Alex's Ever evolving Flux DIY ?

Welcome to the journey!

This First 85% will be sort of a background of how this came to be + Catching you up on how its going + where its headed.

Will be a lot of visual notation / documentation, Ill try to keep Words to a minimum best I can

starting off in 2020 is when I came across esk8 boards.
I bought a Evolve GTR & rode the absolute hell out of it
(unfortunately now its dead but that’s part of how I got here)

I purchased it because I wanted a way to get around Catalina Island. (a island which I was Sailing quite frequently to with my grandpa and what better way to get around in my mind.

Evolves price tag kept me from it for awhile but eventually I scraped together what it was alledgley worth.

Was a ton of Fun but ultimately could not handle the sheer force of shredding - Ended up Severely Fracturing the nose of the board which I fixed by using a angle grinder + scrap Aluminum I found at work and cut to pieces sort of resembling a H that sandwiched the nose and kept it together until I retired it



Fast forward 2023 I had been Trying to figure out how piece together a diy board for the pst couple years. I knew what I wanted wasn’t necessarily on a shelf somewhere.
For some reason I somehow wasn’t aware of any sort of local community deeply involved in PEVS until late 2023 (First Group Ride At the Evolve Store in San Diego) I met some pretty cool people that day Mason, David & Austin from Speedboard + Theron & Apollo from Evolve.

I somehow managed to stay in contact with mason from speedboard and bothered him with questions regarding esk8 / Vesc Stuff that I had not alot of information on for several months later until I realized at a certain point the answers to these questions I had didn’t really stick, and I needed to somehow progress this vision on my own.

So I start ordering a parts… First thing I ordered was a deck + Enclosure from Flux Motion aswell as a Vesc. I was Trying to Figure out the absolute biggest 12s Battery I could fit in the enclosure using a piece of paper and the one 21700 cell I had in a flashlight I Traced 10 parallel and settled on that.

I purchased everything I thought I possibly might have needed even upgrading some things before the battery even arrived.

in the meantime while the Battery was being built I was trying to figure out how to piece all the things together.


the Night before my battery was to Deliver I somehow managed to convince a well known Sawyer Reynolds to help me fire up my vesc + program my vesc to take input power from two 5.0 ah Makita Drill batteries.

and at like 5 am day off the actual battery delivery I test rode the board using those drill batteries Ahahaha

Real Battery shows up later than expected.
with not the slightest clue what I was doing I wrestled the battery into the enclosure trying to see if I could stuff a bit of padding on top and bottom of the battery to help against wear. but the battery was so big I couldn’t run any padding. I Practically had to stand on the Enclosure to get the darn thing to adhere to the deck while driving the enclosure screws.


I was in a bit of a rush to slam it all together (I was to meet sawyer so he could properly program it on a night ride by the LA Zoo later that night) as the battery came later than expected I had a little time to install a buck converter, which I soldered while the loopkey was IN LOL ahaha. so as I placed my solder tip onto the battery tabs it let out a nice spark which for someone not knowing they were doing was quite frightening. After telling myself this is I’m sure how its done I placed my soldering iron down & Maintained Pressure to prevent a disconnect / more sparking and wallaaaa its done.


![4BFE0105-4C81-4176-BBD5-6235DA515D48|281x500]

This was while waiting for sawyer to show up, I was sort of in awe that I even made it this far.

two days later I somehow found out about this thing called Tails up Thursday in Long beach and met a ton of cool folks that are some of the best people I know today

Shortly after that I found out about i2s and Met EVEN more REALLY COOL PEEPS. all of whom who accelerated my interest In PEVS. I found out about a Race that was coming up at Apple Valley Speedway and the Race was on to be prepared for breakneck speeds I wanted TO WIN!

as I started to become more fixated/involved on improving my setup I started coming up with parts that thought of.

I came Across @Heathlewis and some content of what he was doing with his boards as they shared the same chassis. I was eager to push the same speeds he was pushing. delusional I thought that I might on my matrix 3s I bought all the bushing types for those trucks and tried each setup accordingly. and the bottom line seeemed like go decently fast and straight (45mph)

or be able to actually turn and severely drop speeds that my channel trucks where capable of safely.

time was running short as this race was approaching and I didn’t directly want to mimic what heath did on his setup out of respect for what he did. but I believe through a post of mine on a esk8 group posting he encouraged de-wedging aswell as using a stablizer as he was in favor of safety.

Which I took as a green light to make my attempt at what he did in short amount of time.
I had a connection through work of a guy who could help CNC a wedge. (4 the rear) as I was had no idea what degree I was going for I guess kind of eyeballed it



the Night that I had this block milled out was also the last night before the race
(Last minute larry)


Raceday arrives and each practice run I’m still scrambling to find a setup worthy of high speeds, changing everything from gear ratios to motor pulleys, wheel pulleys, every single bushing setup possible.

Something I didn’t anticipate was to be invited onto a relay team 20 minutes from the start while my board was completely apart as I was putting it back together for a new setup. as the start of that relay race neared I ditched the self proclaimed wedge and those 8 inch tires. & just drilled straight into the baseplate of my truck to mount the stabilizer.

So going into the race on the softest bushing ready to break my face off I send it, & a bit to hard. I wobble out coming into the first turn but continue to race and finish.

That was day 1,
Day 2 I qualified for the novice class and took home 2nd place


Extra shots from the weekend:






Taking home a 2nd place I was pretty stoked to have podiumed for my first race.

over the next year and a half up until now I have been altering the setup on this board and its as follows.

there’s about twenty different directions you can go with your boards setup at all times if you are in the DIY scene and picking one is kind of difficult.

Ill let the pictures do the talking…








Seven different attempts later…


Not Pretty but for a belt drive it works :slight_smile:


First Test Ride!



More Visions


Tailight?



Hmmmmmm I see you are bored of belt drive…

3d printed mockup

Fitcheck

Prettttty tight

Sniff Check

They Arrive!

mmmm yes wrong file sent

utilize upset to make more aggressive look on V878748578457

order is in now we wait…

!!!

CRISPYYYYY

take a second to recognize the many attempts to get there

Listen to stooge gearz

Nevermind that now continue improving…

**** Involuntary Hiatus since December of 2024****

Miss Esk8con :frowning:
Miss Electrify :frowning:
Miss Friends :frowning:

Hiatus sort of continues …
but still sort of able to keep pushing…

I got pretty sick so that means binge work with what you have with the time you have.

Looking at the vast amount of spare parts / Relics / Mistake parts left over I have disturbs me.
Recalling those raw silver mounts I PANIC Drilled one hole When I realized the pattern was off. I picked up and continued hand drilling with determination.


Succesfully eyeball Drill pattern through one.
use holes to assist marking centers
Centers… questionable

…determination supersedes

mmmm 4wd Mockup?
with motors won at AVS…




Vesc Challenge Ahead?
Chance to do a Molicel battery swap?
(Must Finish Building welder first)

More to come & more to share from the past but this is the start…

I’m sure most of you would be interested (if Any) in where its going not how its really gone :slight_smile:
this just took hours & hours to compile apologies for how disorganized it is and will be

Stay Tuned!

13 Likes

Reserved

Reserved.

I can’t help but notice that your duck has no dick :pensive:

That duck handle I bought from a esk8r that was way before me :sob: Geoffrey chiu @glyphiks

But yes dickless duck

2 Likes

Good read! I like seeing the evolution of the motor mounts. I also had to do a double take on this thread and truly try and remember if I had built a Flux or not and started this thread. yeesh. How are you liking the Acedeck trucks? I had a Z3 with them for a bit. Def dug them but the hardware on them is made of silly putty

Hey man I appreciate, It definitely takes experience / trial & error to understand how to properly design this stuff. I hesitate to share mistakes in the process because I don’t want to seem like I’m building Janky stuff, But ultimately I ride the hell out what I craft.

I agree they hold up but that china hardware is looking a little like they might instantly Vaporize if I thrash hard on the trucks.

I definitely want to change all of the hardware + Loctite it all.
I actually started changing the Button Heads to black oxide socket head m5s Aswell as changing the blue washers to red washers yesterday but I became side tracked with that mount idea,

I still have quite the aluminum spaghetti to clean up lol.

Hopefully within the next year I will have more time to put those trucks through the ringer, I used to competitively Race BMX bikes on a clay track when I was younger so I’m no stranger to doing gaps I just gotta get back into it, & would love to see if these trucks can hold up to actual jumps and how they perform coming down. Ill start posting YouTube content then for those interested.

I gotta see if there’s any BMX tracks that I can tear up locally

1 Like

here’s a short clip from a bit ago the bottom right screw on one of the arms actually fell out if you look hard enough.

Here’s a real rough sketch / start of a vision for this thing.

Kinda have been fooling around with the idea that It would be nice to race my very first diy again so I am giving it a literal ground up overhaul.

70125s + twin tronic 250rs
On the fence about battery situation.
(Whether I’m going lipos or li-ion)

But I should be running 3 links
And probably a ton of custom parts that have yet to be made. Stay tuned yo.





11 Likes

Tronic died on me so this is the next best thing

3 Likes

I really hope @MoeStooge releases 7” brps
I will likely break my asshole off on the street using 6” BRPS if they never come out of the prototyping stage as this will be my street slayer board and could probably really use those in favor of saftey.

I’ll have to be much more conscious of debris / cricket slippers and such if not :unamused:.

But it’s cool if not I’m already running my v5 to literal death on the street (uses 6” BRPs)

Bigger tires probably aren’t going to help with vibration very much if at all but atleast a bit more clearance might insue some of those Evel Knievel mitochondria within me to send it
Harder

Below shows my v5s positive powerlead disconnecting while mid ride :smile:

Was a real shit moment as my alarms where blaring and I live in a quiet town.

The Tesla cops where already eyeing me
Luckily I had a set of keys on me and used them to take the screws off to disable alarms

the board just fell apart from serious vibration



Yes my power bank powering my taillight is in a sock :socks: LOL

1 Like

If you don’t mind the size and weight of dragging the thing around, and like overkill, give kart tires a thought. They are so comfortable you wouldn’t even believe it :sweat_smile: vibrations just no longer exist when aired down. At all. Plus handles unbelievably well for slicks even on gravel

2 Likes

Hmmmm :face_with_peeking_eye: not a bad idea, how does acceleration on your board feel when you are rolling already?

Kart tires really might be the way to go
As I’m going to throw a fat 12s battery on it. So it will already be heavy as fuck

Which ones do you have?

It eats about 10% extra power. What I noticed though is that the gears will absolutely need lubrication, at least at the 78/12 ratio I run now. Didn’t notice a power loss between greased and dry gears on 6" but on the kart wheels that can eat away up to 30-40% power!

I run bridgestones who no longer make kart tires. Want to move to Lecont SVC on the raceboard. Vega mediums should be another good option. Or even medium hard might be worth a try if it’s not primarily a raceboard.

2 Likes

I saw their website down. They out of business?

seems so

Jeez yeah idk if I could get away with just 2WD with those kinds of power losses

Ya I noticed a few weeks ago. I imagine it’s a niche market hard to make sales.

@Goride65 Well on top of there sketchy rep yeah I’m sure it makes it difficult

@Titoxd1000 and I were talking about if they are still sitting on an inventory or not.

I joked that I wouldn’t be suprised if they came back made some different heatsinks for their escs and called them something different as they might advertise them as a new model.

But realistically they are probably sitting on an inventory, whether or not the units themselves are working is up for debate.

I had a thought of offering them a price for the rest of there inventory as is where is but not sure I’d want another headache right now.

Tito mentioned that it might be worth reaching out to Shaman systems himself to get the lowdown in regards to what happened to tronic as I believe he did the work for tronic?

But yeah kind of a bummer.
I guess I was the last one to give em a little faith ahaha.

I know Mooney said he was gonna purchase them awhile back @Swol_Moon did you ever end up purchasing them before I did?

If so did you receive them?

1 Like

Tronic? Yeah, he said 5 weeks 3-4 months ago. I get that stuff doesn’t go according to plan but homie was unresponsive everywhere. After waiting 2-3 times the original wait and their website being down with no response, cancelled and did a chargeback. I’ve only ever done that twice in my life.