Our electric cargo bike has a long chain of 174 links. 8 speeds. I go through chains every six months. Is this typical? I've installed a gear change delay switch on the 500w motor and that helped a little bit. We live in a hilly area and transport kids. I have to link together one and half Shimano IC51 8 speed chains which is a lot of careful link counting…
by agrivaine
2 Comments
Yes that’s normal, the motor puts abnormal load on those chains. KMC sell chains specifically for e bikes.
For the counting, why don’t you join two together then put the old and new chains side by side in your hand and just see where the end of the old chain is? It’s much easier.
Pretty normal for such a demanding application, you might consider shimano cues when you need to replace sprockets, it has a thicker chain and sprockets which are designed for more extreme applications like this