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November 29, 2005
Ebikin'
I'm so excited - someone (outside our UCS group here at WOU) actually posted a comment to one of my entries! Well, it made me realize I had been ignoring my Alternative Transportation category. We get so caught up in our work, don't we. Well, I'm still riding my electric bike, but it did finally give me a bit of trouble - a spring on the rear brake snapped, which caused the rear brake to shift all the way to the right and pressed one of the brake pads against the wheel all the time. Fortunately, this happened in my driveway. I emailed the guy I bought the bike from (Eric - info@ebikesnw.com) who has a nice electric bike shop in Seattle. He told me that I could get replacement brakes at any bike shop. Nope. The Giant LaFree uses a brake that's custom made - regular brakes are too long, and BMX style brakes are too short. After a bunch of fiddling around, I was able to use a combination of new brake parts and my old brake parts to get it working again. Actually, I just rode around for a couple weeks with only the front brake - no crashes, so it worked out OK, my apologies to the gal with the dog who was jogging and had to stop for me, though.
The Salem Statesman Journal newspaper had a neat article over the Thanksgiving weekend about a guy named Jim Brown, who has a bicycle with two small motors (not electric) on it. He's going to ride the thing across the country. I gather from the article that he is getting close to 100 mpg on his "custom" bike, and it goes about 25 mph. Here he is:
GO JIM!
There are a lot of alternatives out there, from small electric cars, golf carts, motorized skateboards, small motorcycles and mopeds (big motorcycles get worse gas mileage than many small cars - I have one, I know! My Goldwing burns super and gets about the same as our Toyota Camry). Let's use 'em!
Posted by rossm at November 29, 2005 9:19 AM
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