?
The Build
Briefly, this bike is the Great Pumpkin on the front wheel, and a typical mid-drive installation on the back. In between is the usual extra wiring scattered all over the place to deal with powering two motors, set up dual PAS etc..
The Front Motor
2Fat has another Bafang G060 80Nm front fat motor installed – this time its inside of a custom-built 100mm double-wall Weinmann (branded as an Origin8) rim. Go fat or go home. Attached are the same two torque arms as seen on the Pumpkin’s installation, and once again the controller is sitting in a grommeted handlebar bag that doubles as a wallet/keys/phone holder. It also serves to disguise the uncut steering tube I used to give me a more upright – but not too upright – riding position.
Another big, fat, 80Nm front hub motor. This time laced into a 100mm rim. Because fat bike.
Different from the Pumpkin is the battery setup. This bike was built before the v3.0 Pumpkin came onto this Earth (The Purple Thing had just been born). So, lacking the wherewithal to commission a big custom battery for the triangle, I used two packs, one for each motor. The front motor’s 12ah 52v battery was located in the rack trunk at the back of the bike. I had already learned I did not want to put a battery on the front rack as it made the steering too heavy. The rear motor’s 17.5ah pack was in the triangle.
It could be worse: Tucked in between the panniers in the rack trunk is one of two batteries. The second pack is in the triangle. Whats on the front rack? A weatherproof, adjustable 5a charger.
Additionally, due to the very low standover of 2Fat’s Large sized frame thanks to its top tube (it is a titanium, USA-made Chumba Ursa Major) there is not enough room to plug in a properly big battery in the triangle to handle both motors. So I had to do two batteries and live with the awful choice of putting one on the back rack.
After running the two dissimilar, separate batteries from its initial build in 2017 to March 2021, I switched to two identical, now-parallel’d-together packs in the same locations. Each is 12.5ah (14S6P) with Samsung 25R cells. Each has a 50a continuous BMS. As such, the system has a single 25ah power supply with a BMS capable of handling 100 continuous amps. Considering I can never peak past 65, I’m in great shape. I purchased the packs from Bicycle Motorworks, who builds their packs in the USA and constructs them at time of order.
Sidebar: Running battery packs in parallel should only be done by those who have done the research and know exactly what they are getting into. In this case, both packs are identical, being manufactured to-order together, and have the same charge cycle count. Their voltages were matched before they were joined and there is some additional babysitting that will be necessary for charging and balancing. If you can avoid running packs in parallel and use just one battery: Do that instead.
Using two entirely separate batteries is a kludge and your last resort. Not only will you have to charge them separately, you will also draw down the two batteries separately at different rates which will result in uneven remaining power, lesser range and more frequent recharges.
The Rear Motor
This is pretty much your garden-variety 52v BBSHD installation. It has a couple of nice spiffs in the form of a 42T Lekkie Bling Ring, and Lekkie Buzz Bars, but neither of those things are a requirement of the AWD approach we’re discussing here.
The rear wheel is another matching Weinmann 100mm rim, again with DT Champion 2.0 spokes and 16mm brass nipples. The rear hub is a DT 350 Big Ride, which has sealed cartridge bearings and has been upgraded to a steel cassette body. Additionally a 9-speed Shimano HG400 cluster gives me steel cogs literally welded together into a single cluster, that spreads the enormous torque of the BBSHD across the entire steel cassette body. The DT350’s ratchet engagement mechanism is one of the few known bombproof rear hub mechanisms when faced with the power of the Dark Side 30a BBSHD motor.
A solid rear wheel build with extra strength parts throughout is crucial to a successful mid drive ebike.
205mm front and rear rotors with Magura MT5e brakes
The Special Bits
There is a bit more that went into making these motors work together. The complete integration possible on the Pumpkin thanks to the use of identical motors and controllers wouldn’t work here.
Brake Cutoffs
Trying to share cutoff signals between the motors again – using adapters for the red-to-yellow connections found on the BBSHD – resulted in bricking both motors. I tried everything to share the signals. It can’t be done unless you are willing to install a second, independent set of hydraulic magnet style cutoffs, zip tied to the integrated MT5e cutoffs and connected via a ‘y’ further down the line. That would work but it would look like crap, for very little benefit over what I ended up doing: I set up the front brake to engage the front motor cutoff, and the rear – with a red-to-yellow HIGO adapter – to cut off the rear motor. Since I always use both levers to do my braking I get an effective result.
Pedal Assist
PAS for the BBSHD is built into its motor casing, so it just works. PAS for the front motor was another matter entirely. Ordinarily the assist disc and sensor runs on the right-hand, drive side of the bike and hides behind the front chainring. This is not possible with the BBSHD’s secondary gear housing being there instead. So PAS had to be made to work on the left hand side. The KT controller has left-hand PAS sensor installation settings.
What was needed then was a left-hand install. This was quite a bit trickier, since the 120mm motor running in front of 5″ tire-compatible chainstays had zero extra spindle length to mount the disk. Lacking a bottom bracket cup to mount the PAS sensor ring, I set it behind a second inner lockring – I used two inner lock rings stacked like jam nuts rather than the usual inner+outer ring. These doubled inner rings had the secondary benefit of being a more aggressive, solid mounting for the motor.
With the sensor mounted, next I had the sensor ring to deal with. As noted above… there was no length available period for the sensor disk as the crankarms mounted pretty much flush to the bottom bracket.
The eventual solution involved hogging out the center of the PAS sensor disc so it could sit on the inner flange of the Lekkie crankarm instead of the spindle. I prepped the crankarm with… thin strips of thick duct tape so the disk would sit tightly on the flange. It was a bodge but it worked, and with just one improvement since installation in 2017 it has held perfectly. That improvement is a zip tie to help hold the disk steady in position (of course I used a zip tie. We have duct tape in the mix; all thats missing is a zip tie).
Worth noting: I used this identical PAS ring mounting when I built the Lizzard King AWD cargo bike in 2021. Not only did I have enough extra spindle so I did not have to do this surgery on the ring, I also realized I could unscrew and reverse the sensor in its mounting ring. This eliminated the need to use the reverse settings in the display/controller. Since the inset ring was reversed, it was outset now… and that held the sensor closer to the magnets (they work fine inset as seen here, but closer is better).
The Cockpit
Here’s where the eagle-eyed may spot a preview of how I ride this bike to soften up the mid drive.
Those are Jones SG bars with ESI XL Extra Chunky grips, wrapped in silicone tape
On the right, we have the grip, then the brake lever, followed by the 9-speed shifter. Here again we see a v2.0 feature that v3.0 fixed: A SRAM drivetrain gives us a SRAM, not Shimano shifter. The Shimano shifter needs so much real estate on the grip it is impossible to put a throttle on that side of the handlebars. Look at the cockpit of The Great Pumpkin and the Lizzard King to see how a SRAM shifter solves this and lets me do one throttle per thumb.
Being unable to do that at the time – and believe me I tried EVERY possible combination of throttles. I still have most of them in a box in my garage. I settled on two styles of thumb throttle, side by side on the left, with the innermost throttle being for the hub/front and the outermost for the BBSHD/rear. As for the eagle-eyed part: The front throttle is cocked higher so between that and its longer throw, it is engaged first and when at 100% it follows the natural curve of my thumb. Both throttles can then be at 100% and my hand stays comfortable at WFO.
How To Ride It
At last we get to the point!
I already let the cat out of the bag earlier: The biggest deal associated with this bike is not that it can climb really well (REALLY well). Nor is its ability to handle trails and rotten conditions its star quality.
2Fat was made to get dirty
No, the real point of having a mid drive teamed with a front hub motor is to use that hub motor to take the shock off the drivetrain that mid drives deliver. Do that and you also take away the excess wear and tear on the parts (if we are being fair, a lot of this comes from doofus riders who don’t know what they are doing).
When starting, start with the hub
This is most of the deal right here. Don’t make the mid drive haul the bike up from a dead stop. Its got the torque to do it. But everything takes a beating in the process. The nylon gears inside of the mid drive. The chainring. The poor chain. The suffering cogs. The cassette body being dug into by the cogs. The pawls inside of the cassette body that are straining against the hub. Your ebike hates you for doing this to it.
By using a mid-drive-strong chain, a steel cluster and a steel cassette body with a ratchet engagement mechanism, we harden the drivetrain to be very tolerant of this abuse. Between that and learning how to use a mid drive, wear and tear really isn’t bad at all. Maybe no worse than a quality analog bike used hard. But still… even with the hardened drivetrain it sure would be nice to take things easier.
By using a hub motor to get the bike rolling – even by just a few mph – we accomplish this mission. Using my pedaling-friendly BBSHD programming or something like it, the BBSHD will not kick in on pedaling until the bike crosses about 5 mph. So from a stop, you hit the front throttle for about one full second. That throttle is cocked up a bit higher on 2Fat to make that a natural move. The bike starts up from its dead stop without any strain on the drivetrain since the BBSHD is not even running. Simultaneously, you also start pedaling. This engages the cassette mechanism.
When speed crosses 5 mph, the BBSHD’s pedal assist now kicks in on a drivetrain that is already engaged. There is no longer a risk of having the motor jerk the chain and smash the cluster into engagement. And with this gentle engagement, the motor starts working on a bike that is already moving. So you get the doubled benefit of a lighter effort against all components to get your fat bike off its fat ass. Instead, you get smooth – and strong – acceleration. The lack of lugging the motor has the further benefit of not generating anywhere near as much heat since the motor is no longer running at low rpms for anywhere near as long. And those nylon gears inside the motor are writing you a nice thank-you card.
Or…
Rather than using the throttle, you could also just start pedaling. I have set the KT controller to engage PAS as quickly as possible. Combine that with the BBSHD’s controller being told to hang back for the initial startup, and you have a completely thumbs-off solution that implements at a nice gentle pace.
So… It just works.
Or you can force it! Remember with this setup you have two throttles. There’s no law that says if you need it, you can’t jump the gun and either hit the rear throttle early, or hit it so the motor engages harder than it would have in your designated PAS mode. So if you need a little extra push thanks to an XL load of groceries, or a steep hill, you have options at your disposal.
Downshift? Schmownshift!
One of the mantras associated with smart mid drive riding is that you always Always ALWAYS freaking downshift the bike when you come to a stop. The LAST thing you want is to lug the motor up from a dead stop because of all the brutality it visits on your chain, your cogs blah blah blah. So that means you remember to downshift one or two… maybe even three times before you come to a stop. When the light turns green you upshift in sequence one gear at a time as you get back up to speed again. Thus as we all understand: you row thru the gears.
Another rule mid drive mavens repeat ad nauseum is – if you have an 11T small rear cog… stay the hell off of it. Its too small to use on a mid drive. It bogs the bejesus out of the motor from a stop, its too small to be able to get up to speed before the sun sets and if thats not bad enough, the teeny cog on even the steel Shimano clusters is alloy and it is not attached like all the others are. Its an individual. So not only do they dig into the cassette body harder, they die fast. Like Really Fast. As in a few hundred miles tops.
Well, on AWD mid drives like 2Fat, you can forget about all that. Because of the powered front hub doing its part (either thru a quick dab of throttle or just letting PAS start the bike), there is no longer a need to shift at a light. You can forget about the whole process. Just leave it and it’ll be fine as if it was a hub motor! In fact the front motor allows the bike to increase its speed so it gets up and goes fast just like a hub motor does.
I found this out within a day of building the bike, and since then learned from experience the 11T cog will last about 1500 miles before it typically cracks (two so far). Thats not so bad for a readily available US$7 part. And if I wanted it to live longer, well it wouldn’t kill me to go up a gear at a light once in a while.
At the office, outside my e-garage. There is a trail network along my commute route that 2Fat lets me take
Wrapping It All Up
2Fat itself is not the ideal example of how to execute this concept. It is a product of when it was built and my knowledge level at that time. In the present day, I for sure would not want to build a bike with two batteries, and if I did I would NEVER put one on the back rack. But thats partly the limits of the frame I used. I came within a hair of using a Salsa Blackborow frame kit for this bike until, at the last minute, this titanium beauty fell into my lap for a song… but thats another story.
Next, I wouldn’t use Shimano components thanks to the real estate problems introduced by the shifter. Instead I’d use SRAM components so I could do one throttle per thumb.
Really the Great Pumpkin with its XL size and XL triangle, plus its SRAM shifters – would be ideal here. But them’s the breaks. This is what I’ve got. Boo hoo.
With that said… I did learn as I went along, and in 2021 I returned to dual motor bikes with the Lizzard King, a bike meant to prove a different kind of AWD could be awesome: You don’t need the 80Nm, 35a punch of the Pumpkin’s or 2Fat’s front hub to gain the benefits of AWD. A low power implementation, done a little differently, should be very effective and appeal to a much broader range of everyday, low-speed, low-drama ebike use. And…
This is a common question on BBSHD and BBS02 motors, so I thought I would write up a quick post and describe what can be done, and what I do.
Here’s The Problem
If you shift under power with a BBS02 or BBSHD, you will do so using a LOT more power than your ebike’s drivetrain (chainring, cogs and chain) was ever designed to handle. Shifting while under even a moderate amount of power is a great way to snap your chain and take the Walk Of Shame home. Worse: you can crack or even taco a cog.
Use a gear sensor. Thats not so tough, right? First of all, what is a gear sensor? Its a little box, with a little wheel inside. You run your shift cable thru the little box, in one side and out the other (which means you need to cut and re-section your shift cable housing), with the cable running across the little wheel. When the wheel senses any motion, it sends a signal to your motor that cuts the power for a split second and takes the pain away from your drivetrain when a shift occurs.
Whats Wrong With That?
Nothing, so long as it works. The little wheel inside is mechanical and crud-sensitive. Lots of folks have issues with them not working after rain storms or mud baths. You can solve that by wrapping it somehow to keep the grit out.
I wrapped this sensor in silicone tape to make it crudproof
Its also not the ONLY way to do the job. Like I said, I had my first BBSHD without one. I learned to shift without needing a gear sensor. By the time I built my second bike, I had that method down pat. So yeah sure the sensor is nice but I have already learned another way, and I have found – even though I have bought sensors and have had them right in front of me during a new build – I don’t feel a need for them.
But I sure as hell have a need for the job they do. Everyone does. So don’t let anyone tell you the problem is not real. Its probably the #1 way to snap a chain on a mid drive bike.
Gear Sensor Alternatives
So there are a number of different ways to do this job. I’ll list the one I use last
Use the brake cutoff as a clutch
Its simple: Squeeze the brake handle just a little bit to engage the brake cutoff. That cuts power to the motor and gets you the same thing a gear sensor does. The trick is to not engage the brakes to any noticeable degree and lose any of that hard-won momentum. Interestingly, Magura MT5e ebike brake levers have a special little hinge in the middle of the lever. It lets you do this more easily without engaging the actual brakes.
See that little metal pin in the middle of the lever? That hinge makes this lever a shift cutoff. Touch it with a fingertip, the brake cutoff engages, the motor cuts out and the pads aren’t touched.
Thats nice, assuming everything works. If you are a little jumpy, or the bike is bouncing along a trail or something, then that delicate caress on the brake lever might be a little more than you figured and … well, you get it. We live in an imperfect world. But this method still works pretty good.
Use a cutoff button on the handlebars
This is definitely not a common solution, but it does work, and is what I used on BBSHD Bike #1 until I gave up on it and perfected the method I describe next.
See the green button at the center of the pic? Thats the cutoff switch
What is it? Its just a dead-man switch on the bars. Press it and for as long as you hold it, the motor is cut off. Release it and the motor re-engages. Its a brake cutoff that has no brake pads. The other end of the switch has a yellow Higo/Julet that connects directly to the BBSHD’s motor cutoff plug.
In practice, I found it took too much thinking to reach for the button just prior to a shift. It felt forced and I didn’t take to it. Maybe you will and if so its a dirt cheap and simple method to try that doesn’t involve screwing around with your shift cables.
Adapt your pedal cadence
This is the method I settled on, and even after buying and successfully using a gear sensor, I have never felt a need to install another one. This method is just a natural part of my riding style now and is trained into muscle memory… so I do it naturally and automatically on any bike no matter what. Here’s what I do, in order. These steps occur in very rapid succession so making a shift happen occurs in about one to 1 1/2 seconds.
Step 1: Stop pedaling.
Step 2: Click the shift (just one gear).
Step 3: Start pedaling. Muscle power completes the shift before the motor kicks in
Thats it. Do it fast and its just a quick stutter in your cadence. Changing your BBSxx settings so they are friendly to pedaling helps. The linked settings will cut the motor off fast and start it back up soft. Perfect for completing a shift.
When you get good at this, you will be able to click your shift a hair before the motor stops the rotation of the chainring. My more recent builds use SRAM 11 speed drivetrains that need only about 1/4 of a cog revolution to complete a shift. So if I do it right, I click while there is still a ghost of rotation left that makes the shift, so when I start pedaling again I’m already working with a shifted gearset.
But…
Don’t try and get fancy right out of the gate. Just keep it simple and get the shift done. The high speed fancy stuff will come naturally as you gain experience.
Remember, there is nothing wrong with a gear sensor. They do their job. I just learned how to do without one. Having done that, I don’t feel a need to make the effort to install the sensors anymore.
In an ideal world, you do both. Truth be told I screw up every now and then. With the cadence technique and the sensor backing it up, you are pretty much guaranteed to never snap a chain thanks to shifting like a fathead.
Some Bafang BBSHD and BBS02 programming tutorials say Speed Meter Signals must be set to 1 or bad things happen. They are right. They are also totally wrong.
This is going to be a quickee post to illustrate a bit of Bafang mid drive minutiae, and point out something wrong I see in some tutorials or forum posts about Bafang BBSHD / BBS02 settings. Specifically:
The Speed Meter Signal
Put simply: It does not have to be set to ‘1’. But I am getting ahead of myself. Lets start from the beginning:
At the root of the matter is the BBSxx Speed Sensor. If you buy one as part of a kit, or on its own, this is what you get for roughly US$20:
Figure 1: L to R: Sensor magnet, sensor base, sensor and underneath, the two screws used in the install
The speed sensor magnet attaches to one of your spokes. You attach the sensor to your chainstay (usually) and position it so the magnet passes close to it as the wheel rotates. The sensor detects the magnet’s passing and calculates your speed, via a rotation count and knowing your wheel diameter via a separate setting.
Figure 2: The speed meter installed on the chainstay.
So if you buy the typical sensor, you get one magnet, one sensor, and you need to set the Speed Meter Signal to ‘1’. Is that setting because you have one speed sensor?
No. Speed Meter Signals counts the number of magnets. Not the number of sensors. Each magnet is a signal. Got one magnet? Set it to 1. Got two? Three (for a 36-hole wheel)? Four? Change the setting accordingly and it works.
Figure 3: The Speed Sensor settings from my Luna Black Box, with the setting in question circled.
Why do we need more than one?
You don’t. The one magnet works pretty good as it is, so nobody really gets too deep into this. Plus nobody sells Bafang speed sensor magnets by themselves. So to do this you are talking about roughly $20 per magnet because you have to buy a whole speed sensor assembly.
I have found these can just be tightened onto a spoke by hand, and they do not need any thread locker to stay tight (adding some Vibra Tite would not be such a bad idea). Reportedly these magnets work over a much greater distance than their Bafang cousins, which is another benefit. At the very least I can confirm they work reliably as I have been using them instead of the Bafang magnets on several bikes due to their lower weight and thus kinder/gentler attitude towards my precious DT Swiss or Sapim spokes, and my wheel balance.
Get To The Point!
Fine here it is. Look for the speed sensor magnet in the picture.
Figure 4: How many lights do you see, Picard?
There are four lights magnets on this wheel. One every 8 spokes. I have the Speed Meter Signals reading set to 4. The improvement is not earthshaking but I do get the following:
My speed reading on my display updates faster and more smoothly. Not a surprise given I am quadrupling the signal sample rate.
The Cateye magnets are smaller and lighter by a fair bit than the Bafang magnet assembly. This results in the wheel getting thrown less off-balance (even if you place the Bafang magnet opposite the valve stem to even out the two weights).
Four magnets placed equidistantly around a wheel make for a more balanced wheel spin. Its minor. But when spinning the wheel with the motor when the bike is up on the stand the lesser amount of shaking is noticeable.
Using just two sensors (the 2-pak of Cateye sensors is only $9.95) gives a noticeable improvement as well. Enough that 4 sensors is not noticeably better or worth even the minimal cost/effort. I can’t help but think that two magnets means two points of potential failure rather than four. So I went back down to two magnets and gave that a try.
Long Term Conclusion
What I found over time with both 2- and 4-magnet installations was that apparently there is more signal-reading failure going on than we realize, and the Bafang controller has a way of gracefully dealing with this on your display. However when you use two or more magnets that failover procedure is no longer seamless to the eye. You can see oddball, cockeyed shifts in the speedometer reading as you ride along once you exceed about 22 mph.
This speed threshold is probably more about rotation count of the wheel more than it is actual physical speed. I suspect a 20″ wheel would evidence the issue at a lower speed, and a 29er at a higher one.
A 4-magnet setup is more susceptible to this than a 2-magnet setup. And remember I have verified that these Cateye magnets are perfectly reliable over literally a period of a year or two in a 1-magnet system, so they aren’t the problem.
So…
You can take this experience as useful in a couple of ways: A cheap, lightweight, stronger magnet replacement is a good thing, and while many sources say multiple magnets are not possible, they are. But they are not advisable on a bike that exceeds 20 mph (Class 1/2 speeds). For countries with a 25 km/h speed limit this may be a nice little spiff. You may as well be able to see a smooth display since you are going so slowly you have plenty of time to glance down and admire the view :-).
