Adding a TongSheng TSDZ2 mid-drive motor to a Quickie Shark RT hand trike (Part1)

For sometime now I have been speaking to a local Rider Philip about his very nice and quick! Quickie Shark RT hand trike.

Philip loves his trike but would really like to be able to cover more distance and especially would like some help on the steeper hills which are common in these parts!

Having looked at his trike I came to the conclusion that it should be relatively straight forward to swap out his existing crank setup and replace with a TSDZ2 motor mounted in a custom bracket.

Philips trike has a very elegant adaption plate system that allows the bottom bracket section to slide up and down for perfect alignment for the rider and this would allow for a easy way to swap out what was needed with bolt on parts.

So we began with a strip down and made up an adaption plate for the TSGZ2 motor

The plate allowed for the anti rotation bracket of the TSDZ2 to be fitted directly which worked really well and made it a very nice solid mount. but the next step would be a little more taxing.

The original Cranks used are custom made hand bike cranks that have a huge offset to clear the rider in rotation. The left crank was almost able to mount direct to the TSDZ2 square taper mounts but the right crank includes the chain rings and well it could be mounted but you would have extra unused chainrings spinning round. Not exactly the tidy solution I was looking for.

One option would be to hack that crank to bits and cut away the spider mounts for the chain rings, but I don’t like cutting up perfectly good components and more importantly destroying quite expensive custom parts. so I decided to get two new custom cranks made by a local talented engineer.

We took the original alloy cranks that come with the TSDZ2 kit,

(TongSheng alloy cranks from the kit)

Cut then and have a alloy pipe section welded in between to mimic the original left crack on philips trike, then repeat this in mirror for the right and well I think the results speak for themselves and look fantastic!

Original black hand crank from phils bike on the left, new reworked cranks now silver on the right

On the bike I actually prefer them in the plain alloy finish and the offset is perfect.

While the cranks were being made I worked on a simple mount for the new SW102 screen I plan to use with the motor as I needed a way of mounting this on the left handle in a un conventional way. As hand cyclists know not taking your hands of the bars is critical to smooth riding so I wanted a solution for Philip that would allow him to change power assist levels and still be able to keep his hand on the bars and keep rotating.

After a bit of work designing a simple battery bracket and 3D printing it we were ready for a test ride…

Have a look at part 2 when we test the motor for the first time…