Dani O'Sickey

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since Sep 02, 2020
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Recent posts by Dani O'Sickey

We converted an electric blender to a bicycle-powered blender to make smoothies. It worked great, even with a very poor interface for transferring energy between rotation in one plane (the direction the bike wheel spins) and the plane perpendicular to that (the direction an upright blender spins). So, also no hand crank experience, but the hand crank designs we saw in our research had real bevel gears to do the work, so I imagine they'd work at least ten times as well.

It was proposed after the fact by a friend that we could have poached a piece from a right angle drill as a way to obtain some bevel gears. If you have a strong flea market around, you might be able to get a drill like that for pretty cheap (the flea market around us often has a drill or two where the key is lost or the splines for the key are damaged).
4 months ago
I fairly strongly recommend the RadWagon.

I worked, prior to departing a month ago, at the only Rad authorized servicer in the Cleveland area. Their bikes consistently have quirks, especially in the rear hub, that can annoy the hell out of a leisure rider, but these things really do seem to hold up to some fairly rough use. Admittedly we saw few RadWagons (but still some), as cargo bikes are just less popular, but we were fairly pleased with the ones we did see--appropriately sized rotor for the brakes and sturdy frame construction. These are often points of concern in the no-name budget e-bikes (we were frequently concerned for the riders' well-being on many of the bikes--electric and otherwise--that came through our shop, but never with the Rads).

From what our customers tell us, the customer service experience interacting with Rad is effectively the same as our experience as an authorized servicer (which bugged the hell out of us). That said, that means Rad is very willing to send replacement parts to solve problems. They are also very UNwilling to send a proper service manual (which makes solving electrical issues tiresome) and are unwilling to send multiple parts at once, which can make troubleshooting an issue. I imagine these drawbacks are far less of an issue for a consumer than for us working in a commercial setting with certain expectations about turnaround on work orders.

In summary: The RadWagon is exactly what I think a $2,000 e-cargo-bike ought to be, and the customer service is pretty decent for the consumer too
3 years ago