Only My Honest Opinions Are Spoken Here! : )

Dano's Bike Page
written 2003 by - Carmella Mae Dunkin

You may be asking, "what is Dano's Bike"? Well let me explain.. My husband Dan and I delivered newspapers for our local paper in Indiana from March of 2000, until May of 2007, at which time Dan had to quite because his back had gotten so bad, he just could not do it anymore. My injuries from delivering had caused me to stop delivering the year before. However, before quiting Dan built a motorized bike in 2003, to make the task of newspaper delivery easier to do on a bike for someone with a bad back and to save a bundle of gas in a car to do the deliveries.

As we all know gas is ridiculous to say the least, no matter what year it is. Well Dan decided to fight back and refused to deliver papers in our van any longer. His plan was this, to get a scooter and deliver that way. He spent hours and hours everyday researching the best scooter to buy. He was looking for durability and long life, but he kept running into three problems. First problem was the weight limit. He had to have something that could hold his weight as well as the weight of the papers he was carrying. These two combined was over exceeding most all of the scooters out there. His second problem was cost. To get a scooter that would even come close to holding all the weight, we would have had to spend in excess of $1000.00, and we only had $675.00 to work with. The third problem was my husbands back. He has degenerative disc disease so bad that in the three years prior to making his bike, he had lost over 3 inches in his height! This is from the disk in his spine dissolving away. Besides this he also has a herniated and bulging disk, although those have pretty much dissolved away too, he still has pain and trouble with his back most all of the time. So a scooter without a seat was a big concern, as was the question, "what if the battery runs out of juice and he has to ride it home like a skateboard"? So, these three problems led him to look at motorizing one of our bikes. After many more hours and weeks of research he finally found what he wanted, (see pics below). He liked it much better than delivering in our van because of the breeze that is created while riding down the road on his bike. I can testify to how miserable it is to do this from inside a car with no AC. It is awful. There is no air flowing in the car because you are traveling at 10 miles an hour the entire time, and your inside a closed in box basically. Needless to say, you sweat ALOT! Dan likes to pedal and ride his bike, but with this motor he doesn't do a lot of hard peddling which helps a lot, especially up hills and against the wind.

Below are pictures of "The Bike", and pictures of Dan on "The Bike". The whole conversion was very easy, and fast too. It took Dan around two hours to do it all. The motor and batter packs were bought from Wilderness Energy in California, and they are a great company to deal with. When the motor and battery packs arrived, one of the batteries was leaking. Dan called them and they had an entire new pack shipped out right away.

All in all, this motorized bike has been a Blessing from God, because our van broke down, and had it not been for the bike, we would have been walking to deliver our papers, 280 of them over an 18 mile stretch!

Copywrite 2003 Carmella Mae Dunkin

Here is the bike. The black case on the back is the battery pack, and the motor is the silver disk looking thing in the center of the front tire. Oh I almost forgot the best part... We have gotten two light bills since he started riding the motorbike, and we are yet to even notice any difference in the bill! At most we figure it is costing around $0.10 - $0.15 per day to charge it. Gas was running us right at $6.00 per day! Now that is a huge savings. Do the math, and you'll see that the bike has already paid for it's self. The motor and battery pack was only $430.00 Now that is what I call fighting the high price of gas. Since we motorized the bike we have only put $30.00 worth of gas in our van. Had we been driving the van all this time, we would have spent somewhere in the vicinity of around $300.00 on gas already! It certainly makes you sit back and think about it.