Has anyone seen non-shitty electric castorboards? For the longest time I’ve only ever seen underpowered ripsticks online, but I recently stumbled upon another kind of electric castorboard that might have potential to be good!
How it seems to work:
At 0:24 in the video there’s a shot of the underside, and it’s similar castor wheels to what is on a ripstick but not angled. The tilt to ripstick wheels is what guides the user back to a front-facing stance, where as this allows them to continue to rotate. The two castor wheels are lower than the wheels on the trucks, so the 4 normal skate wheels float slightly in the air and only make contact when turning/banking. Pretty interesting
What I don’t get:
I’m trying to wrap my head around how power is being delivered to this if it’s real. If these wheels can rotate 360 without having to be ‘unwound’ then there must be some kind of slip ring that can handle high amperages. Even then, I don’t see any wires going to the motors. Maybe behind the motor itself?
The biggest challenge I think would be finding or building the swiveling bearings that allow for a slip ring to pass power through to motors.
There’s a review video I found that shows some pitfalls. Says it’s a rough ride on anything but fresh asphalt basically. Maybe could be fixed with larger wheels? Maybe some mini mountainboard wheels?
You’re talking about the leiftech (or summerboard for their newest board), it’s an electric freebord pretty much
It’s indeed a slipring, a pancake slipring to be more recise but custom made by them to allow a lot of current to go through it (in comparison of other slip ring)
I’ve really thought about it, and it’s not really feasible to do such thing DIY that is as cheap or as good as buying directly a leiftech or summer board
But if you wanna have an electric ripstick, I think someone did his on the old forum, electric skateboard builders (it’s much easier because ripstick cannot turn 360 degrees)
The best slip ring I’ve found so far is this one, at 20 amps per phase wire.
Are you building one of these?
Did you machine your own castor wheel mounts that can hold the motor too?
That’s quite the ring you found! looks way too big, expensive and so on.
This is what I’m working on. E-Freebord Open source Electric Caster
It skips the whole slip ring thing by having a big hole in a custom reinforced deck.
Well, the way the freeboard is able to turn is that it has 4 normal, fixed direction wheels on skate trucks. When those touch down, they will only go forward, backward, or slide/brake. They give you something to push against ONLY because they have limited angles of rotation.
A board that has ONLY free spinning castor wheels isn’t going to behave like that. It’ll behave like a dolly cart. If you give a dolly cart a forward push with some spin and tell the person standing on it to stop the spin, what would they do? It would look something like this:
11:50 “really makes you realize why skateboard wheels are made the way they are”
Sorry I’m guessing that you are talking about how my model currently only has the normal caster wheels and the additional E-Caster. This is just because my first attempt at modeling the 5-X hangers off pictures was a frustration not a success.
I mostly thought it was clear that it would be used with the Freebord hangers.
You are the second person to think that so it’s really my fault i should throw some trucks on there.
The more I’m looking into this I think there’s really just 2 challenges to making this a DIY feasible.
high amperage slip ring with low profile
custom castor wheel mounts
The second one is just tricky to get access to metal shops during quarantine but I think I’m going to take a stab at making my own slip rings!
I’ll be posting updates on them here
