Surly Bridge Club E-bike Conversion

In 2022, I bought a used Surly Bridge Club. Black. 700c. 10spd. I got it for a great deal because it has a dent in the top tube. But steel is real. It came with the front and rear racks and I bought it to be my grocery/takeout/gym work-horse.

I’d been considering an e-bike for some time. And in late 2024 I pulled the trigger a CYC Photon mid-drive conversion kit from Electrify Bikes. I had some time over the holidays to do some wrenching and figured that e-bike motors and batteries will only get more expensive in the coming political environment.

I chose the CYC photon because it looked lighter and smaller than other options. It also has a built in torque sensor. I wanted a pedal assist e-bike. I didn’t need a throttle, I already have motorcycles. I also chose the A52 10ah battery. I wanted a smaller and lighter battery option and the price was right. This was mostly guess work.

Conversion Begins

I didn’t take as many in progress photos as I was planning on because frankly the installation was much faster and simpler than I was expecting. Cranks come off. Bottom brackets comes out. Motor goes in and a series of washers and nuts and bolts go on, cranks go on and battery goes on.

All of the wiring used unique connectors so it was trivially easy to make sure every was connected correctly. No soldering, no electrical engineering required. If you can set up a computer, you can set up the wiring on an e-bike.

Test Ride

Fully electrified Bridge Club with no bags

Stealth Mode

I don’t really care if people know that I have an e-bike. I don’t need to hide it. I’m not sneaking it into places that don’t allow e-bikes and frankly this bike will still be an obvious e-bike. But a lot of e-bikes look really dumb. And I don’t understand why. I wanted my bike to look cool. Because i am a child. So I am putting the battery in a frame bag.

Battery and battery mount and cables come off.

Battery mount is attached through the bag. I cut small holes to feed the screws through the bag and into the bottle cage mounts.

Battery is in the frame bag. Front and rear bags attached. Fully loaded like this the bike weighs about 60lbs with the battery, about 53lbs without. The bike weighed about 35lbs with the racks on before the conversion.

I opted for the Electrify Bikes 2400 lumen integrated headlights. These are wired directly to the battery. They are controlled via switch on my handlebars. They are designed to be mounted on your handle bars. The lights are actually upside down here, which matters because they have a high and low beam feature (why?). My experience with them is underwhelming. Very bright, but very directional, they cast light in very tight rectangles. It is a good design to cast light on a smooth straight road traveling at 45mph but not so good for a bike on a mixed material path at 12mph.

Final Product

Overall, I’m really happy with the results. It has been a dream to ride. Still looking to do a long ride to test the range but it might be a while before the weather allows for that. The hope is to start using the bike for more short errands around town.

-Ben