Covid cancelled my snowboarding holiday earlier this year and ended up buying the European equivalent of the Liftboard, made by a company called Helvei for £300 off of amazon. Few days later it was here and I got to tinkering.
First order of business was copying the wheel pulleys as these are proprietary and likely to break at some point (which they did). Printed these in PETG and lasted over 200 miles. Only realised the damage when I stopped using this board and took it apart for parts. Left is original.
Next board I built used Slick Revolution / iWonder wheels (rough stuff, cloud wheels). I designed a press fit pulley with bearing which fits the trucks I used. Optimistic about my previous success I printed these in PLA which lasted for about 8 miles before all tabs had snapped. Below melted mess is the result.
Clearly the tabs needed reinforcing, looked at other ABEC designs, it didn’t take too long to add some screws holes and try again. Printed the below in PLA as they’re all plenty chunky to hold up to some abuse.
Don’t mind the wobbly print. I am none too precious about how these look. I purposefully put some of the roughest pulleys in there to see how they hold up. Some had snapped tabs which I put in and screwed the lot tight. 100+ miles later I am not experiencing anything unusual on my 83MM wheels.
Would you mind showing me the profile you draw for the teeth?
I want to draw some pulleys up for my wheels but have no idea about the crimping of the plastics etc and the effect on the tolerances you guys give it.
I’ll have to do some digging as to where I got these from originally, but they were a big opensource ZIP of all sorts of HTD3/5 gears. Used the teeth profile and designed my pulley around that.
I’ve done some testing with this as well.
I would look into being able to print some ABS or nylon 910 for a final product. That’ll substantially increase your wear and strength.
If you don’t have an enclosure and your printer is far from capable of some advanced materials, find a PLA plus that is blended with ABS. This will give it some improved abrasion resistance characteristics, flexibility, and strength while maintaining really strong layer adhesion from the PLA base. They’re easy to print with too
PLA shouldn’t shrink much. Make sure to calibrate your extrusion for each material
I get a lot of tiny pebbles stuck in my pulleys / belts and must say that the PLA set has been seeing a lot more dents than the older PETG ones. Printing these in PETG once the current ones fail, which to be fair might still be a while.