Meanwhile, in the repair shop

"Loose bottom bracket."

I guess so:

It looked like a culvert.

Interesting contrast with the Specialized Como ebike I assembled after that. We'd been resisting smokeless mopeds, but a longtime customer wanted to order one to have here so she wouldn't have to transport her other one from her winter home. We'd assembled other smokeless mopeds for summer customers. It had been pretty straightforward. We didn't have to mess with the brains, just the bikier parts.

Not this time. A large yellow sheet of paper and several stickers warned us to UPDATE FIRMWARE. Just follow this simple flow chart:

Torin volunteered his computer to communicate with the mother ship at Specialized. The update process was simple enough. A couple of cables, a few minutes. A little technology break. If we were going to make it a regular thing, the shop would have to buy its own laptop, but we'll take that as it comes. All of that offsets the slim margins on those bikes. The small profit is camouflaged by the almost $3,000 price tag. And that's just a fairly basic model.

As we consider easing into it, I remember how the evolution of suspension technology increased our costs for offering that service until we discontinued it because it was too costly to keep up with the constant changes requiring new tools. To break even on the investment we would have had to draw service business from a wide area and dedicate permanent space to it. Will the same be true with the changes to electric bikes? It seems likely. So far, we have been able to take it case by case.