One of my favorite things about summer is that I can start riding my bike more. In the “before times” (when working from the office didn’t give you COVID), I spent half of the year biking to work instead of driving. Back in 2018, I dropped $1,568 on an electric bike from Rad Power Bikes and since then, I’ve put a little over 2,000 miles on it. It’s a great bike. I adore the thing. The only two problems are that it is prohibitively hard to bike November through March and whenever I need to take the bike to the shop, it takes a solid month to get it back. I have thought about buying a new e-bike to reduce the amount of time it is in the shop. That seems like an expensive solution so I started looking at converting my trusty Gary Fisher manual bike.
I really like my old Gary Fisher but I don’t ride it much because it’s harder. The last time I tried a 20mi loop on it, I felt like I was about to die. I also don’t want to destroy the thing while trying to convert it. I recently stumbled across the Swytch conversion kit and I’m starting to like the idea. The company is REALLY tight with pricing and won’t let you just buy the thing but it looks like it is $500 if you are willing to order it six months ahead of time. It also looks to be a lot easier to install than some of the other options that I have seen around.
Have any thought? Feel free to drop a comment, below.
[ Cover photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash ]