The challenge is to cycle to work as often as feasible, 46 miles each way. Work moved to a farther away location and I didn’t want to leave my home in the land of good humour and filled oatcakes that is Stoke-on-Trent, so it's a bit of a step. There are moderate hills adding up to about 1500 feet of climbing each way.

It looked like a job for a velomobile to keep the travelling time halfway realistic. And considering I’m no athlete, one with electric assist, or "uphill assist". I hadn’t settled on the best velo for it, but then Lee Wakefield was selling his Quest and it’s perfect.

The motor setup took a bit of inspiration. At first I was going to go with a very nice crank drive system from eLation in Australia, but the lead time and cost with shipping were just too much. I ended up with a DIY setup. There are a few before and after photos of Questy at [cid-d787ae55cec6f6ff.skydrive.live.com] .

(Questy’s imaginative name was inspired by my old Brompton’s name of “Brompie”.)

It’s early days yet. I’m building up my legs with only riding the commute once a fortnight, with occasional smaller trips elsewhere. It’s getting there.

About the design: I liked the approach John Tetz explains at [www.recumbents.com] , where the assist is just enough to make the difference the rider needs and to prevent peak power demands tiring the rider. David Hembrow’s page with the Kreuzotter power calculator at [www.hembrow.eu] was helpful to understand the assist needed. Alistair Marks’ CHESLA drive at [www.oaktreevet.co.uk] looked like a good layout. And [endless-sphere.com] was very useful overall.

I couldn’t hope to come up with anything as beautiful as John Tetz’s little gem of a system, what I’ve built is quite crude. Questy deserves better! But it was affordable, and achievable with my level of skill, and it works.

The motor is a 24v 250w Unite MY1018 from the eBay seller jrmotorpartsdepot powered by two 12v 22ah “gun light” batteries in series from [www.deben.com] . The brushed motor isn’t all that efficient but the shape and built-in gear reduction is ideal. The controller is a £10 eBay number; the throttle is a little fingertip operated plunger potentiometer, with a spring return. There’s a second rotary potentiometer that limits the maximum power for the system. There's also a Cycle Analyst to see what’s going on.

The motor tucks in fairly low and central, as near to what would be the front axle as I could get it. It all clamps carefully on, Questy stays 100% intact! A LHD BMX freewheel on the motor shaft drives a tandem left crank, 155mm to match the right one. Besides that left crank there’s no change to the rest of the drivetrain.

For the legal stuff, Questy comes in well under the 60kg limit at about 49kg. Speed limiting is done with a mechanical circuit break off the front derailer, so there’s only power when in the small chainring. At those ratios the motor can’t run fast enough to drive the machine over 15 mph. Crank drive means I can’t run the motor without pedalling. And with the spring return fingertip throttle, I get automatic motor cutout when the finger moves up to the brake lever.

Early days but going OK so far. As one car passenger shouted, “go bobsled!”

Roy

That's very interesting. I like the idea of driving the crank using a Tandem Chainset, it seems a great solution for recumbents.

My Bionx is lovely to use but I dislike the fact that it's all locked down as much as possible by Bionx. They've done everything possible to make their stuff not servicable/programmabale by the consumer. That's probably OK if you have a good dealer to hand but as mine was bought 2nd hand I'm left in limbo if anything goes wrong.

How noisy is your setup? I'm constantly amazed at how quiet the Bionx is, I saw a YouTube clip on the new DaaHub and that sounded like a Strimmer to me.

You have some serious amperehours there, what's the range as I can't imagine you would have time to do a recharge at work as I think those batteries come with a 14 hour charger.

And the most important question for me is how does it climb? I imagine it's an uphill assist as 15mph on the flat in a Velomobile ought to be fairly routine with no assist for a reasonably fit pilot.

What is your average speed on your mega-commute?

Regards

Oddball

'I'm drinking wine and eating cheese, and catching some rays, you know.'

Yup, very interesting indeed. Now I've ridden the Rotovelo a little I'm also interested in hearing how electric works with a velomobile...

--
Peter Eland - Velo Vision publisher

Are you saying its hard work Peter?

"I thought of that while riding my bike." --Albert Einstein, on the Theory of Relativity

2007 ICE QNT
2008 Hase Kettwiesel AL27
2011 Catrike Trail.
1951 Engine in need of partial rebuild.

Not as such :-). More that stop-start isn't where a velomobile's aero benefits kick in... but it is where electrics could be useful...

I'll read with interest. Who knows my next car could be a eVelomobile.

"I thought of that while riding my bike." --Albert Einstein, on the Theory of Relativity

2007 ICE QNT
2008 Hase Kettwiesel AL27
2011 Catrike Trail.
1951 Engine in need of partial rebuild.

I saw the Rotovelo at Spezi and liked its robustness. I know a review is imminent but I wonder how it rides on twisty descents of 5-10%. How do you lean in a Velomobile? Especially an unsuspended one based on what seems a straight tadpole trike? I have a vision of rolling it on the 1st corner... It would no doubt survive but I wouldn't fancy being the crash test dummy!

I presume you could just pop a Bionx into the Rotovelo - assuming it has a normal rear end (as opposed to single swingarm like some velomobiles).

Oddball

'I'm drinking wine and eating cheese, and catching some rays, you know.'

The motor noise is a medium "whirr" about the same as my wife's Heinzmann. Not too bad.

It's touch and go with the slow 1.65 amp chargers at work, at least the two batteries came with two chargers. As long as I put in slightly too many hours at work I get away with it. I'll probably get a pair of their 3 amp chargers and leave them at work.

In sort of medium flat terrain I'd put the range around 55 miles without discharging the batteries more than 80%.

It climbs...OK. Compared to the Heinzmann the assist is pretty gentle. It's only drawing around 250w though, and of that I'd guess 180w are ending up at the back wheel. The meanest hill I've tried is 8.3% and we got up at a steady 6mph. The calculator says that would take around 385w in total. 6mph is still double what it would have been without the assist.

Broadly speaking, it works out that while I'm on a 3%+ hill at a speed where aerodynamics and rolling resistance aren't doing much compared to gravity, the motor doubling my power basically doubles my speed.

That little bit of help keeps me from going so slowly up hills that the trip would just take too long, and I never have to really slog. Accelerating is that bit nicer with the assist as well.

Average speed is bang on 15mph door to door, including the odd few minutes of stopping. End goal in the distant future is at least once to scrape in at 2 hours one-way.

I was all for trying to make velomobiling work without the assist - but with a real hill it was too much hard work, at least for a non-athlete like me! Without assist there's still 38kg of velo and that just takes a lot of work to pull up hills, even right at the bottom of the generous gear range.

What works for me is to pootle along at something comfortable like 100-125w, which gives a decent enough speed on the flat, then for hills I up my output a bit but most of the extra work is done by the motor.

Early days yet but the combination of velo speed on the flat and assist for hills and accelerating seems a bit of a match made in heaven.

Downhills are another story altogether - I do wish I could lean more than just with my head!

Leaning - remember that leg position helps a lot on cornering with a normal trike, so must also help with a Velo (with or without electric assist) - when cornering to the right, the right leg should be straight out, and the left leg bent up with the knee leaning to the right (and vica-versa for left bends) - this does assume you are going fast enough to freewheel through the corner, but if you are not there is unlikely to be any risk of tipping.

John Turvey

Been slowly building up the miles, and it's going pretty well. And the fuel economy numbers are looking good!

Started again earlier this year with a one-way ride to work on a Monday, then spent Monday to Thursday night camping fairly near to work. The rides to and from work were perfect for building up a bit of fitness. And Questy has a colossal amount of room to throw in all kinds of camping gear, food etc.

I find it difficult to be motivated to do leisure rides - I just really get a kick out of practical cycling. So it has to be part of the commute!

After a couple more weeks of camping, I've now been making the full 90 mile round trip one day a week for about six weeks now.

If it wasn't for the uphill assist, it just wouldn't work. I can fit 4.5 hours of cycling around a full day's work, but not much more - and I'm still gunning for that 4 hour mark! And for a second day a week as well.

All-in speed door to door is up to 20.2 mph on the most recent round trip. Questy is comfortable enough that there's no need to stop for a break.

Amp-hours used round trip are down to about 15.5, and that's at a pretty feeble 22.5 average volts - the battery packs top out at 25v without load, not the 28.8v or so one would hope for.

The battery power numbers are straight from the Cycle Analyst and checks of speed and gradient with the Kreuzotter calculator seem to support them.

So that's something like 349 watt-hours from the batteries, and over the 4.5 hours round trip I'm pretty sure it's not going to be more than 651 watt-hours from me.

At the US EPA electric MPG equivalent (MPGe) conversion (according to Wikipedia that's 114,984 BTUs per gallon and 3,412 BTUs per KWH) and adjusting to imperial gallons, if I leave out the muscle power then Questy is getting around 10,440 MPGe.

Adding in the muscle power (fuel stored around the waist etc.) and so assuming a total of 1 KWH for the 90 mile trip, that's still about 3,030 MPGe.

Looking at a beautifully aero eco-car like the one at [www.greenlaunches.com], and giving them 3,080 MPG in imperial gallons, Questy compares pretty well - 5mph faster, and in the real world.

Onward!!!