Starting with the disclaimer that I don't currently have one of these motors myself yet so everything I say should be taken with a small grain of salt. I am looking into getting one or more of them myself and have been researching them myself as well though.


Answers that I'm 99+% sure of:

----- H/A/L switch is for the motors double speed function, H = locked in high gear, L = locked in low gear, A = Automatic. In the automatic mode the motors controller changes between the two motor gears as needed automatically based on your speed and it takes about a second for the gear change to take place and the motors power cuts out while the gear change takes place. Pedal gearing is unaffected it just gives the motor more torque at lower speed for hill climbing in low gear compared to a normal hub motor.

----- PAS = "Pedal Assist Sensor" its a sensor some e-bike systems use that attaches to the bikes bottom bracket and tells the controller if you are pedaling or not and to a certain extent how fast you are pedaling. Most e-bike controllers can be set-up with such a sensor so that there is no throttle on the handlebars for the motor and just the PAS sensor and when you start pedaling it turns the motor on and the faster you pedal the more it throttles up the motor and when you stop pedaling it turns the motor off. Some european countries actually require that for e-bikes to be legal in their countries. I do find such a system beneficial when riding in thick in town traffic (got that kind of system on one of my other bikes) since then I don't have a throttle to fiddle with and I can just concentrate on watching traffic around me and just pedal. Having a manual throttle on the handlebars though is nice if you want to use the motor without pedaling. The one bike I have that uses a PAS also has a manual throttle as well and if I don't touch the throttle it works off of the PAS only and then if I'm like beat tired commuting home late at night after a long day I can use the manual throttle keep the motor going even when I'm not pedaling or am pedaling pretty pathetically. That kind of hybrid system is generally referred to as PAS with manual throttle over-ride.

----- On PAS only bikes especially an interactive LCD display with setting buttons can be helpful and is often equipped with varying levels of assistance as to how strongly the motor responds to your pedal input. Think of it like a matching system, do you want the motor to just match your input or do you want it to more then match or maybe even just help a little to conserve battery power? Most PAS systems with LCD displays have a number of assistance setting levels as numbered settings like 1-to-7 levels of assistance. The often also include a battery charge left display and such. Most of my e-bikes I don't have such a display but I can see where they can be useful.

------ Bikes that have dropouts that are wider then 135mm include: Most Quality Tandems (bicycle built for two as the song about Daisy goes), Fat Bikes (those bikes with super wide tires built for floating on top of sand and snow and such), and then some downhill bikes (those crazy downhill jump crazy bikes with big shocks front and rear) have wider drop outs as well. I'm not aware of any that are specifically and exactly 156mm off the top of my head but I do know the wider ones are out there in those applications. I think though that in many ways its a function of this motors design that sometimes it ends up fatter then normal in some configurations. For a normal run of the mill mountain bike most of them have 135mm drop outs although some of the newer ones with 10 or 11 gear spools on the rear end (but not all of course) have 142mm rear drop outs.

----- Yes, the current claims and buzz are that if you go with V-brakes you can get a 7-speed freewheel motor without disk brake mount that will fit in the standard 135mm rear end and its only if you insist on having a disk brake on the rear that you have to spread the rear drop outs 10-to-15mm wider because the motor with disk brake mounts is that much fatter. So only the guys who insist on having a rear disk have to spread their frames rear drop out width. In my case I can weld my own thin wall steel tubing frames completely from scratch or heavily modify existing steel frames and have already done so for previous projects so I'll probably order my motor(s) with what I want and then make the frame fit the motors rather then the other way around, I understand that most others don't have that option.




Answers that I'm not so sure of:

----- Probably get the LCD display and the PAS and the manual throttle and then when you got them decide what you actually need/like and put the extra parts in a box for later use if desired at a later date or hock them online. When ordering stuff from all the way across the ocean shipping can be a big expenditure and often and extra couple little pieces in the big box make little to no difference in shipping cost and better to have more then you need in the first shipment then have to order additional parts later and pay the big shipping charge all over again for just a couple cheap parts you ended up needing when you thought you weren't going to need them at first and end up paying three or more times the cost of the parts in the second shipment for the shipping cost.

----- Sounds like that single freewheel 156mm motor either has the drum brake body (just used without the drum brake with V-brakes that act on the rim) or is an extra wide version of some sort. The 7-speed is going to be the one to go with for most mountain bikes and its just a matter of changing out the shifter on the bars to one indexed for the lower sprocket count compared to the 8-10 sprockets on most modern mountain bike rear ends (obviously there is also the 11 sprocket option on some high end modern bikes and 7 and even 6 sprocket rear ends can be found on lower end or application specific quality bikes but the 8,9, or 10 sprocket rear end is currently what is on most modern quality bikes). As I mentioned decent quality Shimano 7-speed rapid fire click lever shifters are still available so the 7-speed/sprocket rear end is sort of the cross over point where the older freewheel technology and the modern free-hub technology cross paths and you get cross compatibility.