{COMPLETED} $800 CalBeast 10S 6365 170KV Volador Build

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:27pm

This post is in that dangerous “other place”, but I wanted to move it here to preserve the data and provide this knowledge to people on this forum. I completed this build in December of 2018, is still running great today, albeit his old deck broke (reasons? no idea) and he transferred it to a new one.

Sup guys!

This is my fourth build in total now. I have 2 boards for friends so far and one for myself. This one is for another friend that attends Cal Poly SLO. Goal here was to fit very closely within the $800 budget range and use his existing board {Volador Amazon Deck} to put it on. See that look? Pure joy.

Thanks @hyperIon1 for hooking it up with the Maytech 6365 motors and the quality Bestec BMS.

The rest of the build list is included below in this excel document! Feel free to look and/or ask questions. I will be updating this build as the parts come in.

CalBeast $800 Board {Direct Excel Sharing link!}

Getting pretty good at doing these loop keys. Heres the great looking one for this build.

Behind you can see the MadMunkey remote mod that I did. It came out awesome in my white 3D printed case. These always take way longer than I expect them to. Probably about 3 hours to complete the remote mod with all the annoying soldering and then troubleshooting the potentiometer that I accidentally broke.

Also pictured are the batteries. I went with these Nanotech ROAR approved ones. They were on a huge sale, 22 bucks down from 36. Originally I planned to do the pack like this but ended up slightly changing it once I looked closer at the wiring required. These packs come with disconnectable leads and make it super easy to wire them together. I barely used any additional wire in this build.

Wiring completed with the positive and negative out as well as the balance connectors.

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:35pm

I assembled the reverse mount truck mouns and the wheel pullies, only to realize that when I asked DIYElectric for the reverse mounts on my order instead of the front facing ones, they had forgotten to provide the correct length of belt for the reverse mounted motor position. I ended up emailing them and they were able to send the correct size. Took about a week for them to arrive from message to receiving.

Fast forward some hours of work later, all connectors are soldered onto the wires and the Bestec D140 10S BMS. I used an XT90 male for the loop key obviously, and then a female XT-60 for the charging port. The XT-60 connectors are very robust and can support more than enough current to charge through. In the past 3 builds I have done, I used the male XT-60 for charging, as it kept the whole connector inside the enclosure, but it makes it very hard to grab the female connector to pull it out when unplugging it from the wall. The female side has a very small grippy part. This is why I switched it to the male part on the board. This will later be pictured in the final images.

Also connected here are the two Flipsky VESCS that I got from Alibaba. I chose to go with these instead of the DIYElectric ones because they are considerably cheaper. We are running 170KV motors on 10S here and there is no way they will ever get close to 60K ERPM. I think these will be robust enough running only in BLDC mode with standard settings. We will see how well they last over time but I have heard enough positive information about them that I trust to send them out in a build. They help keep the cost down a lot (two for $104).

The BMS balance wires are not yet wired up to the battery balance connectors quite yet, but that is completed later.

Hard to see here but I completed the wiring for the balance connectors (triple checked the voltage order before plugging it into the BMS). I ended up using some 3S JST plugs that I had sitting around because I have like 50 of them. I simply pulled the extra small wires out of the plastic plug housing and used a knife to cut off the second finger on the battery side of the connector. Here’s the BMS diagram that I used to wire the Bestec D140 BMS. it is a little odd that they split the balance connector into two parts on my particular BMS but it works.

The red marks on the connectors were the wire numbers that I wrote on there, since they were counter intuitive to what I thought they would be.

Here is the completed battery pack, ready to place into the board enclosures once I make them. I used fiber tape to reinforce the pack and tape down the BMS and balance wires. You can see the charger plugged in at the bottom, this is a standard 10s li-ion charger I purchased from Amazon and then put a XT-60 on yet.

The wiring for the board is also now completed. Everything works great and the motors sound awesome in BLDC mode.

grumpypuppy108 · September 29, 2019, 11:40pm

Great build it’s cool to see that you can build great boards at this price range
how are the lipos working for you ive seen them explode on other people even when treated well

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:50pm

The final part of this build was to make the enclosures. For this portion I chose to use 0.08" Kydex. Kydex is an awesome material and is extremely strong. I got these sheets from Amazon and additionally chose to purchase a Porter Cable heatgun that was essential in completing these enclosures.

Got two packs of these Kydex sheets. I used paper on the longboard to trace out the approximate size for the battery pack enclosure, leaving room to mount the loop key connector and the charging port towards the bottom. I then measured these and approximated how tall I thought it would need to be. These sizes turned out to work great. I used two sheets for the battery enclosure.

After quite some work, I had a mold made for the front enclosure. I used some planks of wood that I got from the Home Depot scrap pile for free. I used a wood base on the front angled part and then some cardboard for the top. I had heard that cardboard can compress quite a bit when making these but I figured the two sheets for the additional thickness on top would be alright.

I glued these together with hot glue, but if I had more time I would have used wood glue instead. When I was gluing it I placed it on the board to make sure I got the curves correctly.

in a similar fashion, I made the mold for the back enclosure. I used a circular saw and a backsaw with a cutting box to do all of the woodwork for this. Additionally, a harsh rasp was very useful for shaping both the Kydex outline and the angles on the wood.

After creating the molds for the front and back, unlike most people who make Kydex enclosures, I was not able to find any strong foam that I could use to push down the Kydex, so I made cardboard positives. Here is the mold for the rear enclosure and its cardboard positive, along with the front mold positive.

These positives are all layered several layers thick in order to have enough strength to stretch the Kydex over the molds.

Moving on to the actual difficult part. I used a normal kitchen oven to heat up the Kydex sheets on a piece of cardboard. The first one I did was the rear enclosure. This proved to be the hardest one by far, due to all of the angles on it. Looking at it again, going with larger angles and less of them would have made it easier, but I am still pretty happy with the end result. I was worried about one sheet being able to cover the entire rear enclosure, so I estimated and decided to turn it 90 degrees to press it on. The wooden mold is glued down to the paper, and the paper is taped to the board so we could push it in different directions.

After the first press, there were lots of ripples in the Kydex, seems pretty unavoidable with a shape like this.

At this point, I switched to using the heat gun to heat up parts of the enclosure that were rippled and pressed out the ripples with some scrap pieces of wood that we had from making the molds. This process was incredibly time consuming and probably took 2.5 hrs to make this rear enclosure with 2 people working.

Moving on to the front enclosure, I started with the smaller piece, which would be covering the rearmost part of the battery pack. The first press went pretty well, however, this time I heated the plastic 3 seperate times in the oven to start working the shape into it.

After fixing up the rearmost part of the front enclosure with the heat gun and wood scraps, I then pressed the next piece of Kydex over it. The first press looked like it went pretty well, and it actually was pretty decent. This was probably due to the long straight edges and the fact that the front part with the angles was not nearly as tall as the octogonal back enclosure.

Fixing the front did not take as long but since there were two pieces, it still took about 2 hours to complete.

After all the arduous labor, the two enclosures were finally done and looking pretty great.

The final things to do were to cut out the hole for the battery meter, the charging port and loop key, and the holes for the motor wires in the rear enclosure.

After cleaning up the edges with tinsnips and a rasp, I applied some weather stripping around the edges of all the enclosures.

Front enclosure turned out amazing. I used #8 screws in attach it to the board, and heavily padded the batteries on all sides with weather stripping. The battery meter is heavily glued in.

Taped the VESCS together with fiber tape and padded the enclosure with weather stripping

I simply let the wires that travel from the front enclosure to the back enclosure go under the weather stripping and that worked out fine.

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:52pm

The lipos are working great. I have never had a single problem with the lipos in all my builds. My first build, my own, has a good deal of voltage sag now, probably at around 750 miles on it, 50-75 charge cycles at least.

All of them have pretty good quality BMS units in them, might be why.

Thanks for the compliment. I like how it turned out too!

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:55pm

Final pictures! I’m very happy to be done with this build and I’m proud of the final result. Excited to do the next one this summer!

ShutterShock · September 29, 2019, 11:58pm

This video was his first time riding it, quite some time ago. Today he owns a helmet and we have ridden quite a bit together lulz

Davewesh · September 30, 2019, 12:40am

I used to be big into Kydex Holsters - I really like this idea of using Kydex as an enclosure in this scenario. Ive been running with a LIPO bag for mine (padded and secured) but have been struggling to find a suitable replacement. This really fits the bill.

Great build and awesome execution.

ShutterShock · September 30, 2019, 12:59am

It does work out pretty well. I would love to experiment with making a vacuum former to make the build process a lot easier. It takes quite some time to form it properly.

Thanks for the compliments. These enclosures are pretty tough, however just recently he had the enclosure crack at the front. Very odd because it is pretty strong up there. I think it probably only cracked because his board broke at the front before and when it broke, it over stressed the enclosure. Oddly enough he has been super unlucky. First his board broke, and he tried to fix it with some metal reinforcement, but the front truck actually broke. Very strange. As usual, @torqueboards came through with their excellent customer service and replaced his truck.

Davewesh · September 30, 2019, 3:50am

Like I mentioned I am looking for a suitable replacement for the LiPo bag that I use for my battery at this time.

The configuration of the Mountain Board that I’m running is not conducive to having the battery on the bottom, mostly because of the intent behind the board itself (since it will be given to my buddy after im done with it). So the implication of impact resistance is not super concerning mostly since the only time an impact should occur on the top is if the board is rolled and at that point there are larger concerns.

Unfortunately for my buddy, I’m a cheapskate and have already dumped well over 1k into a 700 dollar board (trial and error) I wont shell out for a Pelican or similar knock off - assuming I could find one that fit between the bindings on the board.

I think once I’m ready to show everyone just how laughable my board is currently - ill make a small showcase thread for it. But until I’ve redeemed myself with a proper VESC/FLESC/FOCer 6.6 build, my shame will continue to be shrouded in my self pitty .

That all said though, the Kydex like I mentioned is more than rugged enough to protect the Battery from stray rocks and sticks, and maybe not as fire resistant as a lipo bag - would still provide enough time to bail out if needed; As well it shouldnt see any impact unless like I mentioned, The board is rolled/dropped/etc.

ShutterShock · September 30, 2019, 3:54am

Yeah I agree with you here. I think that if you are gonna build a mountain board, it needs to have a top enclosure. I think you could even consider making a box like the trampa monsterbox, but out of Kydex, and maybe use a thicker sheet.

You could use a thick sheet and a heat gun to make bends to create a box out of it. Within that you could pad it quite well. I would imagine large washers and 4 screws or so would work well for a mounting option.

ShutterShock · May 26, 2020, 3:07am

Updates!

So after sitting mostly un-used (stupid rules about not using electric boards at CalPoly SLO) for 6 months, on a full charge, the batteries in this old boy were shot.

My friend, oh boy has he had bad luck. This board has been through the ringer for sure. I don’t know how bad the roads are up there but this board has been through it all.

First incident: remote issues, okay fine, we fixed the remote.

Next, the deck broke. Don’t really know how, but my man is only like 1̶8̶0̶l̶b̶s̶ (got slapped on the wrist) 150lbs, so I will blame it on the Volador deck. As a temporary fix, he repaired the deck with some scrap metal, and after riding it for a while, the baseplate on the rear TB218 broke. Wow. Really? Dexter ended up replacing it.

Next, and a still an issue, the TB218 axles started to bend. We swapped out the front and rear hangers in this update in interest of having straight running drive wheels.

So we stay running okay for a bit, and bam, the deck broke again. Guess we are not buying Volador again. I recommended he switch to a high quality Sector Nine deck, and that’s what he ended up doing. I don’t know what exact deck it is, but it’s similar in style to this one:

Anyway, so he ended up swapping all the electronics to the new deck, and all is well right? Well, not exactly. You see, Kydex doesn’t like flexing more than it needs to once it is bent. The front enclosure ended up cracking across the two front holes due to the larger concave on the new deck. My man superglued it back together to keep riding.

So that brings us to the most recent update. After realizing the board isn’t running right and finding some balloons in the enclosure, new batteries were put on order.

So much the ROAR rating did for the batteries, I was surprised at how deformed and messed up the hardcases were from the expansion.

In interest of keeping everything the same, we looked for hardcase batteries the same size on Hobbyking, because the ones we got on sale before were no longer on sale. We picked these pretty good looking Zippy 6000 cells. (Woohoo +200mah of range)

Fortunately, I had put together the wiring in such a way that it was plug-and-play to replace them and it went quite smoothly. While we were at it, we decided to re-make the front enclosure with an extra piece of Kydex we had from originally making it. I still had the buck and negative laying around, so we stuck the sheet in the oven and pressed out a new one!

The enclosure came out about as expected, with the new concave shape. Hopefully we won’t have any cracking issues this time. In order to help alleviate the cracking, I put some strong velcro between the battery pack and the deck to take some load off the enclosure.

In addition to this, my man picked up a good deal I sent him and acquired the 97mm Abec 11 wheels from @Kaly sale the other day. They look pretty darn good and came at a good price. I’d have to say I’m a pretty big fan of how it ended up - here it is sitting next to the recently finished BustinWheel build.

Apparently the wheels aren’t that much of an upgrade from his 83mm Chinese urethane, but I just don’t believe him at all, I think it’s because of the lack of time riding on them and coming back to the 97mm wheels.

That’s all, hope you enjoyed, I bet my man is almost as unlucky with his failures as @xsynatic bad luck schekklepock or whatever it is. Well… I doubt it, but with the amount of stuff that’s happened, I don’t want to jynx it.

xsynatic · May 26, 2020, 8:47am

yeah that’s some gnarly bad luck! Glad you got it working again.