Yes, the answer to Safe's 'ideal wind config' will be arbitrary and only reflect his preferences for the outcome. It's been a righteous bunch of experiments, though, exploring the relationship between various configurations and what they deliver.
Is it practical as a way of tweaking a motor? That really depends on the value of your time. Armature winding as a profession is well paid for a reason. It sounds really fiddly and highly technical. Easy to make one wrong turn and end up feeling like AussieJester (if that was what happened). But Safe has found it rewarding enough to do a lot of it. He could probably make a side income rewinding people's industrial motors now
.
Other people might find it a lot easier to just buy a more powerful, or more efficient motor, depending on their requirements.
End of the day, no matter how much tweaking goes on, range and power are going to be in tension. If you aim for maximum power, you sacrifice range. There is no limit to this - Safe could aim for a 100KW bike, for total overkill, and with the right configuration I'm sure an inventive guy like him is going to be able to get that. But it won't go very far, unless it has lots and lots of batteries, which will eat into the acceleration and range with their weight, not to mention the handling.
It would be nice to get the best of both worlds with some kind of switch, between an economic and a powerful mode. I would love that - there are times for both. But I don't know how it can be done - obviously the lighter the bike, the easier it is to be economic, but that means less batteries, and/or a smaller motor. Also, the smaller and weaker the bike, the more frail and under-engineered it can be. There's no way I want to be going 100kmh on my bike - it could easily come apart in some silly way, and it certainly would need to have the brakes beefed up hugely, and all the other safety features, like indicators, headlights and a decent horn. I'd have to ride it wearing a motorbike helmet, and ideally a jacket and boots, so pedaling would be out of the question, even if I was at a speed where that would actually do anything (under 40kmh). The wind chill would not enable cycling clothes, period, unless the journeys were really short. Basically, if you have something capable of those speeds, you have a motorbike, not a pushbike, not even a moped.
Which is not to say that a grunty electric motorbike wouldn't be a really cool thing to have. It's just a totally different proposition to a moped, which can be ridden on a car license (at least here in NZ it can), or a motorized bicycle, which can be ridden with no license and no registration either. Expecting to get all of those things into the one vehicle seems a little unlikely. Better would probably be having one of each. Bikes don't take up much space, so choosing the bike for the purpose on the day isn't such a bad idea. If all you want to do is burn rubber, take a few jumps, show off to some chicks, and just marvel at the awesomeness of the machine, take your meatiest hog. If you just want to cover some miles and aren't in a hurry, like during a commute, then the smallest most efficient bike is probably best. If you want to nip around doing errands in your area, then something in between would be the best choice. Why not have all 3?
But anything that can be done to widen the power AND efficiency bands of all bikes is something worth doing. If Safe works out a way of switch a single motor between various efficiency/power modes, he's a legend. The next trick will be how to switch the batteries between those modes.
