Ebike de-restricting, pros and cons including how to do it yourself.

hello everyone welcome back to the ultrabank mechanics youtube channel my name is dave k and i hope you've had a good weekend it's monday today it's lunchtime and i can feel a little bit of autumn coming uh there's a few leaves on the floor it's quite chilly on the morning and you can get that like autumn smell uh and it's coming a little bit cooler so we've definitely got autumn on the way in the workshop we have uh a cube stereo e-bike it's been in a couple of weeks to be honest uh but the customer brought it in for a major service there's quite a lot of parts that need to be replaced on this it's quite a tired poorly e-bike uh but when we discovered uh after the customer said they were quite noisy and there were a little bit of uh play side to side on the cracks we we discovered that the that the bearings had gone in the mortar the outboard bearings um and so what we generally do is we're motors that are not in warranty i send them to a really nice chap called peter collard down south and he specializes in rebuilding uh mortars this one's a bosch and it makes a brilliant job so thanks for that peter it's now arrived back today it's in this box but before we go any further with putting this motor back in this bike this video is about e-bike tuning okay i thought it'd be interesting to do now because this bike's coming and when i took the sides uh the covers off the side of the motor i discovered that it had a a tuning device attached to the motor so i thought right let's do a little bit of a video on e-bike tuning and let's just kind of answer people's questions about why would we want to tune an e-bike why would would we want to de-restrict an e-bike why would we want to make it go faster why not buy a motorbike for goodness sake first things first with e-bike tuning it is illegal okay to ride a tuned bike on uk roads d restricted okay if you're gonna de-restrict your bike and make it go faster than the set allowed limit which i think is about 15 or 16 mile an hour then you are breaking the uk law by riding your bike on the road or a public highway or any public place you can ride it off the beaten track on a private road uh in the middle of the woods uh as long as it's not public property then you can ride your bike and you're not breaking the law by doing that i'm correcting saying that i think i am anyway so this is a very personal thing really should i really chew me e-bike or shouldn't i and what's it all about and how do i do it okay well there's no secret how we go and tune e-bikes generally speaking no matter what motor you've got in your e-bike whether it's a yamaha whether it's bosch or shimano or bros then there is somebody that will manufacture some kind of device that you can attach to your motor or the wiring that connects to your motor to fool the fool the bike into thinking that it's actually that it can go faster or rather it's allowed to go faster uh than the set limit as uh set by the manufacturer so this particular one had what they call a speed box three fitted okay now it's here i'll sh i'll just whiz it up to the camera you can see it there look there it is let me put this box down okay there it is okay it is a speed box three uh and it's a fairly simple device to look at anyway god knows what god knows what's going on in the unit i don't want to know anyway so um what you basically do is you intercept uh two cables uh before the other end goes into your motor okay so um these two go into your controller that one goes into your rear speed sensor and then these two go into your motor itself okay it's a fairly simple thing to install wherever you buy one of these from the generally offer instructions how to do it and you can do it yourself with the newer ones i'm not sure whether they're 3.0 plus you can actually configure these on your phone app okay so you can actually change certain parameters uh inside one of these things uh and you can turn it off or turn it on uh as you as you wish and i know that they know you can do that on the newer ones on these speed box ones uh so there's other makes that uh that are available other manufacturers that make a similar sort of thing that do the same job and you generally plug them in the same way okay so the question is first of all let's look at the pros and cons of tuning your e-bike let's call it tuning your e-bike so let's look at the let's look at the pros first so the pros are that your bike will continue uh to er to assist you as long as you're pedaling up to the amount of uh cadence that you can manage so if up to when you spin out effectively so you the motor will give you that in give that assistance until you can't pedal anymore okay till your legs are spinning out it will still continue some of these uh some of these are actually limited to 50 mile an hour or something like that but generally speaking uh you will be able to pedal this bike with one of these devices fitted as fast as you can pedal and the motor will still give you assistance that might benefit you on the certain trails that you ride okay it might be that you're a trail center where you need that sort of speed who knows it's a very personal thing and you can only decide whether it's right for you so okay so that's the main pro of the uh of the speed box or the tuning the cons uh he could find yourself in a dangerous situation when you're traveling above 15 mile an hour maybe where there's other people on the same uh stretch of path road or wherever you are uh if you're going faster than 16 miles an hour 20 miles 120 mile an hour you you might not be able to stop before you hit that person and if you hit that person then you are liable for the damage that you cause to that person and the people with them the chances are if you've got an insurance it's not it's not going to be it's not going to be valid um you will wear your mortar out quicker okay there's quite a lot of cons coming up here um but i'm not actually saying this is right or wrong it's your personal thing my personal opinion my personal opinion is i wouldn't do it okay it's not for me at all um the other main con is that if you do this well your bike's still under warranty you invalidate the motor warranty okay and if i were to plug this bike in to the diagnostics with this attached the diagnostic would know that this is actually attached no matter how how much you hide it out the way uh the software will know it's there so that another con is the invalidation of your warranty if your bike's under warranty and particularly your motor if it goes faulty then whoever manufactures your motor is not going to honor that warranty it's going to be invalidated um which could lead yourself with a with a quite a big bill to replace your motor or get repaired and the other thing from my point of view as a mechanic i really need to get you to sign a disclaimer uh when i'm working on your bike to say that you're only going to ride this bike that i've worked on and refitted your speed box uh on um private land okay if you're willing to sign that then i'm happy to work on your bike so there's quite a lot there's quite a few cons there at the end of the day it is down to you okay if you want to tune your bike then that's up to you if you want to make it go faster it's your choice whatever you decide to do so what we're going to do is we're going to put this motor back in and then we're going to reconnect it back up uh and we're going to refit this speed box so we'll get the motor back in and then i'll come back when we've refitting this speed box i'll see you in a bit so i'll just now that we've got this motor in i'll just explain what these cables are for this main one there that you can see there that one that one is from the battery the power to the motor okay that's the main power connector and that actually goes in that socket there okay so you can gradually this little clip and you just slowly push it in until it clips in like that okay and that's saying that's all you need to do with that one this one here okay this little black one is the connection for the controller on the handlebars and you can see it's actually a rectangle shape it's black and you can see if i point in there move these out where you can see that rectangle little slot there is where that controller cable goes now you can only get them in one way they won't go in any other way but one way but you must be careful uh how you put them in they must go in square and if you feel any resistance there you're obviously putting them in the wrong way so it's really important to be careful the pins inside these uh little connectors here are really really tiny and they're really easy to break okay if you break one of these then the motor's got to go back to to have a new board fitted inside so a bit of a dram a bit of a disaster if you accidentally do that the it's fairly easy to have a look to which way they actually go in because you'll see that there's some slots either side and if you look on the on the connector that goes in it can actually go in one particular way so that's the uh the connector for the controller this one here is a bit of an unusual one you don't normally see these and it's for lights all that basically does is supply power to the lights and and this one here is for a speed sensor we can see that that's actually damaged so uh it looks like it's been forced in at one time and it's uh sheared off there so we're gonna need a new speed sensor one thing that i forgot to mention was the cost so this particular motor although we've not just only replaced these two outer bearings one in either side this motor has a as at a full overhaul um so you're looking at roundabout 280 290 for that doing um it's a relatively inexpensive uh when you cut when you look at the cost of a new motor at 560 i think they are somewhere around there so it is a good option and this particular motor will be like a new one um is the report is that it's particularly great inside there's nothing to worry about it's in it's in good condition so my only concern really is we're gonna have to replace this uh speed sensor this magnet sensor which is a bit of a pain in bum but nevertheless that's what we've got to do so there we are it's as simple as that tuning your ebike there's a some kind of device a little bit of hardware available for nearly every e-bike motor and if you wanted to de-restrict it then that's what you need to do i think they're about 150 quid or something like that you could do it yourself if you feel fairly competent but that's it it's as simple as that so whether it's right or whether it's wrong it's up to you to decide whether you'd want your bike de-restricting then again it's a personal thing me personally i wouldn't do it but there's a lot of pros and cons to to consider before you think about it before you go ahead and do it so i would really like your comments if you want to leave some comments let us know what you think about d restricting e-bikes good or bad um and uh we'll go from there please subscribe if you've not already and click that bell and thanks for watching turtle pip

Channel: The Yorkshire Bike Mechanic

Views: 284,758

Keywords: Hi to de-restrict your Ebike, how do I make my e-bike go faster, how to tune my e-bike, speedbox 3, how to remove the speed limit on an e-bike, De-restricting e-bikes

Id: 6JZ181ujskU

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021