Jupiter E-bike Flat Tire - Tube Repair

I suppose it was bound to happen. I got a flat tire on my e-bike. I don't really remember getting a flat tire on a bike in the past but I can't imagine it didn't happen. I went to Sequim with my wife a few days back (she had an appointment). I brought my e-bike to ride around while waiting and started out by riding on the Olympic Discovery Trail but there were more pedestrians than I liked so I decided to get off the trail and ride on one of the little-travelled roads.

There were hardly any cars and no pedestrians, so I was happy. After 5 miles into the ride I came across a couple of dogs on the other side of the street in a fenced yard barking at me. I was looking at them and then, "thud", I ran over something. I kept going for several seconds hoping I didn't get a flat but then I started hearing that dreaded sound of air escaping. Bummer, a hole in the back tire. First thing I tried to do was keep riding slowly but that didn't work so I stopped and looked to see how far I was from the car. Three miles. That's a bit of a hike pushing a bike with a flat.

Jupiter Discovery X5 E-bike - Adding Onboard Power Circuit to Tail Light

Something a little odd with this bike is that the rear tail light runs off a 3 volt button cell rather than from the bike's main battery like the headlight does. I wanted to rectify this situation so I bought what's called a DC-DC Buck Converter, or Step-Down Converter. It will take nominal 40 volt bike battery voltage and step it down to pretty much anything you'd like. In this case it will step down to 3 volts (or 12 volts as you will notice further down the blog). Here's a photo of the converter that I found on Amazon ($9 for two). The small rectangular blue thing is an adjustable potentiometer which is used to adjust the output voltage.

Costco Jupiter Discovery X5 E-bike Battery Replacement

We bought two of these e-bikes from Costco in April of 2021 to take with us when we went camping in our truck camper. The bikes are 36 volts with a 350 watt motor, so no speed demons, but they would fold in half and fit in the back seat area of our F350 crew cab without too much trouble. One little hiccup, when the pandemic hit in 2020, everyone and their brother went out and bought an RV, so by 2022 all the campgrounds got overcrowded and difficult to get reservations. We ended up selling our camper in May of 2023 but kept the bikes.