Managed to do a pretty extensive test ride over the weekend and did a 10km tour in the City.
Biggest plus: my VESCs did not overheat on my way home back up the hill.
Biggest bummer: my motors did!
Here the story:
Absolutely love the stealth mode in FOC and general responsiveness of the setup. The hummie hubs do have a lot of grunt and torque. With one push and a flick on the trigger you are up and running. Real life torque is absolutely up to the task and I’m not the lightest rider.
The rather thin thane is not an issue, on rough pavement and even some pitched roads the ride was not overly harsh. And that is on my stiff and short board. The wheels are also good for carving.
Can’t really comment on top speed as I did not push it at all on my first ride on the new board. On 10s I was definitely going fast enough.
However I did notice that the motors did get quiet hot riding in the flat. Very warm to the touch. And also seem to drain a battery pretty quickly.
Then after a cooling down stop in a café it was time to head home up my dreaded hill. Now my Swiss hill is a completely different beast than the tiny ant hill shown in @onloop’s video!
It’s not overly steep but inclines continuously. Over a distance of around 2,6km I cover an elevation of around 120m.
I’m not able to ride all the way up in one go on my single drive satellite setup because my VESC overheats and limits amps. Then I have to stop and let my VESC cool down before I continue. Eventually I make it to the top and it takes me around 15 minutes with all of the stop and go.
On my hummies I had to walk home. The motors got really really hot after some minutes of riding up. Unfortunately the motors only cooled down very slowly when taking a break. So around halfway up the hill I gave up and walked home. The motors were so hot I couldn’t touch them and even the trucks were almost too hot to touch.
Think I could have used my board to boil water for spaghetti for all of the goofy riders here.
So my big summary regarding the aluminum version of the @hummie hubz: they are very well suited for a small cruiser or any other board, they look great, they feel great (especially on FOC), the wheels are good for cruising, they are fast enough and they have enough torque to climb steep hills. So all good riding in the flat.
Heat is their biggest problem. Once they start heating up e.g. when riding up a hill trouble starts. The heat just builds up more and more.
Now I’m curious if the new “steel is real” version solves the heat problem. Would be interesting to see if they make it up my hill.