The motor is on!

Well it is done. After a few hours of intense work at Cycle Surgery we managed to install the Ezee motor, the Mountain Drive and a new derailleur gear system (no wiring of the motor as yet). Simon and Tom are pictured below doing the hard yards on the new derailleur and shifter -

The 'tricky bits' of the install were as follows -

• The rear dropouts had to be spread slightly to accommodate the motor - no big issue despite my initial concern!
• Had some trouble with the torque washers due to the position of the axle in the dropouts so left these out.
• Had to cut off a connector to put a torque arm on the wiring (right) side of the motor so will need to solder this back on.
• The nut and bolt to secure the adapter claw for the derailleur hanger interferes with the 11T on the freewheel so effectively I have six usable gears instead of seven. When you count the Mountain Drive low gear though it is really 12 gears instead of 14. Again no big issue as the gear range with the newly installed 34T chain wheel (instead of my previous 42T) is 10.2 to 62.8. If the motor works out as well as I expect I may go back to the 42T chain wheel and bump the range up to 12.6 - 77.5.
• Needed to drill out a bottle screw mount on the handlebars to slide the thumb throttle and new gear shifter into position.

The end result looks pretty good -

Did a quick ride around the shop and the derailleur and Mountain Drive combination work very well. Though I'll need to get used to shifting gears on a derailleur after becoming accustomed to shifting thru the gears very quickly (and whilst stopped!) on the previous Shimano Nexus 7 internal hub.