Heh. The chainguard is just sitting there for the photo. Not yet fully installed.
The bike is intended to be an homage to the French porteur bikes as built by parisian constructuers like Rene Herse and Alex Singer:
http://www.blackbirdsf.org/courierracing/velos.htmlThis velo-orange frame was only about $400 however. Of course that was in 2008 dollars. The idea was that the bike should be cool, but not so fancy that I'd be afraid to ride it around town and lock it up places.
This style of chainguard, the front rack, and the reverse brake levers are common porteur elements. I suppose the shellaced cotton grips are too, though I arrived at them as a bit of an accident. I had to use a 23.8mm bar to fit the aero bar end levers, and no other grips would fit, especially with the cable running under the bar so I had to make my own. That turns out to be exactly what they often did back then too.
As far as the e-bike conversion kits go, I've been doing quite a bit of research. There are basically 2 common Chinese mid-mount ones that claim to fit 95% of existing bikes, the Bafang BBS-02 and the Tongsheng TSDZ2.
There are a couple of retailers that sell them in the US, but my research suggests that ordering direct from Aliexpress can save you 40%. You can get the Tongsheng 48v, 750W TSDZ2 and a "52v" 17ah "shark pack" battery that mounts on the bottle cage holes on the downtube for under $1k shipped. 2/3 of that cost is in the battery. A smaller capacity battery, or one that uses slightly less efficient Korean made cells from Samsung or LG rather than Japanese made Sanyo 18650s can shave $200-350 from that. I've watched several tsdz2 install videos on youtube. It doesn't look very hard.
The vid that convinced me: