Zen and the Art of E-bike Touring


 

3 Chapter 1
Chapter 3 4
Index


 

Chapter 2: Learning to use your E-bike

You must learn to ride your ebike in a safe, isolated place, and that is doubly true if you have not ridden a bicycle in a while. While you may not forget the basic actions of riding a bike, you may well find that you are unsteady at first, and the extra weight of the ebike will exacerbate that problem. So you must find a desserted stretch of road or a big empty parking lot to pactice until you really have control over the bike. We used the road network in a large cemetery to practice riding before taking our first cross-country tour.

You should first practice without any electrical assist. This is important because the bike, although heavy, is far more controllable with the motor turned off. In fact, if you get into riding situations where precise contol of the bike us absolutely essential, you should default to turning off the assist and riding it as a normal bike. We ran into situations like dodging among pedestrians on wide promenades where we found it was best to just turn off the assist.

But the reason you bought the ebike was to get that assistance, right? So once you have good control of the bike, try out the various levels of assistance if it is a pedalec, or different throttle settings if it is a throttle model. Be prepared for some surprises as electric motors can give instantaneous full torque in a noiseless fashion that is quite different from gasoline or diesel engines. With the throttle models, you must carefully get used to the gradient of response of the motor to small changes in the throttle.

With a pedalec system, you will usually have 3-5 levels of support, which you should try out, but you will also have to get used to the way the system responds to your pedaling. There will be a short but noticeable delay from when you start pedaling to when the motor assistance kicks in, and another short delay from when you stop pedaling to when the motor shuts off. You must get accustomed enough to those delays to factor them into your control of the bicycle. Typically applying the brakes will shut off the motor immediately, and you should get used to that additional way to shut off the assistance.

You will encounter different kinds of surfaces on any long journey, so be sure to have at least some of the later practice sessions on unusual surfaces like cobblestones, gravel, packed dirt, mud, and sand if possible. Cobblestones shake a bike violently, making it quite hard to control and possibly loosening or damaging various bits and pieces. Control in gravel depends on the type and depth of the gravel, with deep layers of pea-shaped gravel being the most difficult to safely ride on. Similarly, sand and mud are both treacherous for riding, and the deeper it gets the worse the control problems are. But even such things as a layer of wet leaves or a wet manhole cover, which you could safely ignore when driving an automobile , can be quite treacherous on a bicycle, so practice on as many different surfaces as you can.

You are wearing a bike helmet , aren't you? Find one that fits and gives good ventilation, but absolutely wear it as you have far, far less protection on a bicycle than when driving in a steel cocoon. That is an advantage in connecting you more completely with the environment while you ride, but a severe and possibly fatal disadvantage in the case of an accident . Wear the helmet!

We found added advantages of wearing a helmet in the rain. First, the helmet visor helped keep rain off our glasses, which helped visibility . Secondly, if we put the helmet on over the thin hood of our rain shells, the helmet would keep the rain hood firmly in place and keep our necks dry. Wear the helmet!



Copyright 2015 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

3 Chapter 1
Chapter 3 4
Index

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