This is really horrific. But as this was second hand I'm not sure how having "independent third-party certification" in place would help, unless you could either get something you bought certified afterwards, or it was illegal to sell secondhand without said certification documents (but then you still run the risk of forgeries or after purchase alterations).
It points towards a bigger problem to me, that of dodgy imports in the first place. We need
Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites. No more shirking responsibility by saying it's on their sellers.
Proper import checks (thanks Brexit) to catch stuff that's not up to the existing safety standards.
More money put into enforcing existing safety standards in general
To work closely with the Chinese government to tackle dangerous products before they're out on the open market.
How they do it doesn't really matter how they do it, just that there's laws in place to make them do it. It's also more than that, if there's people with fake goods on their platforms and they're not doing enough to tackle it they should be fined into oblivion.
In addition: Teach people to put them in storage/garage/basement and not the house or apartment hallway. Not even non-electric bikes. Because even if they ain't the cause of the fire they still hinder egress when you gotta go fast.
Not all homes have a safe place where you can do that. And I even recall one story of a family that built a small shed in their front yard so they could store their bikes—not even for safety, but just the convenience of not needing to awkwardly drag the bikes up and down narrow stairs every dat—and the council forced them to remove it.
Apartments need to be required to have secure bike storage, and houses need to be allowed by right to build small bike sheds.
Edit: it was Ireland, not the UK. I guess because most of the stories about cycling I hear that aren't Australian are from the UK, my memory just lumped all of the British Isles together.
The article specifically mentions he couldn't afford the $600 battery that pays for official certification that is likely very expensive so he opted for the cheaper unregulated one. I'm willing to bet he let it charge overnight as well.
I just never let my ebike batteries charge unless I'm home and awake. But mine are the expensive ones as well.
Learned that a less-hard-way when I killed my battery charging it overnight. Thank god the stupid did not remain with me long when I found out why this was a very bad (as like the article) expensive idea.
I charge a lot of very high density batteries (larger than those of typical e-bikes), and some are import brands since that is what the customer wants to prototype.
If anyone is seriously worried about the batteries being a fire hazard, a small enclosure of AAC can solve that problem cheaply.
Your advice is still considered best practice, naturally.
It seems odd that batteries of a certain size aren't required to come with an automatic off switch when they reach 100% charge. Some kind of simple gate between the battery and the charging cable.
Yeah I have a Bosch ebike battery. Of course it's certified and such, it only gets charged when I'm awake, and it's on a 4-hour outlet shut-off timer.
I think everyone needs to understand and respect the power of these batteries.
There also needs to be a standardized system to easily and safely dispose of end-of-life ebike batteries. I think the bike shops should have deals in place with the manufacturers to send EoL batteries back to them.
When he was pushed back by the flames and toxic fumes he called to his partner, Gemma, 31, and children, Lilly, eight, and Oliver, four, to jump from the same bedroom. “She said: ‘I can’t get out.’ That’s the last words I heard. I don’t know what happened,” Peden said.
That's fucking awful. I feel those words would haunt me for the rest of my life, which may not be that long if I had to live with so much survivor's guilt.
It has so far focused on the previous owners of a secondhand battery that Peden bought online days before it exploded in his hallway.
Anyone know how EU regulations look like for this?
That's fucking awful. I feel those words would haunt me for the rest of my life, which may not be that long if I had to live with so much survivor's guilt.
It's impressive that he's using this to work so hard for change.
Coming just after Project Farm's video about most of the power tool batteries sold on Amazon Ebay being hard-to-detect counterfeits, missing their safety features, and containing unlabelled cells which are also missing their safety features.
Fucking yikes. Those looked like eBay pages, was there a separate video on Amazon? I know Amazon is shady but hopefully not as shady as those eBay fraudsters.
The packaging looked so similar it'd be nice to know how to determine it is real or not. I guess open the case and check the batteries.
Amazon ist just as shady. The additional issue with them is that they pool inventory from their own and from marketplace sellers that they do logistics for. Let's say they source genuine batteries from the OE manufacturer and some marketplace dude will have his stock at the Amazon warehouse, which is counterfeit goods.
Chances are then that when you order from Amazon themselves, they pick one of the counterfeit units from the marketplace seller because they're stored in the same shelf and Amazon does the shipping.
I cannot give you good advice on where to purchase original batteries for a good price online, but I know that Amazon should not be your first choice.
that'll be my lesson about posting videos from memory! updated. The youtube comments did mention Amazon and other shops too.
Yeah, the takeaway did seem to be, at the very least, to check whether the cells inside are branded - although in many cases they were packed in a way that you can't tell without destroying the internal plastic structure.
obviously wouldn't have helped the poor cyclist, who could only afford the non-genuine batteries.
Ah, gotcha. I don't quite trust Amazon to do a great job, either. I just know they are official distributors for some of these brands so I wonder if my mistrust is unfounded.
Safest thing to do is buy from the manufacturer approved resellers, that can even be on eBay as they often have a presence there as well as their own site.
Saying that it's some chinese brand is super funny. They make like 80% of batteries. I often heat people saying they don't want some chinese led's, they want the good stuff. Do people think there is a guy called Philip who solders led's in his basement in Michigan?
Well you're correct but some brands actually QC (quality control) their products and others do not. This filters out a lot of issues, just having a real human look everything over
Obviously, damn near everything is made in China, but there's a difference between an item designed by a reputable company and and manufactured in China and one that is made shoddily by a Chinese shell company that's practically untraceable.
I don't know about the UK, but at least in Australia Amazon would be responsible at least for the cost of a replacement. Which is small comfort in a case where it's done significant damage and even killed people, but in cases where it was a faulty product that failed in a mostly harmless way it's pretty good.
(I don't know one way or the other whether they could be held liable for more than that.)
They absolutely don't care. They've pivoted from an online retailer, into a courier with a storefront taking an obscene percentage.
It wasn't enough that they ruined the high street, they even ruined their own shopping experience. It's literally just AliExpress with better delivery times. You get more trustworthy stuff on eBay.
It was not the ebike, it was a secondhand battery. It might've been an original, but bad battery, it might've been tinkered with by the previous owner, it might've been a Chinese knock-off. I doubt he knows at this point, and it's probably difficult or even impossible to determine from the wreckage.
A man who narrowly survived an ebike battery fire that killed his partner and two children says he is tormented by grief and guilt but determined to fight to change the law to avoid similar tragedies.
When he was pushed back by the flames and toxic fumes he called to his partner, Gemma, 31, and children, Lilly, eight, and Oliver, four, to jump from the same bedroom.
Coroners, fire officers and campaigners have expressed growing alarm about rising sales of unregulated and potentially lethal batteries.
Peden is backing a campaign by the charity Electrical Safety First (ESF) for a law change to ensure there is independent third-party certification in the sale of such batteries, as there is with other dangerous products such as fireworks.
Picking up his phone, he showed that within seconds he was being targeted with adverts on social media for similar secondhand batteries with no safety warnings or certification.
The Department of Business and Trade said a Whitehall taskforce had been set up to tackle the problem and research had been commissioned to understand the cause of fires in lithium batteries.
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This is a total shot in the dark, but maybe you could use a preload adjuster from another coil-sprung fork with the same stanchion size. Maybe even from a different manufacturer, since they would likely use the same thread. You could take a $10 gamble on a Suntour preload adjuster: https://www.srsuntour.us/products/preload-dial-adjuster-1
Of course you can do what you want to do - leave it, strip and paint it, touch it up, turn it fuchsia...
But for me the real question on mucking with vs. carefully restoring (or leaving as is) comes down to whether I'd call it "vintage" or just plain "old."
I bought a vintage racer in 2018 with the intention of fixing it up, repainting it, etc, as it had clearly rusty parts and exposed steel, and I ended up not bothering for one reason or another, but it was every bit as zippy and manoeuvrable when I had an accident on it last year that meant I had to chuck it in the tip. I shouldn't brag or whatever but I remember this little speed counter thing saying I was breaking the limit a few minutes before the crash.
I just looked at how much the coating costs (100 - 500$) in my location. Some can restore it with stickers... but it adds to the cost. I have access to few old Favorit frames (old ČSSR bike maker), you are lucky to get 100$ for bike in perfect condition.
So go for it, I wanted to make some beater bike (for commuting) and I consider using it.
Oddly enough, I grabbed it for that very reason but once I got it home and had a good look at things I realized it was quite a nice bike with all original parts made in Japan and Switzerland.
Might seem a bit out there, but color matched paint is so easy these days. Even if it’s faded, they can match that. You could just touch up the worn areas and try to leave as much original as you wanted. I’m kind of a traditionalists with old mechanical things though, so maybe this is bananas.
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