Bike Friday and LiGo - revolution, or a bust?
The Bike Friday folding bikes have been known as a great touring alternative for many years. The benefits are clear - they fold into cases that can go on planes as regular luggage, they fit into elevators, small hotel rooms, and trains, where larger bikes would fear to "tread". Their small wheels are inherently tougher than big ones, and top quality touring tires are readily available for them, On the down side, those small wheels are hell when on rough roads, the bikes generally use outdated technology and come with generally cheap parts, and you still need somewhere to stash those travel cases at your air flight destination.
Everything in the paragraph above has been well explored over years. But not so long ago we, and even the Bike Friday company itself, launched an experiment in retrofitting for e-assist. Given that e-bike batteries are not allowed on planes, this would seem contrary to the whole Bike Friday "PERFORMANCE THAT PACKS, BICYCLES THAT FLY." ethos. But the Vancouver company Grin Technologies came up with a battery, the LiGo, that is just under the 100 wH limit for being allowed in carry-on. The LiGo's can stack at the destination, suddenly adding up to 400, 500, or 600 wH serious capacities. We jumped on this possibility, and bought a dozen of them, some years ago.
It looked like a great idea, and actually it was. But there were some glitches: LiGo was not compatible with Bosch, so we installed Bafang hub motors. The controller boxes for these were separate, and had to be strapped to the frame. Hanging out there, mine drowned in a rainstorm above the Cliffs of Dover. Replacement had to be shipped to us from China, to Paris. But no mechanic in France had any idea then (or now) of how to program the thing. Also the motors quickly overheated in the hills of Portugal, usually shutting down well before the top. But still, it was great. And at perhaps $160 per battery, a six pack was competitive with a Bosch 500 wH.
This was all back in 2021, and we enjoyed taking the Fridays then to Mexico, around Christmas. I also thought the flashing lights of the LiGos when charging were very Chrismasy:
The pandemic soon wiped out the availability of further LiGos. They have since made a reappearance, redesigned and called the 10-X. A six pack, though, now costs $2000 - basically double what we paid.
Meanwhile, Bike Friday switched to entirely Bosch. You can't fly with that, but they don't seem to mind. And the cost of a complete Bosch Bike Friday today here locally is $7,999. And Bike Friday seems to be immune to Black Friday, so you really need all 7,999 dollars (plus tax!).
All of this, together with an impending return to Mexico, gave us an incentive to fire up and check our old LiGos. It turned out that in storage they were losing a lot of power. Going too low in charge is death for a lithium battery, and we also had the idea of leaving them now in Mexico for almost full years at a time. Fortunately careful review of the LiGo instructions turned up the distinction between them being "off" and "dormant". To get dormant mode, you had to press their button five times at just the right speed. If you did it wrong, you just got "off", and they could die while "off".
Dodie got good at "playing" the LiGo dormant rhythm. If you did it right, all lights would go red and then slowly fade to black. That signifies dormancy. One time though, we really got Christmas! Even Grin had no idea what that was all about:
So there you have it. This will be a Bike Friday trip, and we will take the old LiGos. It's a throwback to what we did in the prepandemic days. Probably we will also look a lot like we did back then. But with some kind of new selfies we can look for a chance to update our Bike Friday personas:
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1 month ago
However, there is no accounting for possible bull headed stupidity. For example, we ran afoul of Hawaiian Airlines one time for carrying a propane stove. But this was brand new, and never had even whiffed propane, let alone being connected to propane at the counter. No matter, they would not countenance it! It would be just as intelligent to reject a water bottle, just because in theory I might put gasoline in it one day!
1 month ago