We've got a Shimano STEPs equipped city bike that is roughly five years old.
It has done some hard duty, first to tow a double trailer on turbo up and down the side of the Pentlands for a couple of years, then when the kids moved up to a longtail it became a prime choice for riding into the Pentlands to the start of hill runs, or out to Livingston for work.
I'm over 100kg these days so it is taking a pounding and the wheels are in notably poor condition, so I started pricing up some parts to build new ones.
Then I started thinking, okay, we've got these short travel "city" suspension forks where you can see each fork blade moving independently under hard braking. It's also a squeeze to get 2" Big Apples under the mudguards. Wouldn't it be nice to replace them with rigid forks? This is relevant to the new wheels because a lot of tapered MTB rigid forks are also "boost" spacing.
Now we're looking at quite a big investment (150-200 for a fork, 300+ for wheels). So naturally your mind starts going towards the ebike motor (it seems superficially OK, although it also sounds like something is rubbing 100% of the time)... and the battery isn't the freshest... and the handlebar controller has been smashed up so much that you just have the little underlying microswitches exposed (but they still work).
Now I haven't spent too long on this, but it doesn't seem like you can just pop on Amazon and get an E6000 motor that is new stock and warrantied. Possibly you could pair up a friendly LBS and get them to do a rebuild that they would stand behind but think of the labour cost on what is, at the end of the day a bike which only cost about £1400 to begin with. There doesn't seem to be a nice generic motor that fits the E6000 mountings (including even the Shimano E6100 updated version).
So now you start to think OK, am I really going to do the fork and wheels on a bike which could be one broken sensor away from disaster. We could pop down to Hart and get a nice new Gazelle and have a new warrantied motor and electrics (or Decathlon and have a cheapo version of the same).
But then five years from now...
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