UBC ThunderBikes team members, left to right, Bhargav Thoom, Kevin Heieis, Huy Nguyen and Ramiro Bolanos with the teams electric MK3 mountain bike.Andrew McCredie Despite its members having diverse countries of origin, this university club has a singular focus: advancing personal mobility using electricity.The brainchild of fourth-year mechanical engineering student Bhargav Thoom, the UBC ThunderBikes is a student-run design team with a goal to educate and enthuse members about electric bikes and electric bike conversions.I sat down with three club members, including Thoom, last week in a shared workshop in the William and Wayne Engineering Design centre on the Point Grey campus to find out what tomorrows electric vehicle engineers are learning today.Thoom is from Calgary and was inspired to start the ThunderBikes team after learning about a University of Calgary club called Team Zeus, which builds for and competes in electric motorcycle competitions.We didnt have anything like that and I thought we were a better university so I thought we should do something similar, he said with a bit of a wry smile. My decision to start with an electric bike (rather than an EV motorcycle) was so we could build our foundation on something that was a little easier to work with so that members can get hands-on experience with their own personal projects.Then once we had that experience we could build bigger motors, bigger components and better cooling systems. The MK3 uses an electric hub motor at the rear wheel to power the bike so that pedaling is not required at anytime. Andrew McCredie The club began in earnest last summer with Thoom, club founder and inaugural team captain, and nine members embarking on a project to design and build an electric mountain bike to compete in a 10-kilometre off-road competition at the The Lost Sierra Ebike Festival competition this summer.Team mechanical lead and newly appointed team captain Huy Nguyen said they settled on a design that is very similar to a number of commercially available EV mountain bikes, one that features an electric hub motor at the rear wheel, which powers the bike without any pedaling required.Dubbed the MK3, the bike came together somewhat slowly, as funds were short which meant many of the components were rebuilt used ones. Then in February of this year, a major setback none of the team of bright students expected occurred: the MK3 was stolen.We didnt have shop spaceactually we still dontso we were working out of my dorm room on campus, Thoom said. One day when I was moving stuff around in my room I had to leave the bike outside for an hour or so. And it wasnt there when I got back. It was devastating.He took to social media and was amazed at the response from Vancouvers bike community. Exactly a week after the theft he received a text from someone who had spotted the MK3 for sale on Craigslist.We contacted the Vancouver Police Department and they got it back for us. The Calgary-based Daniel Family Foundation has provided much-needed sponsorship money to the team’s projects. Andrew McCredie Thoom says he missed a lot of classes that week without the bike, and thanks his profs for being so understanding. He also is grateful for the media coverage the theft generated, noting it led directly to the securing of their first big sponsor.A Calgary-based group called the Daniel Family Foundation heard about what we were doing from those news stories about the theft, liked the mission statement of our project and they became our biggest sponsor and will support us for the next three years.Though they are still on the lookout for more sponsorship and funding (you can reach the club at thunderbikesdesign@gmail.com), the Daniel Family Foundation commitment allows the club to look at expanding its project builds to the point that the team is now building two new electric-powered vehicles a more powerful, longer range mountain bike, and an all-electric motorcycle to compete in a Super Sport competition in California next summer. And there is also a side project to, as new team captain Nguyen puts it, fix the MK3 from the crash.Ah yes, the crash. In addition to being founder and team captain, Thoom was also the MK3 rider at the Lost Sierra competition, which took place just a few weeks ago in California.Our suspension was off, Thoom explained. We used cheap parts from one of my previous builds due to our limited budget (they used one-third of their entire budget just getting to the competition). After my first (and only) test run the suspension was killing me so I asked the team to adjust it for more cushion.He suggested to deflate the tires a little bit, but admits he forgot to think about the weight of the (rear hub) motor. One kilometre into the race, the bike was not performing well, with little power, and on a steep descent into a rocky flat, Thoom realized he had a rear flat tire and a dented rim (called a pinch-flat caused by the heavy rear hub). Thus,
Origin: ThunderBikes team dedicated to the art of electric personal mobility