My wife and I have been biking together for years, and it's one of our favorite activities. She's never been a very strong rider, but we used to go for lots of ten mile evening rides in our neighborhood, and up to 25 or 30 miles on Saturday morning brunch trips. She rides a Trek FX3 from about 2017 and absolutely loves it.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer last December and is now in recovery, following two surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, and some other treatments that are still ongoing. She is expected to make a full recovery, but it will take many more months.

So, we decided an e-bike could be a way for her to start riding again much sooner. The treatments she's undergone have left her quite weak, and she probably won't be ready to ride her regular bike until next spring. She doesn't want to wait that long.

We shopped around for a factory-built e-bike and found some viable options, but nothing that she loved enough to justify the cost. Then she came up with the idea of converting her old mountain bike.

Before upgrading to the Trek FX, she was on a 1990s Schwinn mountain bike. It's a heavy, cheap-o, kind of clunky, near bottom-end bike... yet somehow she liked it and did fine with it. It has been sitting in our shed for several years, but was not in terrible shape.

I checked the tires, put in new tubes, replaced some cables, brake pads, chain... the maintenance items that typically need refreshing after several years. The bike rides pretty good again. I also ordered a kit from Bafang with 750w mid-drive motor, 48v battery (11 amp-hour capacity), and all the little bits and pieces to make it work.

It was not hard to install, and I'm pretty impressed with the overall quality of this kit. Obviously it's not as polished or elegant as a Bosch system, nor does she get tidy internal cable routing, disc brakes, wide tires, etc. that modern factory e-bikes come with. I don't think she cares. We're still getting everything adjusted and fine-tuned, but it looks like this will be a good solution for us. I'm hoping it will prove to be reasonably durable; time will tell.

The whole kit came to about a thousand bucks (1/3 the price of a new bike with a less powerful motor).

The idea is that she'll use her e-Schwinn to start riding again and gradually regain her strength. Eventually she will move back to her much nicer Trek, but will probably still go to the electric when the distance or terrain I want to ride is a bit too ambitious for her.

I will report back after we've put some miles on the Bafang kit.