About Us - Pedjo Bikes and eBikes

The Present

Introduction.
Pedjo is a startup. In March 2015 we purchased the highly desirable 11,000 sq. ft. Signet Bank Building at the main intersection in the town of Pulaski, VA in the heart of the town's historic district: 1 West Main Street. We own it outright without debt.

The Town of Pulaski is in the mountains of Southwest Virginia with Virginia Tech, Radford University, New River Community College, and Wytheville Community College nearby. Key bike destinations are substantially at our front door: The New River Trail is a few hundred yards away; the 1976 Bikecentennial Route, only a few miles away; and the Blue Ridge Parkway, within biking distance.

The bank lot effectively is river-front property. Peak Creek lies at the property boundary. The site was a tourist destination in the era of great summer hotels where people in the lowlands would visit during hot summer months. The Hotel Pulaski was on the site and the famous Maple Shade Inn, under the same ownership, was on the other side of the creek.

Work.
2014 was the year for Rick Armstrong (Armstrong Technology in Blacksburg) and I (Ike Jeanes) to work on the fundamentals. 2015 is the year to expand into prototype development and testing. For that, we will be bringing onboard contract workers and employees — in short key players. See the Jobs page for more on that. We will also be renovating the building and making cosmetic changes to it.

History

Solving a problem.
At the risk of being a bit crabby, I point out difficulties that prompted us to design and build bikes and eBikes. Once that problem was well behind us, work became fun, exciting, innovative, and more.

June 2013: I purchased for my own use what was widely reputed to be the finest — and incidentally the most expensive — eBike conversion kit. This was the first eBike that I had ever seen and I expected smooth sailing in view of the many joyous advertising claims. I was disappointed.

Nice things first: the 48v 350W direct drive motor was, and still is, excellent. The torque-sensitive pedal-assist smoothly matches each pedal stroke and is a joy to use.

Now for the rest with a preface first. My principle bread and butter came from manufacturing professional motion picture machines. Along with 4 other highly competent people, we made those machines substantially from scratch — raw materials coming in, completed machines going out. Their inflation-adjusted price was $30,000 each. So obviously we had to do a decent job. My standards are high, but not unreasonably so.

I was thunderstruck by how needlessly difficult the eBike install was. When I laid out $2k+ for the kit I was expecting Rolls-Royce quality. What I got was more akin to a credible prototype that had not yet been thoroughly beta tested. The regenerative braking components were amateurish. The hub motor attachment method struck me as being frankly dangerous. I made what I feel was a necessary part to withstand the high torque at the hub motor mounting point. In my view, the level of dedication required to get the kit to function properly was beyond the capabilities of the normal casual consumer.

October 22, 2013: After having charged the battery 16 times and ridden 272 miles, the $1,000 battery completely failed and would not charge. I doubt that the failure was caused by the battery being defective. Instead, the likely culprits, in my view, were poorly designed electronic controls which under other circumstances could have prevented the failure.

December 13, 2013: Fifty-two days later a new battery was shipped to me. To the company's credit, they replaced the battery at no cost to me. Aside from this, a chief irritant is that many manufacturers make preposterous claims about eBike battery mileage range. Because of hills here in the mountains of Virginia I get about 17.3 watt hours per mile. An advertised range of 18 to 23 miles would have be more plausible for the 423 Watt-hour battery that I purchased — with the caveat that as the battery ages the range significantly decreases. To extend battery range would normally be a trivial problem. That is, if you were able add additional battery cells or if you were able to make a few sophisticated tweaks in the bike's software. But none of this was possible in the proprietary closed box system that I purchased.

The fall of 2013 through all of 2014: It was plainly obvious that eBikes would always be embarrassingly inadequate until both hardware and software became open-source. Technology is changing too fast for any eBike manufacturer — even a good one — to give the user an adequate product. It can only come through makers at many locations customizing bikes and improving them that we can ever get fine eBikes — eBikes that the user can adapt and personalize for his or her needs. This flexibility needs to exist both with software and hardware. Thus, open-source hardware and open-source software need to be the rule, not the exception.

Further, from the customer's perspective, there is the problem of short company longevities or (in deep pocketed secure companies) short product lifecycles and planned obsolesce. Even the life of large S&P500 companies is only an average 18 years. Proprietary eBikes can quickly become worthless when a company or product fades from the scene. By contrast, having open-source components and many potential suppliers vastly increases the likelihood of the customer getting long-lasting service and use from his or her bike.

At present bicycle components, hub motors, replacement parts, and numerous accessories are available through a wide variety of vendors on eBay and elsewhere. The job now, as Pedjo sees it, is to supply previously unavailable frames, electronic boards, workstations, software, and accessories so that substantially anyone who is dedicated to building personalized bikes can do so. Pedjo has the designs for these well underway. We only needed a building adequate for our needs.

Jan. 5, 2015: Signed a purchase contract for the Signet Bank Building.

Feb. 9, 2015: The Town of Pulaski Planning Commission, by unanimous vote, approved to recommend to Town Council that a special exception for light-manufacturing be granted to Pedjo.

Feb. 11, 2015: Incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation: Pedjo, PBC.

March 3, 2015: Pulaski Town Council unanimously granted approval that Pedjo, PBC operate as a light manufacturing firm in its central downtown/historical district, at the prime business location: 1West Main, the old Signet Bank. Three web pages conveyed the principal points as we saw them: our summary page, our introductory pdf, and a bike history summary.

March 19, 2015: Pedjo purchases Signet Bank Building.