Interesting post, pretty much sums up what I have found. I had a rear Crystalyte on my G'friends bike, when it had problems I changed over to 2 front hubs, but it is an agressive setup: 4011 hubs with 72Volts. I was thinking that my real world use of this is probably quite a bit different than what most others want to achieve – because I’m in the mountains and vertical is my main challenge, thus the need for the torque. I have to bear in mind that I went to the front because a pretty good trial of the rear system with the 409 did not appear like it would meet the challenge of the steep hills. Then there was the issue of getting the bike on the car, the weight distribution, etc. So the way I see it, I have no other option than to continue and achieve the end goal of getting a front end that can deal with the torque. Even if I can find steel non suspension forks, it seems I will still need to modify them.

I've already stripped out a cheap pair of steel dropouts:

and I'm going to have to fabricate a real fancy set of acel retainer torque arms something like this:


I've also built 2 NiMh 36 V battery packs at a total cost around $1,000.00 and neither of them work!

The biggest challenge with Front Hubs is stabilizing your dropouts, hopefully once that is achieved, it will be worth it.