#swytch

Finally finished my troll rogue! 

The pandemic era taught many of us that bikes are a great way to get around cities. Doubly so if they are e-bikes, replete with batteries to help reduce the amount of sweat required to get somewhere. Swytch Technology, a startup that builds e-bike conversion kits, isn’t targeting your average cyclist in the United States or Europe, however. Instead, the U.K.-based startup offers regular bike…

Month 8: cadence sensor failure. Power delivery feels random, and I suspect its cause is the sensor not being 100% watertight.

I love Swytch’s design, but their QC in China is poxy. It feels like a pre-production bit of kit… maybe it’s because I use my bike quite a bit, but 30-40km/day, is not outrageous. The only component that hasn’t been replaced in 8 months is the motor-hub. Fingers crossed that it won’t fail.

The good thing is that Swytch’s support team is always responsive and friendly. Got the offer of a replacement component within 10 minutes.

6 months in. This is why crowdfunded projects are risky; you’re buying a prototype. In this case, Swytch’s concept and design is really clever. Where they fail is materials, build and QC.

The battery and controller cables are the wrong type – too stiff, and the bag for the setup too loose, resulting in a lot of movement when riding on anything but the smoothest of blacktops. All the resulting movement and pinch-points in the bag wear out the cables and in my case, the power-cable.

I’ve already bought a new mounting bracket because the original one had a weak catch. Do I regret investing in a crowdfunded project? No. Is it frustrating? Yes.

After the last few months of riding The Mongrel with the Swytch kit, I decided to do something about the crappy handling on rough B-roads and bridleways caused by Swytch’s terrible mounting-position of the battery-pack. A pal of mine who also has a Swytch and the same complaint found a compatible extension-cable on Amazon that gave me the confidence to begin a fix without voiding the warranty. (He side-mounted the kit to his seat-post, but I don’t have enough seatpost height to do that.)

The Mongrel as it stood looked like this:

I wanted to move the battery-pack and mount below the saddle to improve the bike’s handling, and found an old adjustable handlebar stem that I added shims to and fitted on the seat-post, facing rearwards. Onto this, I fitted a sawn-down old aluminium handlebar:

The adjustable stem’s important. This allows me to ensure that the bottom of the power-pack rests on by rear-rack to minimise rattling and movement:

Once re-wired with the extension-cable, and everything was tweaked, I ended up being able to rear-mount the battery and fit my under-saddle tool-pack, whilst having space to fit and remove the battery pack and lock it into place:

The fit is perfect. No rattling (it rattled when it was front-mounted and I was riding on anything but fresh tarmac). Fortunately, I don’t need to see or play with the power settings, as I’m permanently on the lowest power setting, as I just need a little help on the big, grinding hills. But it would be nice to see if I could find a bluetooth adapter at some point, so I could control it with my phone.

Most importantly, my bike now handles again. And riding and recording the same 25.5km daily exercise route shows that moving the battery behind/under me has given me a 7% gain in average speed and cadence, whilst my heart-rate is 7% lower. More speed/efficiency, just by removing the effort/distraction of trying to control the bike on crappy surfaces. Am sure a great deal of the gain is psychological; a planted bike gives greater confidence that results in higher speed.

ADDENDUM: I noticed a bit of lateral steering movement when cycling yesterday, so dismantled the head-tube fittings to find that the upper cup and cone were worn. Am certain that the handlebar-mounted Swytch battery bouncing/vibrating was the cause of the irregular wear, given that I only rebuilt the bike 6 months ago.