Eric meets one of his biggest mentors, a DIY ebike builder Adam Livingston who inspired Luna to build the Fusion custom ebike batteries and also the Luna Wolf Pack. Table of contents:
00:19 Podcast starts, Dog yelps
00:40 Introduction to Adam Livingston
01:23 Adams lightweight Electric bike
02:54 One of best DIY ebikes ever
06:30 ingenious DIY body case design
12:55 Rock Shox Judy
14:12 downhill mountain biking
15:00 Adam the bike shop Manager
16:48 Wheel Building
21:22 Building a girl bike
23:31 running 72V through mini hub
26:03 Mid drive freewheels
27:36 Junky expensive $200 controllers
28:20 no backpack battery for us
29:59 Wheel Building Machines
32:04 Dogati Eibke, the Best DIY Bike Ever
37:07 Adam’s Tragic Accident, burned hand
39:58 Tangent Ebike System
41:15 Adam Designs the first version of wolf battery pack
43:04 The beginnings of the wolf battery pack
47:42 working with metal and wood for prototypes
48:59 Lunas First Custom Battery Bike
51:27 Luna’s decision to sell ebikes
53:55 Coast Cycles Banana Bike
56:04 Ebike Vibe in Southern California
59:06 The beginning of fat bikes
59:58 Karl from electric bike blog
71:40 R@D
73:13 Betting bottles of tequila building batteries
For added convenience we have included the entire written transcript of the episode:
Eric: 00:00:02 We need our own soundtrack, but right now we don’t have a soundtrack. Okay, so are we live? All right, we’re live on electric bike podcast, we’re here with Adam Livingstone. Me and Adam met on the fast Electric Bike Facebook page. And wow [dog yelp]. You never know what’s going to happen live.
Adam: 00:00:29 Rot row.
Eric: 00:00:30 We’re live on Luna Cycle, right?
Adam: 00:00:34 Yeah.
Eric: 00:00:34 Okay so anyways, we met on fast electric bike, I’ve always been admired his builds. He’s one of the better builders on the group I’ve always thought and me and him became friends. He ended up changing the direction of Luna Cycles, which we’ll tell the story later. He’s really like the guy who inspired me to make the wolf pack and so he said he was coming down in Southern California. And I said, “Man, you should come down.” And we’ve been wanting to talk about the wolf pack a long time on my live video and we decided that you would be the perfect person to talk about it since you were really responsible for inspiring me to make it. And so go ahead Adam, tell us about your oh, is this your electric bike right here?
Adam: 00:01:23 That’s one of them. That’s pub runner.
Eric: 00:01:25 He made more impressive bikes than this guys, give him a chance. This is kind of I know what you’re saying, it doesn’t look that fast but-
Adam: 00:01:34 That is moonshine in the flask on the down tube as a redeeming feature.
Eric: 00:01:39 And it’s not really in focus, but that’s a flask right there, isn’t it?
Adam: 00:01:42 It is.
Eric: 00:01:43 I love it. And where’s your battery pack if that’s your flask? Don’t tell me you’re one of those backpack battery guys.
Adam: 00:01:48 It’s in the tank.
Eric: 00:01:49 Because if you’re one of those backpack battery guys-
Adam: 00:01:51 It isn’t no backpack. It’s in the mighty mini in the Schwinn tank.
Eric: 00:01:54 There you go guys do you see that? The whole trick is hiding the battery. You see that? Because we can all build a beautiful bike but I was getting worried about it Adam. I thought he was going to say, “It’s a backpack.”
Adam: 00:02:09 Come on backpacks are the way to go.
Eric: 00:02:11 No and it’s like not for a real builder look at this. So that is ingenious that’s mighty mini hidden in the fuel tank.
Adam: 00:02:18 Yeah.
Eric: 00:02:19 And as I got to know this guy and saw his skills I realized we got a real builder on our hands, right? And can you show us later bike ash? When I saw this bike me and him almost became instant friends. He did a tangent build let’s see if we can find that. Yeah, it’s a tangent build it says silver colored, right?
Adam: 00:02:42 Bike one yeah.
Eric: 00:02:42 I haven’t seen it in a while. Look at these oh my God.
Adam: 00:02:47 So that was a mockup of the battery box.
Eric: 00:02:49 Oh my God now I remember that bike. Okay, so this really did inspire me.
Adam: 00:02:54 Oh, I love that.
Eric: 00:02:55 Yeah, because when I saw this bike I realized we can build our own battery packs. Now this guy’s building him in his garage.
Adam: 00:03:01 With one hand at the time.
Eric: 00:03:03 One hand at the time and that’s a really great story you guys need to hear.
Ashley: 00:03:06 Sorry.
Eric: 00:03:07 That is one of the most beautiful Do It Yourself bikes I’ve ever seen. Yeah, look at that. That’s a tangent drive.
Adam: 00:03:13 Yeah.
Eric: 00:03:14 And backup and look at that battery pack. And I remembered that there was a change in mindsets from this bike and the bikes that we ended up building.
Adam: 00:03:24 Really?
Eric: 00:03:26 I think people this bike really lifted the bar in my mind because I swear I’ve never seen a do it yourself bike look that good.
Adam: 00:03:35 That was fun.
Eric: 00:03:35 Was that before we did our fusion bikes where we did the batteries?
Adam: 00:03:38 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Eric: 00:03:38 This was before that, right?
Adam: 00:03:40 Yeah.
Eric: 00:03:41 Wow.
Adam: 00:03:41 Yeah. And that-
Eric: 00:03:43 Here go back baby.
Adam: 00:03:44 So that mock up.
Eric: 00:03:46 Now look at the on switch on the thing. Go to where you can see the entrance of the battery, the aluminum and tell the story. There we go. And zoom on that.
Adam: 00:03:54 Yeah, so that mockup was that was pretty fun. So I initially did some cardboard pieces and fit them into the frame and this bike that you’re looking at I designed it when I was 40 years old and so I named it fortitude kind of attitude and 40.
Eric: 00:04:13 Fortitude, that is cool man.
Adam: 00:04:13 And it’s a titanium frame and I just kind of went long on that it’s all roll off and-
Eric: 00:04:21 Freaking amazing.
Adam: 00:04:22 And I wanted to build a bitch and electric bike-
Eric: 00:04:26 Fortitude.
Adam: 00:04:27 Fortitude.
Eric: 00:04:28 I love it.
Adam: 00:04:29 But I wanted to-
Eric: 00:04:31 This was before your injury.
Adam: 00:04:32 No, this was after the injury so.
Eric: 00:04:35 So wait, aren’t you closer to 50 right now?
Adam: 00:04:38 Yeah, but I had that it was just a regular mountain bike for about 10 years.
Eric: 00:04:43 So this injury happened a long time ago.
Adam: 00:04:45 No, I built that bike a long time ago and I just made it into an electric bike when I did the hand.
Eric: 00:04:51 So this is recent?
Adam: 00:04:52 Yeah.
Eric: 00:04:53 Got it, okay.
Adam: 00:04:53 Right.
Eric: 00:04:54 So you built… okay, so let’s go back. So the bike you built or you bought it.
Adam: 00:04:57 Built it.
Eric: 00:04:58 Built the whole bike?
Adam: 00:04:59 Well I didn’t no, I worked with a frame builder who built the frame. So that’s a tie frame and I did the geometry and everything and he dialed it in and made it the way I wanted it. I’m not too good with titanium welding.
Eric: 00:05:15 Well titanium welding is not that bad. It’s aluminum welding that gets you.
Adam: 00:05:19 Right.
Eric: 00:05:19 What you’re learning now with your latest build.
Adam: 00:05:21 Right.
Eric: 00:05:21 Like, did you think about well he’s doing…
Adam: 00:05:23 I thought about it.
Eric: 00:05:23 We’re going to talk about it later, but he’s doing a belt drive aluminum Bike and belt drives are wicked tough because he’s going to have to slice the frame. And he’s got a way to put it back together without welding and I think it’s awesome. But compared to titanium aluminum is really tough. Titanium is a little tougher than steel, but it looks really cool when you weld it.
Adam: 00:05:50 So when you see this battery box, I think there’s a picture that shows it with the kind of the battery in it after I yeah, there.
Eric: 00:05:58 Wow.
Adam: 00:05:59 And so what you see you see an inner tube that goes around the battery and-
Eric: 00:06:04 Did you build that battery?
Adam: 00:06:05 No, that’s your battery.
Eric: 00:06:07 That’s just a basic triangle battery.
Adam: 00:06:10 That’s a 17 amp triangle.
Eric: 00:06:12 25 hour battery. Wow, wow.
Adam: 00:06:15 And so I designed that frame around it and then that inner tube goes around the battery and then when it’s all sealed up, you pump up the inner tube.
Eric: 00:06:25 No way.
Adam: 00:06:26 And it isolates the battery from any shock and totally locks it in.
Eric: 00:06:31 Beautiful, beautiful and it doesn’t change the shape at all it’s just to keep the battery from making any noises.
Adam: 00:06:37 Yeah any movement it cushions the battery keeps it from getting any wear spots.
Eric: 00:06:41 Oh my God, you guys see why this guy’s the pimp? Look at that air pump in his battery pack. I’ve never seen that ever man.
Adam: 00:06:47 And so that worked out really well.
Eric: 00:06:51 You saw that new bike we released the fixed bike.
Adam: 00:06:54 Oh man.
Eric: 00:06:54 I got a story I haven’t told many people but that’s the first time we brought in a bicycle from China completely but and they’re a really good factory. The guys we’re working with are really good guys. But the first shipment we got, we got them and we went out and rode them, it’s really quiet. When you hit a bump you hear a slight rattle I was like oh my God. And it’s like that slight rattle just wrecked it. And I started getting obsessed with rattles and even the bikes that we build like the KHS bikes or whatever, you pick them up and you hit the ground they rattle too, you have the chain the derailers everything.
Adam: 00:07:31 The derailer slaps but-
Eric: 00:07:34 Yeah, when you’re building a bike, even when we did this one we didn’t build ourselves but every little detail counts. You can see how oh wow this has a rattle and so we decided we had 20 of these things. We took them all apart now how hard is this thing to take part anyway? And at first we tried a trick. We put a screwdriver up in the top because it has a tube within a tube. So it’s double tube, so there’s aluminum tube inside that and we thought if we just bashed it with a screwdriver-
Adam: 00:08:02 Just like wedge it in.
Eric: 00:08:03 … it would keep it from rattling.
Adam: 00:08:05 Right.
Eric: 00:08:05 And we tried it and we tried two times and we tried it three times and bam, it worked on our prototype bike. Hell yeah it’s like the best news all day, we’re not going to have to disassemble all these bikes. And Kyle goes, “Wait a minute, let me try it. Let me try something.” And he takes the bike apart and we can’t get the battery out of it.
Adam: 00:08:22 Because you’ve wedged it.
Eric: 00:08:24 Yeah, and so we’re like oh shit. So the next day on Monday we just started taking all the bikes apart. Take the motors off, take them out and it was just a matter of just a little bit of tape around it to keep it from moving around.
Adam: 00:08:34 Right.
Eric: 00:08:35 So going back to your bike, you need a whole freaking inter tube. So are you worried about damage to the battery pack, you’re not just because that’s what most people would just put a little foam around it and like-
Adam: 00:08:45 It just seemed like a smart way to lock it in because foam degrades, it kind of wears out you don’t really get that. And so the tube just seemed like a creative it’s a 10 inch tube and stretch it around.
Eric: 00:08:59 So foam you don’t think if you just push foam up against it that’s what most guys would do. You went like the elegant builder.
Adam: 00:09:08 Right.
Eric: 00:09:08 Like you’re taking this thing to car shows.
Adam: 00:09:10 Well part of the reason for building the bike in the first place was mental exercise.
Eric: 00:09:18 That’s right.
Adam: 00:09:18 I needed thinking and thought and-
Eric: 00:09:21 That’s right.
Adam: 00:09:21 I had some goals to work through.
Eric: 00:09:24 He was in serious pain during the spike build you guys and fighting pain, right? It was your therapy, basically.
Adam: 00:09:31 Right.
Eric: 00:09:31 You got in a terrible accident, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But first I want to go back to this bike. How did you do those bins man? They’re so amazing in the battery box.
Adam: 00:09:42 Yeah, well I ended up putting almost like a two by four. I bolted it to the front of my workbench with like a quarter inch gap. And then I could slide the piece of aluminum into it with my one good hand and I could bend just slowly bend it.
Eric: 00:09:59 Oh you didn’t even have a bender and you just bend it out manually.
Adam: 00:10:02 Yeah, I was just bending it slowly.
Eric: 00:10:03 Was it aluminum or titanium?
Adam: 00:10:04 The battery box is aluminum. I got it all to the dimensions and then you saw how I had it held together with what I used a hot glue gun and held it all together and took it to my buddy who did the aluminum welding because I didn’t miss it.
Eric: 00:10:19 Wow so wait you just have one seem that you needed to weld?
Adam: 00:10:23 No, those are three pieces one, two, three.
Eric: 00:10:25 Okay.
Adam: 00:10:26 But I hot glued each of the seams just dabbed them with hot glue and took it to my buddy.
Eric: 00:10:31 See that’s been welded Wow. And do you have to heat treat it or anything or no?
Adam: 00:10:34 No.
Eric: 00:10:34 No reason to you can even throw it in your oven if you want it small enough. Did you think about that? Just throw it in your oven.
Adam: 00:10:39 Well it’s held on the water bottle boss [crosstalk 00:10:42] so it’s pretty happy and then I just made the side panels out of carbon fiber.
Eric: 00:10:50 Wow. Wow, I didn’t know the bike was this good man. Okay, tell me about that. Did you cut that out of something?
Adam: 00:11:00 That’s carbon fiber cloth and it layers up just like fiberglass so-
Eric: 00:11:05 And then you put the gloss on it later?
Adam: 00:11:06 You epoxy it and that gives it-
Eric: 00:11:07 Ashley are you listening to this that’s what we need to do on our pack. Do we got the pack with the new edges? I’m going to show it to you later.
Adam: 00:11:14 Yeah.
Eric: 00:11:15 But yeah, we’re trying to solve this right now. So you just cut it out of fabric-
Adam: 00:11:19 You just carbon fiber, you just cut it with scissors to shape-
Eric: 00:11:22 And then you gloss it.
Adam: 00:11:23 And then you epoxy it, right? And I did this over a one 16th birch plywood.
Eric: 00:11:29 Does it matter which epoxy you use or what?
Adam: 00:11:32 I use two-part Marina epoxy for boats, because it’s just a high quality.
Eric: 00:11:37 Two-part marina epoxy that stuff’s really cheap.
Adam: 00:11:39 Yeah.
Eric: 00:11:39 I think we’ve got gallons of it next door. Oh, excellent man. You’re giving away so many tricks.
Adam: 00:11:45 That’s all right, you can have them.
Eric: 00:11:47 I’m not saying to me to these guys we got to do this offline. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, but no, you guys this is a proper build. Like I would buy this bike in a second. In fact, it’s not for sale, is it?
Adam: 00:11:58 No.
Eric: 00:11:58 It’s one of the more beautiful do it yourself. And now look at it we got a tangent drive, 52 volts, 25 art pack.
Adam: 00:12:04 Right.
Eric: 00:12:05 And what kind of speeds would you get with it?
Adam: 00:12:09 If I play with the gearing I can get 60 out of it, but I’ve got it down for mountain bike torque. So it just likes to climb straight up trees and 35 is pretty comfortable with the roll off.
Eric: 00:12:22 You know what would have been sweet on this thing the only thing belt drive would have been pretty sweet with the red roll off.
Adam: 00:12:27 I know well I’m thinking about it. I’m doing it first on the-
Eric: 00:12:30 And see if it works.
Adam: 00:12:31 On the [crosstalk 00:12:32].
Eric: 00:12:32 He’s got a great idea that we’re going to go through but yeah, this bike is freaking… how many hours do you think you got into this?
Adam: 00:12:39 Yeah, hours and dollars are big.
Eric: 00:12:43 But titanium bike roll off hub. I mean, tangent drive and I mean, look at this thing what kind of front suspension is that?
Adam: 00:12:54 That’s a rock shock, Judy.
Eric: 00:12:56 Ah, shit. fuck that man we’re going to get you a real fork. We’re getting you a real fork before you leave for that baby. You cannot put a rock shock Judy on that thing, man. Oh, that’s because it was your 40s bike.
Adam: 00:13:07 Right, that’s what they have for a 29 inch there weren’t a lot of options.
Eric: 00:13:10 I was just telling Matt lately they were both here on the podcast-
Adam: 00:13:13 Right.
Eric: 00:13:13 And Mark, I go I don’t respect rock shocks as a brand because I think of Rock shocks and Judy. And they laugh. And they go, “Oh, you really old rock.” Rock shocks is like really gotten really good. They’ve really upped their game. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m not one of those big shocks guys like nobody or nobody I know is doing 20 foot drops or 10 foot drops.
Adam: 00:13:38 I ride it locked out 90% of the time.
Eric: 00:13:39 Really?
Adam: 00:13:40 Yeah.
Eric: 00:13:40 Wow. Why?
Adam: 00:13:42 I don’t know. I just I grew up on non-suspension and unless I’m really hammering downhill rough stuff, I’m comfortable.
Eric: 00:13:52 You’re a realist.
Adam: 00:13:53 It makes me a better rider.
Eric: 00:13:54 Yeah, I think a lot of people convince themselves they need full suspension. And when I look at bikes I love hard till bikes because you solved the major problem where you put the battery.
Adam: 00:14:04 Right.
Eric: 00:14:04 Like full suspension bikes are good for people who ride really really crazy technical stuff and are jumping but I don’t know anybody who can ride like that. Most of those guys end up in hospital. Have you ever been to like downhill mountain biking?
Adam: 00:14:21 It makes me I’m too old, I don’t heal as quickly as I used to.
Eric: 00:14:26 Oh man I can’t think about it at our age but I’m saying-
Adam: 00:14:27 Oh my gosh.
Eric: 00:14:28 … when I was younger we’d go and it really looked like a war zone there were just people laid up everywhere.
Adam: 00:14:34 It’s a mess, yeah.
Eric: 00:14:35 But guys get really good at… I’ve seen guys do 10 foot drops right in front of me and I don’t see that these days. Like I look at all these electric bike videos and most people do is go upstairs or go downstairs.
Adam: 00:14:47 Bunny hop a curb.
Eric: 00:14:48 Yeah. But really like full suspension is I think the most like everybody thinks they want full suspension. And by the way, guys Adam’s a real bike dude. He managed a bike shop, right? Or two bike shops.
Adam: 00:15:03 A couple of shops up in Santa Barbara.
Eric: 00:15:05 Became this great man that he is being a bicycle mechanic. Everybody get your kids to work at a bike shop.
Adam: 00:15:10 Yeah.
Eric: 00:15:11 It will teach you all the right skills. And if you want to know if somebody is a legit bike mechanic and I gave Adam the question I’m going to give him the question right now, right? Adam, can you build a wheel?
Adam: 00:15:21 I can build a wheel and I can overhaul an internal gear Shimano hub.
Eric: 00:15:25 Awesome. Anyway building a wheel like are you very good, do you consider it could you build one for like good enough for like a racing team?
Adam: 00:15:34 These wheels have 15,000 miles on them and they’re laser.
Eric: 00:15:38 Did you have to rebuild them after you rolled the bike?
Adam: 00:15:42 No.
Eric: 00:15:42 Now how do you do that? Do you stress them while you’re building them? Do you take a poll or something and tell us your trick.
Adam: 00:15:48 So I’m just real methodical on tension when I’m building up and spoke prep so I can get feel like I get good equal tension through the nipple as I’m tightening.
Eric: 00:16:00 Really?
Adam: 00:16:00 And then dang in, and then I’ll take them off for the first couple of hundred miles. I’ll take them off every ride and stress them and turn them up again.
Eric: 00:16:12 Oh, so you do retool.
Adam: 00:16:13 Yeah.
Eric: 00:16:14 Oh, you actually take them off completely off.
Adam: 00:16:16 No, I’ll take them off the bike. I’ll take the wheels off throw them up on the stand.
Eric: 00:16:19 Take the wheels off. Plus you do retro it.
Adam: 00:16:21 Yeah. And I’ll tighten them up.
Eric: 00:16:23 So see us in the business this is what we’ve got to face with. We got to send people-
Adam: 00:16:27 One and done.
Eric: 00:16:28 Yeah.
Adam: 00:16:29 Right.
Eric: 00:16:30 And then they ride and like there after 30, 40 days and their wheel’s coming undone in a golden pie. That’s why we hate selling hub motors.
Adam: 00:16:38 Right.
Eric: 00:16:38 And they’re going oh, they’re selling me this like wheel with like cheap spokes or something. I go dude, you’re putting power through that and it’s normal that you have to release your spokes. So what we did is we got a really good wheel builder now and he knows the tricks. And he’ll stress each spoke with a broom pole.
Adam: 00:16:56 I could see that totally.
Eric: 00:16:58 Yeah, because we can’t say come back in two weeks and we tighten a bay. We can go ride this around the block a few times and we can’t ride it because like that’s why we just don’t like selling hub motors because it’s a pain in the ass to-
Adam: 00:17:11 Right and hub motors put a lot of stress on the wheel.
Eric: 00:17:15 Absolutely and Adam bought a golden pie for me for his daughter actually oh there we go. I almost bought that whole machine right there.
Adam: 00:17:24 Oh my gosh.
Eric: 00:17:25 Yeah, I came this close I wanted an auction and somebody swooped it up from me but I wanted a wheel building machine so bad. It’s like oh my God can I replace that wheel builder guy who kind of smells and I would love to play I mean this guy you should see he drives his big ass charger and he’s got attitude and tattoos and-
Adam: 00:17:44 He’s an artist.
Eric: 00:17:45 He is an artist and I mean I swear like there’s only one out of 10 guys we interview for bike mechanic who make it here for wheel builder oh my God. We went through not having a wheel builder. You give them the wheel building test nobody passes that test.
Adam: 00:18:01 Really? Yeah.
Eric: 00:18:02 Oh my God. I mean one of our employment test is just assemble a bicycle out of a box. It’d be a shame to hear how many men fail that test. What happens when you have a baby and you have to put the crib together will you have your wife do it? And seriously you’re like guy or I give him the question do you know the difference between a flat ed and a Philips?
Adam: 00:18:24 Come on.
Eric: 00:18:25 I’m not even kidding man. It’s bad now but I’m saying is building a will is a real test. Like because we had so many guys when we’re interviewing wheel builders. We say we’re looking, came in and build a sample wheel and it just was so dog shit and would take them like 40 minutes to do it.
Adam: 00:18:44 I love building wheels it’s so organic. You can really-
Eric: 00:18:47 There’s a China wheel build right here it said that I agree that Kyle tell us that you can’t even it’s hard to get a decent wheel build right now. Because most of them are built in these factory settings and you got to spend like two or 3000 on a bike to get a bike properly built, I don’t think a machine can do it. But what do you think about that?
Adam: 00:19:11 I think a machine can get you better than a lot of people can but not the good ones.
Eric: 00:19:15 Not as good as the good ones.
Adam: 00:19:16 Right.
Eric: 00:19:16 You think you’re better than this lady right here?
Adam: 00:19:19 I don’t know. I bet she’s built a lot more wheels than I did.
Eric: 00:19:21 She’s using a machine too see that’s there’s two steps to machine. This is the machine that puts the spokes in and then they run them through another machine that tightens everything down.
Adam: 00:19:32 Those are the biggest gloves I’ve ever seen someone wear building wheels. It looks like she could-
Eric: 00:19:37 Well this is really easy. The way they’re doing this there’s no skill to it. This is basically a machine built wheel.
Adam: 00:19:41 Right. Yeah, she’s just feeding it.
Eric: 00:19:44 [Crosstalk 00:19:44]. Yeah. How long does it take you to build a wheel?
Adam: 00:19:46 Less than a half hour just-
Eric: 00:19:52 And it’s organic like it’s-
Adam: 00:19:53 Yeah, it’s slow and nice. It’s I really enjoy it.
Eric: 00:19:57 Therapeutic.
Adam: 00:19:57 The worst thing is a bad rim.
Eric: 00:19:59 Yeah.
Adam: 00:20:00 When you get a room that just fights you, just doesn’t want to be true.
Eric: 00:20:04 You know what’s the easiest wheel to build? You’re getting to fat bikes. Fat bike wheels are so easy to build.
Adam: 00:20:10 Yeah.
Eric: 00:20:10 Yeah road bike wills the hardest and fat wheel bikes are the easiest.
Adam: 00:20:16 Oh my gosh those things don’t budge.
Eric: 00:20:18 Yeah, it’s hard to screw up. You want to learn how to build I tried to get one of our guys inspire him to be somebody and I said you could be our top mechanic, but you got to get wheel building skill down.
Adam: 00:20:29 Right.
Eric: 00:20:29 And he practiced this is like I think the first Luna Cycle employee officially back when we were just me Ashley and nobody else for years before we started the website. And this guy man to this day couldn’t like assemble a bike much less build a wheel. But I think if I had a kid, I’d want him to learn how to build it’s like changing breaks.
Adam: 00:20:52 Right.
Eric: 00:20:52 I think every kid should know how to change breaks. One of the best things my dad did for me is if my car break down I’ll just change my own breaks. And I wish somebody would have forced me to build my own little when I was a kid. My dad I bet you’re that kind of dad and that’s how you got such amazing kids, right?
Adam: 00:21:10 They learned a lot. They didn’t build wheels, but they-
Eric: 00:21:13 You never made them build a wheel or?
Adam: 00:21:15 My two girls were not too heavy into the-
Eric: 00:21:17 Well you got girls, girls are different.
Adam: 00:21:19 Right.
Eric: 00:21:19 Hey, in fact, you built a bike for your daughter.
Adam: 00:21:22 I did.
Eric: 00:21:23 Do you got a picture of that one.
Adam: 00:21:25 Yeah, that’s the Schwinn.
Eric: 00:21:26 Oh that’s the first picture we saw.
Adam: 00:21:28 That’s the Schwinn with the wicker basket with the magic pie.
Eric: 00:21:31 Oh my God that thing’s beautiful I’ve never seen that picture.
Adam: 00:21:32 I found that bicycle in somebody’s trash.
Eric: 00:21:37 No way, that’s a beautiful that’s classic.
Adam: 00:21:39 Laying on the side of the road. It’s a Schwinn ladies three speed.
Eric: 00:21:42 I picked that same basket for my girly bike it caught on fire. But yeah, that’s right.
Adam: 00:21:49 And so my daughter loves it. She has it at college, it gets her… the great thing college can be-
Eric: 00:21:55 [Crosstalk 00:21:55].
Adam: 00:21:55 … really hard.
Eric: 00:21:54 It’s all black too, right?
Adam: 00:21:55 What’s that?
Eric: 00:21:56 It’s all black. That’s one of the innovations we did to the industry.
Adam: 00:22:00 The pie.
Eric: 00:22:01 Oh my God, do you know the pie was known for it. I call it the chrome dicks.
Adam: 00:22:06 That was so ugly.
Eric: 00:22:06 Yeah and I told them I want mine all black.
Adam: 00:22:08 Right.
Eric: 00:22:09 It was an innovation like pretty soon now they don’t even make the chrome ones anymore.
Adam: 00:22:13 You really stretched it out of the box for them.
Eric: 00:22:15 Yeah, I go, “What do you mean you want it all black?” I go, “Yeah, I it want all black or I’m not buying them.” And now I think everybody or the first time somebody else ordered them in all black you copycats it’s actually a really good motor, I’ll tell you why. I don’t know everybody always talks about backbone or whatever, because they’re just repeating what they’ve heard before but their golden climb it’s a large diameter.
Adam: 00:22:34 Yeah.
Eric: 00:22:35 So that makes it great automatically and it’s got a built in FOV sine wave controller.
Adam: 00:22:41 It’s a torque based too.
Eric: 00:22:42 Yeah.
Adam: 00:22:43 It’s really good.
Eric: 00:22:44 I mean I can’t believe how thin those steel forks are though.
Adam: 00:22:48 Those are Schwinn Aston Villa ’70’s torques.
Eric: 00:22:52 You got torque arms on there?
Adam: 00:22:53 Yeah right side.
Eric: 00:22:56 You don’t think it would snap those forks like a twig.
Adam: 00:22:58 Uh-uh.
Eric: 00:22:59 Wow.
Adam: 00:23:00 No.
Eric: 00:23:00 And it has region too, right?
Adam: 00:23:01 It has region so the side calipers are not a… it’s not horrible it definitely plays a nice role.
Eric: 00:23:08 I haven’t thought about the golden plan in a few years but when you asked me like when we first got into the business I was thinking which hub motor should we sell? I still think golden ply makes the best motors in the industry and the industry hasn’t changed at all when it comes to hub motors isn’t that weird?
Adam: 00:23:25 Oh, yeah.
Eric: 00:23:25 Except for that motor.
Adam: 00:23:26 It’s a secret weapon is that the two speed?
Eric: 00:23:28 That’s the most advanced hub motor I could find and I introduced it and I thought everybody would love me. It just made the dealer the guys kind of hate me and hate me anyway. Go and doing the two speed but man we worked so hard to do that kit well and that’s our Cyclone with the-
Adam: 00:23:42 On the rhino.
Eric: 00:23:43 Yeah. And we’re building all this cool shit and oh man, people are going to love this. And the more better shit we built, the more the regular guys kind of hated us.
Adam: 00:23:53 Haters got to hate.
Eric: 00:23:54 This guy really hates me right now. This is Kim Reed from he wanted us Suron deal. Yeah, he wanted to sell the Surons.
Adam: 00:24:03 Oh, well. Yeah, I think I’m going to do a two speed for my wife’s bike.
Eric: 00:24:08 Oh yeah, that’s a really good motor. So we went down to China and arranged that whole two speed deal. Now, here’s one of my secrets. I let it go on this video and I don’t think anybody ever watched my videos back then. But I’m running a 72 volt battery through that baby.
Adam: 00:24:22 I saw that you were streaming up the hill too.
Eric: 00:24:24 Yeah, I was like, “Oh man, I can’t believe I had long hair even then.”
Adam: 00:24:27 What’s the controller on that?
Eric: 00:24:29 Look at how long my hair is did I really look like that? So crazy. I looked really good with long hair when I was younger.
Adam: 00:24:41 It’s pretty high tech battery solution you got there.
Eric: 00:24:43 I do look like a homeless guy look at that. Oh yeah, on that track I do look homeless.
Adam: 00:24:47 Rolling the Three Wheeler with the…
Eric: 00:24:49 Yeah, looking awesome man. I didn’t realize I had a whole long hair way back then.
Adam: 00:24:53 That is classic.
Eric: 00:24:53 I think honestly, I didn’t get a haircut from the time I started Luna Cycle up until recently. Like seriously.
Adam: 00:25:00 You’re looking fresh.
Eric: 00:25:00 Thanks, man. Just doing it for the World Series of Poker I didn’t do it for anything else. I just want to see how bad I looked. I want to see how bald I’m getting and now I’m going to go in the World Series of Poker of clean shaven so nobody recognizes me. Yeah, I love this photo, we put so much work into that damn kit.
Adam: 00:25:16 Really?
Eric: 00:25:17 And we didn’t sell that many. And it’s like I learned the hard way. You do it stuff that you think is going to help the do it yourself industry. We put a lot of work into that. We do this well, you have a tangent motor, right?
Adam: 00:25:28 Yeah.
Eric: 00:25:28 So you need a double free wheel.
Adam: 00:25:30 Right.
Eric: 00:25:30 So we did a lot of work on this lunatic. I mean, it was like a year of development time and back and forth with the Taiwan factory to make that for a triple poll free wheel. Because the problem with those systems is that if the free wheel locks up you can injure yourself badly. So and back in those days, the only people who sold a kit like this was Sick Bike parts and that used like a $10 free wheel. And the only choice was like this wide industry for you all it was $80. So anyways we got a free wheel that was the quality of the wide industries even better because it has it will deal with sideways torque because the sideways torque is what causes them to lock and all these guys were getting injured doing mid drives.
Eric: 00:26:18 And I’ve always been a big mid drive supporter and I thought I was doing a big one for the community. And I posted it up on the mid drive thread on Inner Sphere and Amber Wooth deleted it. Goes no spam. I go, “Holly shit.” I go that’s not just I mean look guys, this is what we’ve been waiting for. Like I made it and it’s like kind of like I can’t get hit when same with that dual [inaudible 00:26:42] man that wasn’t just a motor. We had to get a controller and display working with it, that’s like diagnostics and display and it should have changed everything. But it takes a lot of work to build it to build, to build the wheel and everything.
Eric: 00:26:57 I prefer to just sell the kit than sell it because when you do it with a wheel build I think we lost our wheel builder at that time. And then that’s when we went through this like three-month phase trying to remember that Ashley? It took us three months to find a decent wheel builder we were happy with. And so it was just bad timing and I don’t think we sold very many of those kits. Like it was never a big like we sold more BBSHDs in a week or something.
Adam: 00:27:19 Right.
Eric: 00:27:21 Yeah, but so what free wheel did you use on that Cyclone bike? Let’s go back to oh, wow, that’s me yeah. Like this means I’m going to take that controller watch. I remember now. That thing-
Adam: 00:27:32 Looks like you’re going to throw it at somebody.
Eric: 00:27:33 Yeah, that was the big controller the one I had in my hand. Everybody was using that controller for those little bitty hub motors. And I think I threw it.
Adam: 00:27:43 It’s crazy.
Eric: 00:27:44 Yeah, I think I threw it. Guess how much that controller used to cost back then? That’s only two years ago that’s how much it was. From Polyeum 3V that’s a $200 controller. 40 amps, $200. My cost on that controller is 20 bucks.
Adam: 00:27:58 Looks like a toaster.
Eric: 00:28:00 So fucking ugly. Like we’d sell the ASI.
Adam: 00:28:03 Right.
Eric: 00:28:03 And I thought that would change everything. Look now I throw it bam. Now look, this is our controller. It’s tiny, you see puts out the same amps and it’s tiny. It’ll take 72 volts how’s that?
Adam: 00:28:16 And then you-
Eric: 00:28:17 Duct tape it. No backpack batteries for me guys.
Adam: 00:28:20 No, hey zip ties and gaffer tape.
Eric: 00:28:23 Duct tape man. Duct Tape works great. Duct tape and money miney on all our prototypes. Like when we had a backpack battery bike because we do a lot of prototypes actually. Nobody wants to ride it. It’s like oh my God, like put it like-
Adam: 00:28:36 Strapping on your bike.
Eric: 00:28:38 Oh my God, I don’t know what the thing is. I don’t even consider it a bike once you do it but I put duct taping it is just as bad almost like but we’re not… we’re just testing this bike. So we’re not really trying to like I think everybody should take the pride to build the bike properly and that’s the hard part is getting the battery to fit.
Adam: 00:28:56 Yeah.
Eric: 00:28:57 Everything else is easy now.
Adam: 00:28:58 That’s what took most of my time building.
Eric: 00:29:00 Look at this display I had on this thing, and why isn’t anybody buying anything else? That hub motor just changed its two speeds. And you know how it changes gears, it changes the direction of the motor.
Adam: 00:29:10 Yeah, that is trick.
Eric: 00:29:12 It’s sick it’s really sick.
Adam: 00:29:12 It’s really trick.
Eric: 00:29:13 It’s the most advanced motor I’ve seen.
Adam: 00:29:16 How’s the durability been on it?
Eric: 00:29:19 Awesome, yeah awesome. For that little motor, it’s good. I kind of lost sight on hub motors like this one kind of just took the air out of me.
Adam: 00:29:28 Right.
Eric: 00:29:29 And also I thought about getting back into it, but I really want a wheel building machine, because our wheel builder just tapped. Because he builds the wheels and all the apexes and part of the-
Adam: 00:29:39 It’s one of the bikes.
Eric: 00:29:39 Yeah. So like and we don’t want anyone else doing it. So like on a high end bike we don’t want it going out and the spokes coming loose. But yeah, for a while I was going to buy a wheel building machine, but I mean, I’ve built-
Adam: 00:29:54 You got to build a lot of wheels.
Eric: 00:29:56 They came over here and talked to me I couldn’t believe it. Like the wheel building company came here.
Adam: 00:30:01 Was it Taiwanese or?
Eric: 00:30:02 No they’re German. Holland they’re from Holland and they came to me and said they’d lease it to me and I go, “Oh shit.” I was thinking about it but I had too many projects. Last thing I want to do is try to get a wheel building machine going. Like we’ve got too many machines right now. And right as I say that we buy another machine.
Adam: 00:30:22 Right.
Eric: 00:30:23 But a wheel building machine is not high on the list.
Adam: 00:30:25 A new plasma lava injection molding robot cyborg brand.
Eric: 00:30:31 Oh yeah, we want to robotise right now. So we’re doing a lot of robots we’re doing a lot of stuff like I want to buy a robot and that’s like as much as one of these machines like just to feed material in press go. And it’s like, oh my God. Like wheel building you want it like you said it’s organic.
Adam: 00:30:47 Yeah.
Eric: 00:30:48 My only fear is we lose our wheel builder because it’s so valuable to us. Or we lose Kyle the bike mechanic. Kyle can build wheels, but he’s too busy building bikes.
Adam: 00:30:56 Right.
Eric: 00:30:57 Like but that’s the test of a real bike mechanic. Can they build a wheel or not? You know what Kyle tells me that if they could build a wheel they’d be managing a shop. You’re not going to find any regular bike mechanic who can build a wheel that’s here in California. I don’t know if that’s-
Adam: 00:31:10 But you can learn to build a wheel in a day.
Eric: 00:31:11 I don’t think so, guys. I don’t think I don’t know. These guys and we try to teach them how to assemble but you know how many bike mechanics we’ve gone through? You’re dealing with a different type of people right now.
Adam: 00:31:24 Yeah.
Eric: 00:31:25 Like I mean, there’s guys who’ve spent I don’t know how long on the forums and still haven’t built their first electric bike yet.
Adam: 00:31:31 Still checking it out.
Eric: 00:31:33 Yeah, how I mean you know. I was like I could understand if you’re building electric motorcycles or something.
Adam: 00:31:39 Oh right.
Eric: 00:31:40 But it’s like I don’t know it’s kind of a different time I think it’s like look at these guys like there’s just a machine button pusher here. But in terms of actually building things like your bike, I don’t see that very often at all. Like I said I think your bike’s the best Do It Yourself bike I’ve ever seen that I can think of. Well actually pull up the Ducati bike.
Adam: 00:32:04 That’s pretty sweet.
Eric: 00:32:05 Yeah. But that guy was like I went and visited him in Taiwan I expected to see a machine shop and his garage.
Adam: 00:32:13 Right.
Eric: 00:32:14 And he had a little CNC machine like this big. It’s so funny it’s like the opposite. I knew we had a lot of money and when I go visited his operation, it’s actually way way smaller than I ever like really like a $2,000 CNC machine. And he just works wizardry with it. You should get one.
Adam: 00:32:35 I know.
Eric: 00:32:36 It would change… there it goes. That’s all made out of a little bitty CNC machine and oh the jigs, he knows how to weld and all that. I mean, he’s an excellent builder but in terms of like special machinery, his most special machine is a tiny CNC machine because the guy is so cheap. He’s like, multimillionaire, he was on the cover of Wired Magazine. He sold his company for like $50 million.
Adam: 00:32:59 Oh my Gosh. Well good for him.
Eric: 00:33:00 Yeah, but I tell him you got to buy a real CNC machine, right? And he goes, “No, save money. I’m going to just…” I used to fight with him on this bike. One of these he’s built for me like I have one waiting for me. I’ve been winning for the last five years. And one’s for Luke one’s for me and they’re made out of titanium.
Adam: 00:33:20 Oh my.
Eric: 00:33:21 Yeah. And he’s actually got it going recently, like he got lost on this duty cycle thing, which was two hub motors. And now he’s back on this again, and he’s put one motor his whole problem was in the gear reduction. You see that?
Adam: 00:33:36 Yeah.
Eric: 00:33:37 So it’s an Astro motor and it’s got a gear reduction right there. Can you zoom in on that baby? And that was the big problem. And the way to do a gear reduction, actually I got it right here on my desk is to do it this way. You’ll love this, this will change your mindset. That’ll warp your mind. Look at that. That’s a harmonic gear reduction right there. And that’s what the Ducati has on it right now.
Adam: 00:34:00 Really?
Eric: 00:34:01 Yeah. And you could get up to 200 to one on that.
Adam: 00:34:05 Yeah. That’s pretty quality.
Eric: 00:34:10 Yeah, you can buy one right now on eBay.
Adam: 00:34:12 Really?
Eric: 00:34:13 Yeah, buy them used.
Adam: 00:34:15 What does it come off of?
Eric: 00:34:17 I mean, what do they make with these?
Adam: 00:34:18 Yeah.
Eric: 00:34:19 I mean they use them in some kind of high end machine.
Adam: 00:34:21 Right.
Eric: 00:34:21 But you see it can you imagine a last promoter what it would do on this? But the problem with it is-
Adam: 00:34:29 And it’s quiet.
Eric: 00:34:30 Absolutely quiet. How can we don’t see more bikes with this? And you know why he didn’t build his bike with it? Expensive man. And you know what I used to fight that beautiful bike he wouldn’t spend on a roll off. It’s too expensive, man. He’d only do a New Vinci on it.
Adam: 00:34:47 That’s crazy.
Eric: 00:34:47 I was like, “How can you put a New Vinci on that thing? A New Vinci is such a piece of crap.”
Adam: 00:34:50 500.
Eric: 00:34:51 There you go. There you go.
Adam: 00:34:53 Wow.
Eric: 00:34:54 Yep, that’s going to be your next build. Do that in a 3220.
Adam: 00:34:59 Yeah.
Eric: 00:35:00 If you do-
Adam: 00:35:00 Because that’ll take a 20,000 RPM.
Eric: 00:35:03 And you hear how quiet that is, this is quiet.
Adam: 00:35:05 Down to 200.
Eric: 00:35:06 You can get it in any level you want.
Adam: 00:35:09 Right.
Eric: 00:35:09 These are the ones on eBay right now. Well, hey, baby you might want to buy one of these. I think let’s buy one right now. Go back. I think there was a good deal on one. If you see one for a couple of hundred bucks, you should just snap it up right there. Right there. Go back before somebody else does, we’re live right? 14 to 50. What’s the reduction on this? 14 rated torque L50. It might be tiny.
Adam: 00:35:33 It looks pretty small.
Eric: 00:35:34 Yeah. But you don’t need much for an electric bike. You’d sometimes be surprised like the over rate some of these things. Huh?
Ashley: 00:35:43 Is that what you’re holding?
Eric: 00:35:44 No, this one’s beef here. What do you think? Is that what I’m holding? Let me see that’s a good question. Where is this at? Damn it shopping while live streaming is the worst thing ever.
Adam: 00:35:56 Yeah, on the front there 1450.
Eric: 00:35:58 It says 1450 buy it. Buy it baby buy now.
Adam: 00:36:03 Wow.
Eric: 00:36:03 Yeah buy it now same one. Merry Christmas we’ll get it for you buy now boom, got it. Yeah. Ah buy it on my computer just jump over on my computer this is live baby before somebody grabs it. Dude that’s like $1,000 reduction here. Seriously, I was like pricing these things out they’re made in Germany and stuff. Hey, somebody just grab on my computer and buy it. Oh, Ashley’s buying it. Ashley’s like flash. Anyway. So Adam, let’s talk about your accident and how that changed everything.
Adam: 00:36:37 Yeah, that was-
Eric: 00:36:38 That’s like one of the most I remember that’s when we became friends.
Adam: 00:36:41 Yeah.
Eric: 00:36:42 And when you started inspiring me because whenever I get unhappy about something stupid I think about that story.
Adam: 00:36:49 Huh.
Eric: 00:36:50 And you’re still living with it now your day to day is dealing with pain. Are you feeling the pain now or we got your mind off it a little bit?
Adam: 00:36:58 Got my mind off it right here.
Eric: 00:37:00 So this is good?
Adam: 00:37:01 Yeah.
Eric: 00:37:01 We’re going to take you to a Korean restaurant.
Adam: 00:37:03 We’ll go get some Korean barbecue and-
Eric: 00:37:04 And some beer and forget all about it. So go ahead and tell us.
Adam: 00:37:07 So I got into electric bikes as kind of a therapy for recovery from a really severe burn. What happened was my neighbor, elderly couple had a kitchen fire and they came out of the house asking for help. And I saw them and I grabbed a fire extinguisher and went in and there were a couple of different fires in the kitchen. And so I put them out with the fire extinguisher but the smoke was just billowing off of the cook top, there was a pan on the cook top. And I could hear the smoke alarms going off and smoke was filling the house and I didn’t know if there was anyone else in the house and because things were moving really fast. And so I said we got to get this pan out of the house because the house is filling up with smoke and so I picked it up. And when I picked up the frying pan, it exploded.
Eric: 00:38:10 Oh my God.
Adam: 00:38:11 So it was full of burning oil, which I didn’t know at the time. And so it had a lid on top of it and when I picked up the pan, the lid rocked a little bit and oxygen flooded under. And it was six-foot fireball so took the eyebrows off, burnt my nose and my ears and first, second degree on my face. But the oil I leaned back and all of the burning oil from the pan covered my hand. And so my hand was on fire with burning oil. And so that was pretty severe.
Eric: 00:38:49 So your right hand and you’re right handed.
Adam: 00:38:51 And I had the fire extinguisher still in my left hand. So I ended up putting my hand out with the fire extinguisher but it was it’s what they call Third Degree deep tissue. So there was the bones were exposed, the tendons were burned. It was big.
Eric: 00:39:09 It’s a real problem.
Adam: 00:39:10 Yeah, it was pretty messy. So it was five days in ICU and a couple of skin grafts and some reconstruction on the hand. And that’s one of the more painful types of injuries that you can go through and the recovery is fairly long and drawn out. And so I started looking for something to keep me my brain active. And I’d been thinking before that about maybe build an electric bike or something like that. I’d built some 250 or some 25CC two stroke bikes in the past and so I thought, yeah, I think I’ll get into electric bikes and that’s when I started spending a lot of time going through the Luna site and the website Electric bikes.
Eric: 00:40:00 And you found tangent.
Adam: 00:40:02 And found tangent.
Eric: 00:40:04 Tangent’s the real deal.
Adam: 00:40:05 Right.
Eric: 00:40:05 Yeah.
Adam: 00:40:06 So it helps that I’m in my 50s and I have some disposable income so I can find some fun stuff to build.
Eric: 00:40:14 Yeah, you built like probably one of the coolest self-built bikes I’ve ever seen.
Adam: 00:40:18 But it was so great because it was a community. It was great connecting with you. We had some great discussions. And it was two o’clock in the morning till four o’clock in the morning, three or four nights a week. That was kind of my routine doing some research and learning.
Eric: 00:40:39 I remember yeah, having long discussions with you and you told me that story and it really inspired me.
Adam: 00:40:43 Yeah.
Eric: 00:40:44 Because I couldn’t stress out over stupid stuff. And when I see a friend that’s going and we felt like friends, even though we never met.
Adam: 00:40:51 Yeah.
Eric: 00:40:51 But you told me this amazing story and all the amazing things you do the builds you do. And then you gave one of the best gifts anybody ever gave me. And I know the pain that you were in to get that gift while you were in pain. And I just want to show it he made this with his own hands when he was hurt and it’s really a brilliant design. You want to tell us about it? And imagine he made this after his accident when his right hand’s really messed up.
Adam: 00:41:21 Yeah.
Eric: 00:41:22 And at the time the wolf pack was not even conceived like we were just doing custom battery packs for each bike. Kind of like your bike. I think maybe I was inspired by your bike when I think about it. The second I saw that bike I go, “Why can’t we do that?”
Adam: 00:41:38 Well you need some battery solutions.
Eric: 00:41:39 Yeah. But anyways so he sent me this. It’s a work of art and I walked around showing everybody that and-
Adam: 00:41:47 Well I just you had been talking about looking for new mounting solution and kind of formed factor and things like that.
Eric: 00:41:55 I was playing with magnets.
Adam: 00:41:57 Yeah and I said I’ve been thinking about magnets too.
Eric: 00:42:00 That’s right. That is magnetic. I forgot all about that because I lost the key to that thing a long time ago.
Adam: 00:42:05 Got it.
Eric: 00:42:05 Yeah. So here’s a magnetic mounted pack and I was obsessed with magnets at the time and I had mechanical serious mechanical engineers on my team telling me it just wouldn’t happen.
Adam: 00:42:17 Yeah.
Eric: 00:42:18 That there was going to be big insurmountable problems.
Adam: 00:42:21 So the big thing I remember researching was does a magnetic field interrupt with the electric hold?
Eric: 00:42:28 Yeah, we know that’s no problem.
Adam: 00:42:28 And that’s no problem. So I said if you don’t mind, let me play around and I’ll just ship you.
Eric: 00:42:35 It’s the most amazing gift anyone ever gave me I mean, that I can remember.
Adam: 00:42:39 Yeah, so that was the-
Eric: 00:42:40 I mean, anyone like a stranger from the internet like it’s Leslie.
Adam: 00:42:44 The magnetic.
Eric: 00:42:45 Look at this guy’s. This is like look at this. This is the beginning of the wolf pack right here. And at the time, we were really fighting a battle. We were building custom batteries for custom bikes that was our idea. And we’d do batteries ten at a time and it’s just too tough. Like every battery design is like it was back when we thought battery design was easy because we’re spot holding.
Adam: 00:43:10 Right.
Eric: 00:43:11 And so now that we’re wire mounting it’s like more of a thing, but this is beautiful. I forgot all about it that it was magnetic, shit. He uses a lot of little magnets that’s better. Are you a mechanical engineer by any chance or?
Adam: 00:43:24 No just-
Eric: 00:43:25 We have a mechanical engineer on our team who’s pretty good with magnets and a lot of little magnets is better than one big magnet. So and the closer you have them together the better too but this is beautiful. It’s starting to rust huh? We’ll put some oil in there. Is that wood or is that metal right here? That’s wood it’s just wood.
Adam: 00:43:46 Where.
Eric: 00:43:47 That’s just wood.
Adam: 00:43:48 That is wood, yeah.
Eric: 00:43:49 Stained wood.
Adam: 00:43:50 Yeah.
Eric: 00:43:50 I thought it was rust. When I think of magnetic mounts now I think of these things rusting. So on our pack did you know this? I don’t know if you’ve seen our pack lately, look at this. It took us a while to figure this out.
Adam: 00:44:03 That’s a new stainless, right?
Eric: 00:44:05 Magnetic stainless.
Adam: 00:44:06 Yeah.
Eric: 00:44:06 So it was really hard to get magnetic stainless steel and then we use a mople laser to engrave it. So that got first we did stickers and then we put a layer of padding on it, but when you put a layer to keep it from rusting. First we gunmetal them. So I learn how to do gun metalling.
Adam: 00:44:23 Kind of the blowing.
Eric: 00:44:23 We did blowing, exactly blowing.
Adam: 00:44:26 Right.
Eric: 00:44:26 And we did that and it was just messy. It’s too messy to do in California I’ll tell you that.
Adam: 00:44:30 Right.
Eric: 00:44:31 And we’re getting in trouble for this.
Adam: 00:44:34 It’s not nontoxic.
Eric: 00:44:36 Yeah, like if we do it outside, like we wouldn’t do it in the building.
Adam: 00:44:40 Right.
Eric: 00:44:40 But in California that shit’s not cool. So I knew we needed another solution. So I go, why don’t we just paint the potting over the top of the pack. And so I’m telling people now, at first we just put the potting over and let putting one off.
Adam: 00:44:55 Right.
Eric: 00:44:56 But then it gets too thick on it and it really makes a huge difference. Like you want as close to the metal as possible. So now I’m telling people scrape it off with a screwdriver and then just oil it every once in a while.
Adam: 00:45:09 It’s surface rust.
Eric: 00:45:10 Yeah, blowing is basically just oiling it anyway. So same way your gun rust every once in a while.
Adam: 00:45:17 Right.
Eric: 00:45:18 Put some oil on it it’ll be fine.
Adam: 00:45:21 But this turned out so great, though. I mean, that’s just such a quality. It’s not like you just took a form factor and improved it. I mean, you took the battery.
Eric: 00:45:29 Well, we looked at this thing for months, right? And he uses a really well a lot of people are complaining now that we don’t have this a locking mechanism. You know what I mean? But I did look at this design and it did set us in a different direction.
Adam: 00:45:45 Right.
Eric: 00:45:45 Because for one, you became my friend and I really wanted to show you that this had an impression on me. I started loving the idea of wood, working with wood and we’d already been doing a lot of wood molds with our routers with the custom packs, but then we went nuts. We made this one by hand. This is the original wolf right here. And this is a gift for you. It’s the very, very first wolf.
Adam: 00:46:12 No way.
Eric: 00:46:13 And it’s made by hand.
Adam: 00:46:16 That is very cool.
Eric: 00:46:18 Yep. And you see it has the original thing on the back and you can take that off, and you have the second generation of woofs and see we used that very piece to make the castings and that we use to make all the boxes with and it’s a gift for you. So I hope it means something to you.
Adam: 00:46:35 Thanks that’s very cool. It means a lot.
Eric: 00:46:35 It’s actually the original woof. We don’t need it anymore because now we made it out of… we make it out of billet. So it’s build this way.
Adam: 00:46:44 15 pounds.
Eric: 00:46:45 But for what we needed at the time it was… yeah, feel that. Oh jeez.
Adam: 00:46:48 Oh gosh, that’s 30 pounds.
Eric: 00:46:51 Yeah, and it’s like don’t drop it on your foot.
Adam: 00:46:53 Right.
Eric: 00:46:53 Yeah, and so we use the… well basically, at the time, I had a lot of good engineers around me. And they’re always telling me like man you don’t use CNCs for making parts because we got the CNCs and we just have them running making parts making sprockets or whatever adapters. Like no, no, no, no and my old age I’ve become just like them is that CNCs are just made for making tooling. I really think like that right now.
Adam: 00:47:19 Jake’s in the prototyping.
Eric: 00:47:21 Not even prototyping just a prototype when we do wood, I love wood but you can route with wood but you ruin your CNC machine.
Adam: 00:47:30 Yeah.
Eric: 00:47:30 So we don’t have it right now we don’t have any CNC machine setup for what at one time I did. Just to make wood but here we go. That’s us cutting. That’s not wood that’s some kind of weird plaster and boy would it mess up the machine. And then the machine can’t cut metal after that because the problem with cutting metal with the CNC is that after you cut wood with it you cut metal after you start a fire.
Adam: 00:47:52 So it’s got all the dust just accumulated in the-
Eric: 00:47:56 Here’s our very first custom battery pack right there. It’s called the ludicrous the Luna Ludicrous.
Adam: 00:48:02 It’s tight.
Eric: 00:48:03 And see wow Ashley, good job finding these pictures but that was our first custom battery this was before you inspired me with this.
Adam: 00:48:10 Yeah.
Eric: 00:48:10 You probably inspired me with that other bike of yours. I go man if some guy with no tools can do that on one hand, imagine what we can do. I didn’t know you had one hand [crosstalk 00:48:20].
Adam: 00:48:20 Oh that’s funny.
Eric: 00:48:21 But this is one of those Chinese fat suspension bikes.
Adam: 00:48:24 Yeah.
Eric: 00:48:24 And we’d assemble everything here and suspension looks good, works like shit and so against what I believe in, I believe in no suspension is better than bad suspension every time. So even if you put a decent fork that has a DNM fork on it, which stands for do not move. It has that front suspension fork. Those are both cheap as crap. Look I hate I would never put a name on anything like that right now. This is really cheap suspension, I think those suspension ports cost me like 25 bucks.
Adam: 00:48:56 That makes me nervous.
Eric: 00:48:58 And it’s like if you have some crappy suspension I think that bike would move like an inch. Why does it look good? Everybody wants like full suspension. It’s like I don’t know what it is about the Chinese, but they cannot figure out suspension yet. Isn’t it funny? But look how beautiful those rims are. Oh it’s beautiful man, they got the rims figured out for sure. And there’s our sprocket so and when we did this, you don’t see many companies doing custom batteries for the bike.
Adam: 00:49:27 No, just the big boys.
Eric: 00:49:31 Yeah, not even then man. I don’t think anybody maybe specialized does a little two batteries and they make them generic and they fit in every bike. If you notice like specialized bikes they don’t even change your component system. They use the same component system across the whole electric bike line. That’s really weird.
Adam: 00:49:48 Interesting.
Eric: 00:49:49 Yeah. Like they make them as low variance as possible. They definitely use the same motors, same battery but yeah. But that was our very first custom electric bike. I don’t think that we were big into selling bikes at first. We were more into just surviving selling kits and doing batteries. And I remember, I mean-
Adam: 00:50:11 The BBS was just big for you guys, right? It just-
Eric: 00:50:14 Well yeah, it was big for us but at the time we started selling kits and then we started building batteries well we first started building batteries and we realized you can’t sell batteries without kits and vice versa. And that the step to build bikes was a big step for us. And it’s something I always think about. Do we really want to be building bikes? It’s a lot.
Adam: 00:50:38 Yeah.
Eric: 00:50:41 I remember thinking exactly that 80% of our company’s effort is going into these bikes. But we’re not going to become a bike brand just selling BBSHD kits with cool batteries. And what makes my heart thump is like bike builds like yours, like I forgot who you were and how we became friends until I saw that first bike of yours, I love it. So that right there is absolutely the first bike that Luna built. And it came from a challenge from electric cycles. And they said that they had some guy post on Anglosphere that I’ll never forget this thread that he bought this bike from electric cycles pre-built. And it was only like a few hundred dollars extra than buying a kit from us and buying the bike online. And we said fuck that.
Eric: 00:51:28 And we said we’re going to build the bike and we’re going to offer it for $1,000 cheaper than electric cycles is doing. Exactly what we did. And you know what, we built that bike and we went and bought the bike from a local store and offered it for 1000 from Wheel World, bought it from wheel world, brought home. And one night we built it and I said we’re going to do this and see how dirty everybody’s hands are. That’s Josh Tuwolder on the far left, that’s Santiago he’s like a master builder. It’s because that bike was fucking hard to build that like it was one of the hardest bikes we’ve ever built because we didn’t know any… here’s the thing is we didn’t learn about bikes until we really started building bikes.
Adam: 00:52:05 Right.
Eric: 00:52:06 So that one had some weird bottom bracket a PF 41 or whatever. And so the kit just didn’t fit in it. So we had a lathe and we had to sit there and make an adapter for it and we wanted it to be done and on the website that night. So yeah, and now we sell the adapters make them and we feel like and it was really good for us to learn about the kits. Because I said, “Look, I want to have every single adapter those are made here and we can make those…”
Eric: 00:52:36 Right now we got a machine that just makes 1000 of those and like it’s like a little robot, you can just stick a big rod in the back and it’s like such a… baby, are we really charging 36 bucks for that? We should be charging 20 bucks for that. It’s such an easy piece to make. But anyways, we ended up as a company becoming way stronger by building our own bikes in house, because we always have bike experts around us. Whenever I have a question about it, hey, why does this bike do this? You learn a lot about everything.
Adam: 00:53:12 Because you’re not a reseller you’re a creator.
Eric: 00:53:15 That’s right.
Adam: 00:53:15 And that’s where the magic happens I think.
Eric: 00:53:22 I’m glad we did it. And sometimes I think we would have made more money just focusing on parts and we wouldn’t have needed such a big space. Look at that those are all my initial mechanics. No wonder did they all suck.
Adam: 00:53:32 Yeah, no wonder, no wonder you’re focused on kits.
Eric: 00:53:37 But I remember we got I remember buying back in those days, that was when we were in Gardena and making the step to building whole bikes and we sold a lot of bikes right off the bat. Because first Electric is like oh, they only have one bike and watch this. I’m like in three or four weeks we had a lineup of 10 bikes. This bike we’re really proud of that’s a banana bike. We brought in close cycles by the… I had closed cycles in originally Super 73 I believe Super 73 used to coast cycles like this one the Taiwan trade show is the best bike ever. Like best bike of the show. And suddenly Super 73 is selling this with the BBSHD as a Kickstarter project.
Eric: 00:54:20 And anyways, we released this bike before the Kickstarter project bike shipped. So it’s either us or 73 Super 73 came first but the original prototype bikes from Super 73 were based on close cycles. And then they ended up after they got everybody’s money building their own bike but then we came to market with this and released it before they actually shipped their bikes. And that bike cost us like 600 bucks.
Eric: 00:54:47 That’s a cool bike.
Adam: 00:54:49 Like we got samples from China of pre-built bikes like the who are they the… that bike’s made out of steel.
Ashley: 00:54:59 Mario.
Eric: 00:54:59 Mario’s or whatever. And it’s expensive to build this bike because the frame costs us like 600 bucks, but I haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve seen the Super 73’s and they’re not that good and they’re scrambles. The quality of that bike is insane and it shouldn’t be that hard. I mean, it’s the easiest bike in the world to do well, like when we ever think about just designing a bike from scratch we look at this bike. But they just did everything perfect. Like every weld the paint’s really good. The colors on the rims and I don’t know why but whenever I look at another bike like it’s just way off. Like they get too fancy with the bins. I haven’t seen a good one of that beats our bike or I would go with it because it’s really expensive for what it is.
Adam: 00:55:46 That’s crazy.
Eric: 00:55:46 It’s 600 bucks wholesale cost and we buy them by the container.
Adam: 00:55:49 That is crazy.
Eric: 00:55:50 Yeah. And then we have to build them. We buy them it’s just bicycles. And then we have to put the kits and everything on them. So this is us all dry riding. This is back when we were in Gardena and this was a normal ride for us, we would just go down to a park nearby and rip it up and it’s all we had. Yeah, now we got the beats and all that stuff but.
Adam: 00:56:09 So how is the e-bike vibe here in California? Is it accommodating and or is it kind of oppressive?
Eric: 00:56:21 That’s a really good question. I think it’s accommodating, I think it is accommodating everywhere. But when you’re doing stuff like this, it’s kind of assholeish I’m not going to lie. Like riding around in a park. But we’re doing it at night. Nobody’s there. Like the park people told us it was okay that we’re running the park like they said, just do it after we’re gone. And so this was after everybody was gone. The park people even gave us their blessing and we just ripped this up, but we’re filming a video there’s a reason for it. But here’s us doing an Impala [inaudible 00:56:59] when we ride. But as long as you keep a low Profile and don’t ride a bike that’s obviously an electric bike, you have no problem at all.
Eric: 00:57:06 It’s the guys who ride stuff that’s outwardly an electric bike. So I think that laws and stuff like that helps because it makes us all build bikes that are stealthy that don’t have an impact on the environment. I think when you hear what happened to Gas Scooters, they became illegal. Not because people hated gas scooters, but they hated the noise. And nobody wanted electric scooters because they’re too slow. And nobody cares if your electric scooter’s too fast in my experience, nobody. But so yeah, these are bikes that these guys both ended up joining our team. That’s Josh and his dad and those are bikes that they built together.
Adam: 00:57:53 I think I read that on the blog.
Eric: 00:57:55 Yeah, those are two really precious guys to us.
Adam: 00:57:59 Yeah.
Eric: 00:57:59 And look at the hard tell bikes, this guy on the left is but both of them are hell of riders. Never had the need for full suspension I tell Josh he thinks about it all the time. And so I gave him I think I didn’t I give him a full suspension? No I gave him a really good 3000 oh and the big point somebody was asking me this lately because we used to ride a lot back then.
Adam: 00:58:17 Right.
Eric: 00:58:18 Like we should go well Matt was asking me like why don’t we go out and you can see this kind of stuff we did a lot. We just try to go up big hills like this. Taking turns we did this kind of thing all the time. All of us rode fat tire bikes and Fat Tire full suspensions are hard to come by. So and we just do yeah, so anyway. That was our thing is riding Fat Tire pikes because we’re by the beach it’s kind of Sandy.
Adam: 00:58:44 It’s nice on the beach.
Eric: 00:58:45 I love for off road riding I love fat tires and front suspension’s such a what do you call it luxury with a fat bike because you already got all the-
Adam: 00:58:56 Oh yeah, just take a few more pounds out of the tire and soften in up.
Eric: 00:59:00 I still don’t know a decent fat bike, full suspension. Like I think that’s really over the top.
Adam: 00:59:07 Right.
Eric: 00:59:07 I don’t know if they’re offering them yet but to me fat bikes have always made really sense as a builder because they look ridiculously cool. And you don’t have to worry about the extra tires.
Adam: 00:59:18 Yeah, as an electric bike they’re awesome.
Eric: 00:59:20 Did they have them when you were managing your bike store or?
Adam: 00:59:22 They had just started I think from my did a rod doing double rim lace together.
Eric: 00:59:31 Oh, and they do tools and then what would they use for tires?
Adam: 00:59:35 Gosh, what would they use for tires?
Eric: 00:59:38 Pugsley was the first that I know of.
Adam: 00:59:40 The Pugsley.
Eric: 00:59:41 That’s the very first tire fat bike I know of.
Adam: 00:59:45 Yeah.
Eric: 00:59:45 Yeah, but that’s Carl. He’s like six foot eight. Yeah, I’m trying to get him down here do a podcast with him. He’s so cool.
Adam: 00:59:56 Is that the Apocalypse?
Eric: 00:59:58 Yeah, that guy is funny, he used to ride backpack batteries and make fun of them. And what are you doing with that backpack battery. But anyway so going back on that so I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but this is what we do is we make a box.
Adam: 01:00:19 Right.
Eric: 01:00:19 And then we feel that what either we put the battery in it and then we pod it from there. And lately we’ve seen it looks really cool if we paint it from the bottom. It’s like kind of geo coding.
Adam: 01:00:30 Yeah.
Eric: 01:00:31 It’s just been endless on how good lately… I don’t know if this is one of the latest batteries or not great but we a problem with these breaking because these were 3D printed pieces. So we had to have these plastic injected.
Adam: 01:00:44 Because they’re just brittle.
Eric: 01:00:45 Yeah, and first we 3D printed them and we just changed the material we’re making them out of like these are kind of rubbery. And the brand new ones use plastic injected pieces that are tough as nails. And also like we started using jigs when we pod them because if you look at older one’s like this one’s probably an old one. No, we were using jigs here you could tell that they would kind of bow out.
Adam: 01:01:06 Oh right.
Eric: 01:01:07 And then it would make them-
Adam: 01:01:08 Unsecured.
Eric: 01:01:09 … a little bit heavier than if you just so we had to make and guess how we made the wood in the jigs how I gave myself away as wood?
Adam: 01:01:16 There you go.
Eric: 01:01:17 So now when everything’s about tooling it’s so much easier to make tooling really fast out of wood.
Adam: 01:01:23 Right.
Eric: 01:01:24 Because a lot of what we’re doing is just fixturing or holding things down.
Adam: 01:01:28 Right.
Eric: 01:01:28 Like right now we’re doing new battery design a new mire bomb pack and we’re working on the fixture and we’re debating I want to just make it out of wood and be done with it. But we don’t have a wood shop.
Adam: 01:01:38 Right.
Eric: 01:01:39 While you’re down you should make it for us.
Adam: 01:01:40 And knock a couple out.
Eric: 01:01:42 Yeah, you could probably make it in no time if we still had our wood shop together. But unfortunately though, and here I wanted you to see this one. This is the first Apex pack made out of wood. And I believe that we just carved that by hand.
Adam: 01:01:59 Really?
Eric: 01:01:59 Same with that one, that was made by hand these are not see and seed.
Adam: 01:02:02 That’s crazy.
Eric: 01:02:03 Yeah and you know what the hard part is, is getting that perfect smooth finish. We really had big because we were casting we were trying to pull off casting instead of just vacuum, vacuum forming is easy. But when we casted any imperfection did you see that one got the crack down the side down the middle.
Adam: 01:02:21 Yeah.
Eric: 01:02:22 That’s from breaking it out of cast like we cast this shape for example.
Adam: 01:02:26 Sure.
Eric: 01:02:27 And you can see all the imperfections come out really quick.
Adam: 01:02:30 Right.
Eric: 01:02:31 But if you make that cast out of aluminum you get a really shiny result. We just recently, do we got the new Apex pack we can show? We just recently finished casting kicked our ass for six months. We finally figured it out. We had like casting experts coming over here from worked for Disney and stuff. And like we figured out okay, we got closer to casting when we started doing CNC shapes aluminum shapes because the wood just when you break it out of the mold, the wood would break apart so we wouldn’t get that many shots at it. So when we do this and this one before we could use it for a mold we’d have to shine it we’d have to buff it all out.
Adam: 01:03:14 So it’ll release a little easier and give a good finish.
Eric: 01:03:17 Yeah, we’re casting every little detail counts and when we started doing this we got a lot closer getting what we wanted and then finally we finally got it but still like casting is really scary because if you screw up but there’s we got a lot of visually imperfect packs that we’re going to bring you one right now. But we finally figured it out and it involved action molding the what he called the outer making the whole deal. What would you call that? Making the whole tool.
Adam: 01:03:44 They yeah, the casting.
Eric: 01:03:47 The mold, not the mold this is the slug but we now actually make the mold and that ended up being the answer but trying usually you put this in silicone, and the silicone rise and you get your mold. Oh shit. And you got to try to get this pack alpha here because this is actually you can’t get it off. You have to bring the whole thing up. I want you to see how strong that magnet holds. So this is it. This is the new Apollo pack.
Adam: 01:04:15 That’s such a good looking pack.
Eric: 01:04:17 Yeah.
Adam: 01:04:17 It’s all clear.
Eric: 01:04:18 She just did this, this is my first time seeing the side panel. How come you didn’t do the other side baby?
Ashley: 01:04:24 I didn’t have time.
Eric: 01:04:25 You didn’t have time because we had to start the podcast.
Adam: 01:04:28 That’s looking good.
Eric: 01:04:29 And that’s made with MJ one sales but see the little ripples in there baby, you got to heat that with a heat gun. Show it to the camera if you can. But yeah, that’s how we evolved. And see that’s a pretty big evolution from this.
Adam: 01:04:45 Yeah.
Eric: 01:04:46 And this was our first real attempt at a real pack. So this came out kind of imperfect and we didn’t even autoclave this when we autoclave it it comes out way better. And the magnetic mount with this nub, works perfect.
Adam: 01:04:58 Just locks it.
Eric: 01:04:59 Locks it. Did you see him over there kicking at it?
Adam: 01:05:02 Yeah, right.
Eric: 01:05:03 And it’s not coming off the bike and our goal was we wanted to be look like aliens made it.
Adam: 01:05:10 I like that.
Eric: 01:05:10 Yeah, that’s been our goal the whole time but and the wolf pack’s been yeah, so it all started with your thing. And when I saw this I was like, Oh my God, like we got to be able to have something like this and then just kind of evolved.
Adam: 01:05:24 That was fun it was just right time.
Eric: 01:05:26 Yeah. And you know what? And I want to show you this one. This is our first attempt and boy is that ugly.
Adam: 01:05:38 It looks like a space shuttle.
Eric: 01:05:39 That’s a 3D piece.
Adam: 01:05:41 Yeah.
Eric: 01:05:42 Now the person who made that is not an engineer. She’s an industrial designer. She’s a great industrial designer, but we used to call her she’s too much into arts and crafts and there’s big problems with that one. It’s too big. So it doesn’t… we needed something that form fit the 18650s as close as possible because otherwise we’re wasting all this money on podding. And she was buying this podding from this store and she wasn’t doing the math right. And she was buying it by the gallon. It was like 300 bucks a gallon. And she said, but it only uses like 30 bucks to pod a pack. And I actually measured it and it’s really costing us like 200 bucks each to pod it back.
Adam: 01:06:20 Right.
Eric: 01:06:20 Yeah. And we used to call her arts and crafts, like she was more into arts and crafts and then when we started having our engineers go at it, we started to come up with real solutions like we need exactly this much space around the cells. And so that shape there became exactly what we needed. And here you can see it, it becomes even more advanced where we have the shape with the BMS in it.
Adam: 01:06:46 Right.
Eric: 01:06:47 Yeah, and then it was step by step it just became better and better. This one still has wires in it, but you can see this wolf here, it has no… if you look at a pack usually with the case off of it it’s ugly.
Adam: 01:07:01 It looks so vulnerable too.
Eric: 01:07:04 Oh they’re terrible.
Adam: 01:07:05 Yeah.
Eric: 01:07:06 Yeah, the weakest part of the battery once we got everything else down is the harness wires. And one harness wire comes loose, vibrates loose or whatever the pack is gone.
Adam: 01:07:16 Right.
Eric: 01:07:17 So anyways, we struggled with wire harness or somebody fucks up building it. So the way we figured out was the way to win harnessing was not to harness like just get-
Adam: 01:07:30 Get rid of it.
Eric: 01:07:30 Get rid of it completely. And we just took it to an extreme and I want to say wireless pack even though it’s a wire bond pack. And I’ve never talked about this pack in video but wire bonding and aluminum buses like that and we heat gun under an infrared every pack we build, you know the first prototypes. These packs don’t get warm at all, and the podding helps dissipate the heat. And it just did wonders for us. So if you take your pack that you built for your bike and set that inner tube, just put a bit of podding on, I’ll give you some to take home with you. Hold it in place, help with the heat dissipation because you need something to transfer the heat to the case.
Adam: 01:08:13 Got it. Makes sense.
Eric: 01:08:15 Yeah, because if you just put foam in it, it becomes like an insulator.
Adam: 01:08:18 That’s right.
Eric: 01:08:19 Right. And certain poddings have different heat insulations. And we know all that from real testing. Like now we got real equipment that I’ve always dreamed of having. And we just found out so much so fast. But what you want is something that just dissipates the heat to the case as fast as possible.
Adam: 01:08:39 Well, it’s pretty amazing when we walk through the battery development and production, just the investment you’ve made in the tooling and the testing and the technology that the wolf pack this new version has is it just seems like there’s nothing I mean, the only thing that comes close as inside of a Tesla.
Eric: 01:09:02 Yeah, I have to agree. The Tesla battery is insane. And we had one here for a long time and it helped inspire us. And I mean every day it gets better like we’re using a wire binder now.
Adam: 01:09:13 Yeah.
Eric: 01:09:16 See how these wire bonds are kind of crooked kind of, because we’re using like not a very good machine. Now we’re using the very latest FNK machine.
Adam: 01:09:24 FNK.
Eric: 01:09:25 And they came here to help train… FNK or FNG.
Adam: 01:09:27 The FNK. I like that, FNK.
Eric: 01:09:30 Is it FNK or what? Yeah and it does is perfect straight wire that’s like they’re this German company, and it’s no nonsense like it’s like.
Adam: 01:09:41 They’re German.
Eric: 01:09:42 It’s so straight.
Adam: 01:09:43 Yeah.
Eric: 01:09:43 Like and it literally reduces the width of our pack because we always have to take into account that the wire bond has an oval, this one’s like nice and tight.
Adam: 01:09:52 That’s cool.
Eric: 01:09:53 I believe it’s the same machine that makes the model three pack and the other big thing it does is as it’s making the pack it checks and makes sure each bond is strong.
Adam: 01:10:07 So it bonds and then kind of tugs it or?
Eric: 01:10:09 And tugs it and it photographs every single bond. So if there’s a problem, it’ll show you where it’s at and it records every single bond it does and it does like five bonds a second it’s insane. Yeah and it tugs each one, pull test each one. And then it uses vision intelligence to recognize if anything’s wrong. It’s just insanely amazing. And I don’t know how we got this to this level and I think it’s just the day that we’re living that there’s machines like that around. And how we went from oh we’re going to build cool batteries and cool bikes, to running what we’re doing over there like it just kind of blows my mind sometimes like when I just look at.
Adam: 01:10:52 Yeah, but I mean it wasn’t accidental, I mean it was kind of a quest for quality and improvement and just seeing and-
Eric: 01:10:59 What’s that?
Adam: 01:10:59 It was hard.
Eric: 01:11:00 It was really hard.
Adam: 01:11:01 Right, yeah.
Eric: 01:11:03 I was going to say it’s not wasn’t hard. It is hard.
Adam: 01:11:07 Yeah, and hard to borrow and next week.
Eric: 01:11:08 And it’s all your fault. I mean I think we would have been fine just flipping stuff. Like we didn’t have to-
Adam: 01:11:15 Selling kits.
Eric: 01:11:16 Yeah. Like we didn’t have I think you caught me on a bad path man. Like I think I remembered thinking that oh my God, like 80% of our energy 80% of our space. We don’t need all that space we got there. And now we got an entire building dedicated to just battery building.
Adam: 01:11:31 Right, yeah.
Eric: 01:11:33 And it’s like so much that we didn’t know what we needed. That was so much of the problem because it really is an R&D facility. Because like for example, we had an entire wood shop for a while that was taking up a lot of the space, that was your fault too.
Adam: 01:11:46 Yep.
Eric: 01:11:47 Right but wood helped us speed along until we got good at working with metal, until we got the laser cutter. Laser cutter and the CNC has changed a lot. And the laser cutter really changes everything because it’s good for making fixtures.
Adam: 01:12:00 Yes.
Eric: 01:12:00 And it also makes circuit boards. I think we’re looking at one of the battery packs you saw, we make all our own custom circuit boards and it makes everything really easy. But before we had those machines, we were forced to do things by hand a lot more and we need a lot. Like now it turns out, I kind of want our wood shop back if we can meet the right… do we have a picture of our wood shop? Or I always wanted you to see it in tact. Yeah, we just took it down recently too it’s sad, but anyway.
Eric: 01:12:33 And yeah, this is okay so that’s what makes… we did that recently. And so if we want a wireless pack, it makes more sense to have wires coming out the back, because if you roast your connector you can take… because you can’t dig a connector out of that pack. So what we did is redundancy, double XT 90s and double XT 60s. And to do that with no wires wasn’t easy because you can’t just solder aluminum to your XT 90s.
Adam: 01:13:01 Right.
Eric: 01:13:01 So yeah, it was a lot of yeah, it’s a pain in the ass. Okay, there I want you to see that picture. That’s us making cases and you see how we said one, we worked for I want to say three or four days straight betting like bottles of tequila on who could get a perfect result making six packs at a time. And it was hard everybody would get a different shot at it, right? Like everybody would try what they would think would be okay, I’m going to try this because there’s all these different variables when you’re making it into a different mode release. You can do more vacuum, how you turn on the vacuum. I forget what was it? Oh, how you seal the vacuum around the edges. Oh, how you place the molds on the sheet.
Eric: 01:13:47 And that was our first perfect result and then we got that picture but man we struggled with that machine late nights till two in the morning for three or four nights. And then imagine then we have to cut all those out and then coming up with a way to cut them was a pain in the ass. Like you wouldn’t believe what path you set us on. And you see all the molds there, those all came from the pack that you’re taking home. See right there?
Adam: 01:14:12 Yeah, that’s very cool.
Eric: 01:14:14 And all the time everybody says that we’re making our batteries in China. Look, here’s made in China for you does that look like something China man? That’s when our batteries had harnesses, you see that?
Adam: 01:14:25 Yeah.
Eric: 01:14:26 And you know what we had to do with the harnesses, we had to worry that harness would plug into the BMS and that would cause failures because the podding would interfere with the connection of the BMS. You just learn it the hard way. I know battery building is hard. So we put dialectic grease inside to protect the harness. This is Luke. We made that for his grandma when she died. He was crying, I’ve never seen Luke cry before he’s Mr. Happy.
Adam: 01:14:57 Yeah.
Eric: 01:14:57 And his grandma wanted him to give those out. And we sent her this picture while she was on her deathbed and then we made a bunch of those out of metal and we went and rivet them to the sides of walls all the way up and down the beach.
Adam: 01:15:11 Oh that’s very cool.
Eric: 01:15:11 The police came here the next day yeah. And Luke was still crying from his grandma dying and that’s us and Luke hold this, that’s us in Gardena right here. That’s Professor, Luke. We just built our first battery that night man. We vacuum molded that battery case that night and made our first custom battery that bike’s still in the lobby. That’s I’ll trade you that bike for your bike.
Adam: 01:15:35 Let’s talk.
Eric: 01:15:36 But I was like, “Hey Adam Livingston. I just built one too and look how cool that is.” A custom battery really makes it look awesome. I mean, you can take the same bike and do a backpack battery and it looks pretty cool, but it’s not the same.
Adam: 01:15:49 Yeah, it’s not-
Eric: 01:15:51 Yeah, if we had more time, we’d be doing more custom batteries. But right now we got to make. We went with your idea which is a shark pack basically a shark killer and next we’re doing a bigger we’re doing a bigger one called the Dire Wolf. And I haven’t told anybody that in public yet. But and I’m sorry Dyno we got running less like a month ago, right? That was fun.
Adam: 01:16:21 Right, I mean so Dyno that’s not something your average e-bike guy gets.
Eric: 01:16:27 I wanted one for so long we had bicycle dyno’s like two or three. You remember that one we had Professor we had one it made so much noise it would fill up the whole. We’ve been dynoing bikes for a long time. But we had one and everybody would say, “Josh will you stop it. Will you take that thing outside.” And it made so much noise and it was just this bicycle dyno that was just like a treadmill.
Adam: 01:16:47 This is full on motorcycle dyno, right?
Eric: 01:16:49 Yeah, it’ll take 500. We got guys bringing their electric bikes their energy techs and zeros and it’s scary man. When somebody with real horsepower gets on there, it makes all the stuff we sell look like toys. Like that metal plate back there just you see it, it’s just coated with rubber. Like the tires feel like they can explode and do-
Adam: 01:17:12 There’s a lot of energy going on there.
Eric: 01:17:13 That dyno will take 500 horsepower.
Adam: 01:17:15 Crazy.
Eric: 01:17:16 Yeah, and it’s dangerous like that’s how come we’ve clamped down the bikes because you’ve heard of all the horror stories. But when we first got it, we didn’t bother clamping down the bikes and we still don’t clamp them down on bicycles it’s dumb. Just when we’re doing the-
Adam: 01:17:29 The big stuff.
Eric: 01:17:30 That’s a really fast on them I mean, it’s probably got 30 horsepower. Whereas the stock horsepower stock bike probably has four or five.
Adam: 01:17:37 Right.
Eric: 01:17:38 So four or five horsepower is a lot but on an electric bike you don’t get over two horsepower, not easily. What’s the most powerful bike you’ve ridden? Your bike?
Adam: 01:17:46 Yeah.
Eric: 01:17:46 That’s a pretty nice bike.
Adam: 01:17:49 Yeah.
Eric: 01:17:51 And Dave Tangent is the one who sells at Tangent bikes.com, right? And how much are they about?
Adam: 01:17:56 I think they’re about two.
Eric: 01:17:59 Two grand?
Adam: 01:18:00 Yeah.
Eric: 01:18:00 Yeah, that’s worth it, they’re made in America.
Adam: 01:18:02 He’s a great guy. He’s brilliant.
Eric: 01:18:06 Yeah, awesome.
Adam: 01:18:07 He is.
Eric: 01:18:08 I know we made batteries for a lot of his customers, including you.
Adam: 01:18:12 Yeah, thank you very much.
Eric: 01:18:12 Hey, so how many amps are you putting out with that battery?
Adam: 01:18:17 He’ll put out a lot.
Eric: 01:18:18 Yeah.
Adam: 01:18:20 Yeah, high 40s.
Eric: 01:18:24 40 amps, really?
Adam: 01:18:26 Yeah, high 40s, yeah.
Eric: 01:18:28 How many watts do you get?
Adam: 01:18:31 3000 plus.
Eric: 01:18:34 3000 plus and you get 60 miles an hour like it must be really efficient. I’d love to dyno it.
Adam: 01:18:40 That would be fun.
Eric: 01:18:41 If you’re ever down here I’d love to Dynamo a Tangent. Because that’s what I really want to see. So far I haven’t seen any big efficiency difference in anything yet. Yeah, you know what I’m finding having a dyno and first we were all excited about it. We were going to release dyno results. It’s come out to 1000 watts of horsepower, almost across the board. Zero motorcycle, a thousand horsepower, a thousand watts per horsepower. I thought Zero motorcycle if anything is going to be super-efficient, right? And bikes range from a thousand to 1200 watts horsepower, but nothing gets down to that 750 watt you expect.
Adam: 01:19:18 I feel like there’s more room for efficiency on the lower power bikes too.
Eric: 01:19:25 I think I’ve heard that Astro Motors what’s in your Tangent is really really efficient, that’s why I’d love to test it.
Adam: 01:19:31 Yeah.
Eric: 01:19:33 I have one didn’t we get it running recently? That Astro bike. Yeah, we got one running we just haven’t got around to testing it yet. But I think the construction quality in that motor, you got it for $2,000 with the motor, right? That’s a really good deal because the motor is 1000 bucks.
Adam: 01:19:49 I know.
Eric: 01:19:50 But they’re made here in Orange County. And they’re aerospace grade like I think those guys make it for military use or something. They’re not making them for you bikers.
Adam: 01:19:59 Probably for drone for unmanned.
Eric: 01:20:01 Yeah, we went over there and checked it out and pull up the 3220 Astro 3220. I wrote a whole article on them. And though I knew a really good electrical engineer, I hope he’s still alive he’s a good friend of mine, a Ron Z. And he built the nicest and he would claim incredible efficiency numbers. He’s and electrical engineering and he’d run them on dynos, but he’d run a really small one like a 3210 or a 3205, there you go.
Adam: 01:20:27 Yeah.
Eric: 01:20:28 Yeah, these are guys I was hanging out with I was in the machine shop building those with these guys. And I haven’t tested one yet, but supposedly it’s the most efficient motor. And when I talk to motor experts, they’ll say all the efficiency numbers like for hub motors and stuff is wrong, because all around efficiency matters, not just peak efficiency. So with hub motors supposedly they’re only efficient at top RPMs. So you want something that’s efficient all across the RPM band. So with the Astro motor when you’re using gear reduction, it’s already spinning super-fast.
Adam: 01:21:04 Right, it’s 20,000 RPMs.
Eric: 01:21:06 That’s right.
Adam: 01:21:07 Blasting around.
Eric: 01:21:08 So people used to claim incredible efficiency numbers I just want to see 700 watts per horsepower I’d be amazed. This is look, this is Kim on his… that’s a 35 pound bike or 40 pounds insane. Like I mean that’s not a backpack battery he’s using a Hobby King pack that fits in that bike.
Adam: 01:21:29 Lipo’s.
Eric: 01:21:30 Yes and that’s a good 65, 70 miles an hour so that your bike should do that, you’re battery limited right now.
Adam: 01:21:39 Yeah.
Eric: 01:21:39 And I also I don’t know if you’re Judy forks are going to… we’re going to get you a real fork to take home with you. Yeah, there you go. That’s my friend Ron Z’s bike, can you see that system right there. Look how clean that was. I got one here in the shop that he built for me. And I don’t know why he didn’t sell more of those but that thing is freaking beautiful.
Adam: 01:21:57 Oh, he’s doing that reduction was down there.
Eric: 01:22:00 Yeah he build all this well you know what he’s doing he’s using something like this he’s using a nugert, it’s called a nugert right there. That’s why when people tell me so much has developed, nothing’s been developed. Like we haven’t seen anything. You know what was amazing is the tangent drive.
Adam: 01:22:17 That cyclonial gear reduction that was pretty trick.
Eric: 01:22:19 That was pretty trick that is about among the coolest things I’ve seen in the do it yourself industry. And so the reason why I got in it was to do something exciting. And I first thought I was going to do a motor system like one of these, but we decided to go with the batteries because without the battery-
Adam: 01:22:35 Thank you.
Eric: 01:22:38 Yeah, without the battery you don’t have anything else.
Adam: 01:22:40 Yeah.
Eric: 01:22:41 And like for example, it’s cool that you can buy a battery that can put out the amps for your system and fit it in that cool bag of yours, but I didn’t have that when I built my bike. So and here he goes. This is by the way, you can get a lot more power of your motor if you rewire and I think it’s wired in y right now, wired in delta. And you’ll get like twice the power.
Adam: 01:23:08 Really?
Eric: 01:23:09 It’s like a demon. Like that’s how you just get incredible speeds out that motor if you want we’ll do it for you.
Adam: 01:23:14 Classic.
Eric: 01:23:15 And take the limits off the BMS.
Adam: 01:23:17 Oh my gosh.
Eric: 01:23:18 You want it or send it if you want we’ll send you an unlimited BMS if you want. You got 25 hours in that bike, right?
Adam: 01:23:26 Yeah.
Eric: 01:23:28 Do you want more power or what? This one’s really cool what is that? Right there. That is that next level. Now see that makes me think everything’s changed when we start seeing that available. Do you want more power in that bike or you’re pretty good with it?
Adam: 01:23:46 I’m pretty good.
Eric: 01:23:47 Yeah, at some point it just gets nuts.
Adam: 01:23:51 Yeah.
Eric: 01:23:51 And you don’t want to hurt yourself. There’s only so fast you’re going with bicycle components but let’s see what the greatest thing is. That’s like about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. I used to do this thing called the 10 biggest e-bike porn things there are.
Adam: 01:24:09 Yes.
Eric: 01:24:10 List of things Roelof was big and still is, I don’t think anything cooler than the Roelof exists for electric bikes. Like imagine a whole 14 speed transmission with 570%.
Adam: 01:24:22 It’s so well, it’s so robust. I’ve got over 15,000 miles on that.
Eric: 01:24:26 Mine too, I got one I got the same. If you run too much power through it, you won’t break. It has these plastic ears-
Adam: 01:24:34 Oh shear pins, you can do it yeah.
Eric: 01:24:36 That was a big secret of mine for a long time where the shear pins at. Right there, right? The plastic on the ends right there.
Adam: 01:24:44 Yeah, and so they can fix them psycho monkey can pull it apart.
Eric: 01:24:47 I’ll bet you Psycho monkey can. They’re like the-
Adam: 01:24:49 Fix it.
Eric: 01:24:49 That’s right. And so can you fix them is the question? Would you do it?
Adam: 01:24:53 The thing that comes down to it is I don’t have the tools.
Eric: 01:24:56 That’s right. So I asked Cycle Monkey we used to buy all our roll offs from them how much it is to replace those gears? Guess how much?
Adam: 01:25:04 The plastic?
Eric: 01:25:05 Yeah, how much did they charge back then.
Adam: 01:25:07 I don’t know 50 bucks.
Eric: 01:25:08 60 bucks. Oh my God, I go man, why isn’t everybody running a roll off? Too expensive.
Adam: 01:25:15 It’s the high entry point.
Eric: 01:25:17 Man 500% reduction 14 speeds. I’ve never heard of anybody roast it. Well, you won’t roast it you’ll just strip those gears.
Adam: 01:25:25 Yeah.
Eric: 01:25:26 Sweet point.
Adam: 01:25:27 No, I love it.
Eric: 01:25:29 All right, man. Well, I think we covered just about everything.
Adam: 01:25:32 Well, how about your new bike? That was a surprise, right?
Eric: 01:25:35 Which one?
Adam: 01:25:35 The fixed.
Eric: 01:25:36 Oh, yeah, we got the fixed bike. Yeah, that came together really nice.
Adam: 01:25:42 Did it surprise you that a low powered bike was going to-
Eric: 01:25:47 Yeah, I remember having a lot of doubts about it. Because like you never know if something’s going to work or if it’s going to go off. And I’d show people and we had a prototype around for a while for three or four months while we’re getting them built.
Adam: 01:26:02 Chain drive that, right?
Eric: 01:26:03 It was chain drive and it didn’t really do it for anybody and it was single speed. And I’ve never really thought that speeds were needed in a mid-drive. In low power one it really is. Like most of us don’t even worry about gears, but in our BBSHD around here the way we ride. And we just have it in a middle gear and we’re fine. Like some of us don’t even bother with transmissions on our bikes at all because BBSHD is so robust. But with this one it’s so low power and its torque sensor it really sucks in single speed so people would ride the chain one it wasn’t inspiring. What got us all about this one is how quiet, the minute we rode it, when we got the first ones and how quiet it was because it was my call to change everything and do belt drive and do the internal gear and hub in the back.
Adam: 01:26:54 Right.
Eric: 01:26:55 And just it made the bike. So I was nervous about it while we’re waiting for them to get made. And then when we got the deal with Gates and we got this incredible deal on CDX, that’s a whole CDX group set do you know about it?
Adam: 01:27:09 Yeah.
Eric: 01:27:09 The belt’s held on by-
Adam: 01:27:11 It’s got that little ridge on it and higher quality.
Eric: 01:27:14 Oh my God, man like I wanted to know why more people I want to do everything in belts. It’s such you got to ride it. It’s such a different feeling. And you need to tell us about your belt drive you’re building.
Adam: 01:27:25 Okay. Yeah, so on my aluminum cruiser pub runner it’s a 2000 Schwinn Panther. They came out with this really cool aluminum frame for two years. It’s about 7000 series aluminum with mountain bike geometry but in a really cool cantilever style. And-
Eric: 01:27:46 Oh is this it? This is the one you’re going to cut?
Adam: 01:27:48 Yeah, I’ve already cut it.
Eric: 01:27:49 No way, are you keeping the front hub motor?
Adam: 01:27:52 Yeah, I’m just-
Eric: 01:27:53 You use that as an internal gear hub. I mean, you said this I’m sorry it’s a regenerative breaker.
Adam: 01:27:58 Yeah.
Eric: 01:27:58 Wouldn’t that be cool?
Adam: 01:27:59 Yeah.
Eric: 01:27:59 I’ve been thinking about that so you’re going to so you’re cutting the frame-
Adam: 01:28:02 So I’ve cut the frame.
Eric: 01:28:03 Do you got pictures of that?
Adam: 01:28:04 I’ve got a picture of the seat stake cut I’ve gapped and now I’m going to I’m getting a couple of aluminum pieces that will slide into the seat tube.
Eric: 01:28:13 Listen this guys so okay, so it’s really difficult to weld aluminum, right? That’s a problem everybody has because not only is it difficult to weld it kind of melts. But then you have to heat treat it.
Adam: 01:28:24 Right.
Eric: 01:28:25 And you can’t do that without doing one piece. I don’t know do you know what temperature you got to heat treat it at like some ridiculous amount, right?
Adam: 01:28:35 Yeah.
Eric: 01:28:35 Instead of doing this he’s chopping his frame and he’s gluing it back together.
Adam: 01:28:40 So yeah, I’m going to machine a couple of aluminum it’s basically a tube splitter. Paragon machine works make some really nice ones out of titanium and things.
Eric: 01:28:52 Oh, you can buy something [crosstalk 01:28:54].
Adam: 01:28:53 You can they make them but I’m just making mine myself. I’ve got some-
Eric: 01:28:57 I got to see that, like that’s a whole new thing for me.
Adam: 01:28:59 So it’ll be cool and then those will bond. They’ll slide into the seat tube or the yeah, the seat stays down by the axle. On each end of the cut, they’ll slide into a shoulder and stop and I’ll use 3M DP420.
Eric: 01:29:18 I love DP420. I love 3M to begin, we use DP100 all the time.
Adam: 01:29:23 That stuff’s amazing.
Eric: 01:29:24 Well I haven’t tried 420 yet, but I love they named the product 420.
Adam: 01:29:28 Right.
Eric: 01:29:28 What’s that about? Is it four times as strong as the one… the DP100 is like 50 bucks a tube and we use it for a lot. We used to do the side plates before we figured out riveting because it’s kind of chintzy to glue it. But man that stuff whenever we need a glue solution, we’re always running to DP100.
Adam: 01:29:48 So I use the DP420 on my battery box because I needed-
Eric: 01:29:53 What is different about it? Well and stainless steel shaft the golf club head.
Adam: 01:29:58 Yeah, they use it in the golf industry so it’s got a really high shear strength.
Eric: 01:30:04 Wow.
Adam: 01:30:06 And this is what specialize uses to-
Eric: 01:30:09 Glue together their bikes.
Adam: 01:30:10 Their bottom bracket that pressed bottom bracket sometimes.
Eric: 01:30:14 Really?
Adam: 01:30:14 On some of the models they use this so if you get a replacement, they’ll send you a little pack of this. And so yeah, I’ll use this-
Eric: 01:30:24 Wait where do they use it at?
Adam: 01:30:25 They’ve got for a while they made a bottom bracket that was like a press fit shell. And I think when they were doing bottom bracket like if you had a warranty.
Eric: 01:30:38 You could literally take your bottom bracket off.
Adam: 01:30:41 The inside of the bottom bracket.
Eric: 01:30:43 Oh just the shell.
Adam: 01:30:43 Yeah, the inner shell.
Eric: 01:30:44 How would you get that shell off if it?
Adam: 01:30:46 I don’t know. I don’t know what it was.
Eric: 01:30:48 You’d have to heat it up.
Adam: 01:30:48 But I was reading, it came up on a couple of threads when I was reading about the 420 because I was trying to make sure I got the gap line right so the space.
Eric: 01:30:57 You might be onto something here. This might be the new welding. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just put together your bike with that plug fit? Have you seen Kathy’s bikes? Show him Kathy’s Craig Kathy’s bike. Kathy CFEE wooden bikes, you got to do a bike out of wood. And he uses just like casting tape. Like for broken arms and stuff you got to promise me you’ll try a wooden bike. It’s your calling.
Adam: 01:31:23 Look at that.
Eric: 01:31:24 Dude, if you see one in real life, they’re so beautiful.
Adam: 01:31:27 It looks like Fred Flintstone a little bit.
Eric: 01:31:29 Yeah.
Adam: 01:31:30 That’s cool.
Eric: 01:31:31 You should be doing this. You should build frames for us and we’ll sell them as fast as you can build them. Like I could sell these for big money. Yeah, but look at that. Those are all wooden frames. I don’t know if those are. He does a lot of carbon fiber work as well.
Adam: 01:31:47 Got it, look at this.
Eric: 01:31:48 He’s known for his word stuff. And they’re strong as heck and wood is just perfect and it has a little flex, it does great in the elements. You varnish it once every couple years it’s as good as new.
Adam: 01:32:01 That’s pretty cool.
Eric: 01:32:03 That’s just cast it.
Adam: 01:32:04 Man, that’s a bamboo on the seat too.
Eric: 01:32:06 I want one so bad. Can you please build us some.
Adam: 01:32:08 Right.
Eric: 01:32:10 Wow. Okay now how did he do this, let’s go back.
Adam: 01:32:15 He did a bolt for the seat stay right into the drop out.
Eric: 01:32:19 There you go right there.
Adam: 01:32:21 So you just unbolt it and flex it out.
Eric: 01:32:23 Think so?
Adam: 01:32:24 Yeah.
Eric: 01:32:26 Wow that is just beauty.
Adam: 01:32:28 That’s a cool head tilt.
Eric: 01:32:29 Man I just want that whole bike now.
Adam: 01:32:31 That’s pretty cool.
Eric: 01:32:33 Yeah come on man will you build us next project.
Adam: 01:32:36 We’ll see. I’ll be careful what direction I send you in with my next project.
Eric: 01:32:41 Oh you guys I guess we covered everything. How long have we been going? But thanks everyone and thanks to Adam for coming down and visiting with us and talking with us. It’s been fun, happy Memorial Day and Memorial Day. It’s the beginning of summer, right?
Adam: 01:32:57 Right.
Eric: 01:32:57 So let’s have a fantastic summer and God bless you with your pain and I hope that pain just someday just… is it going to slowly go away you think or is it-
Adam: 01:33:08 They say probably not. But I’ll take what I got.
Eric: 01:33:12 Let’s go and talk to Luke I heard Luke has some serious pain killers. He has whole theories on how to deal with pain and I’ll share one with you and for anybody else living in pain, and it’s how I try to deal whenever I’m upset.
Adam: 01:33:26 Right.
Eric: 01:33:27 That that nobody in life can put a negative thought in your mind. And that only you that no matter how much pain or suffering or where you’re at, that if you can just control your thoughts, then you can somehow control any situation you’re in, you end up in.
Adam: 01:33:47 There is a lot to that.
Eric: 01:33:48 It’s kind of Buddhist or whatever, but I think back on it a lot and I hope it helps you a bit. He also has really good painkiller, so it’s not like he just gets high on life.
Adam: 01:33:59 Thanks for the invite, thanks for sending the Luna jet down to pick me up and that trick.
Eric: 01:34:05 Yeah, next time we’re going to put your bike in the back.
Adam: 01:34:07 There you go.
Eric: 01:34:08 Yeah and let’s go out and have some Korean food and I’ll show you the rest of the shop and have some fun.
Adam: 01:34:12 All right, cool.
Eric: 01:34:12 Thanks for coming.
Adam: 01:34:13 Thanks.
Eric: 01:34:13 Thanks guys, signing out. All right, that was awesome.
Adam: 01:34:17 That’s fun.
Eric: 01:34:18 How long was that?
Ashley: 01:34:19 An hour 30.
Eric: 01:34:20 Oh my God, we only got 30 minutes over. I mean I’m glad we did that because dude that bike is inspiring.
Adam: 01:34:26 That’s pretty cool.
Eric: 01:34:27 Dude, you got to do that. You could build those and I can buy them from you for 1000 bucks each, 1500 bucks each.
Adam: 01:34:33 Think of the warranty work, termites. I’ve got termites on my bike.
Eric: 01:34:38 No, we don’t do one of this. Because I just don’t want to tell people… we take care of people we just don’t want to be arguing with people. Find another origin because of that.
