đź‘Ť ESK8 Motor Reliability Wishlist

Actually, working on re-designing motors to hopefully be a bit more durable for the longer term.

Curious to see what all your feedback and suggestions are as far as issues you have and improving motor reliability.

Especially, considering many more people are using gear drives as well.

The ultimate restrictions we have would be motor size/length.

For a mountain board setup - This is less of an issue as you can easily fit a 100mm wide motor. So overall for a mountain board setup I would think that a lower KV and larger motor might be much more reliable. Easier to fit bearings and keep a motor more evenly supported.

For a street board setup - If you still want to run on 180mm Trucks. You are much more limited to total size due to limited length. You can use a smaller stator which might make a bit of extra room.

What do you think?

17 Likes

Battle harden them all!

18 Likes

@Saturn_Corp That’s typically already done. But I still think there are other issues that end up existing after 500-1k/miles that can be improved upon.

I’ve actually heard of a few people that have had rocks hit the motor can and it pushed the magnets in a bit which obviously made the motor gap touch the stator. So for issues like these, you’d either increase motor can thickness or have a motor guard in general when riding in more rugged situations. Obviously, adding to motor can thickness def adds additional weight.

7 Likes

Came here to say this. This is going to be the biggest factor for impact protection especially with All terrain boards.

4 Likes

If I was to make/design a motor…

  • 0.1mm laminations on the stator.
  • As small of an air gap as possible between magnets and stator.
  • Large bearings on the shaft.
  • nh48 arc magnets
  • High quality epoxy with retaining ring at base of bell
  • Hollow shaft
  • Go the extra mile and design a bell to reflect magnetic field back into the bell to even out magnetic field and reduce resistance like this.
    - Don’t paint the motors, it just scratches off.
6 Likes

@Friskies Why hollow shaft? weight reduction?

  • Can’t go higher in bearings due to the stator size. You can add more bearings and/or you can extend the motors to use bigger bearings but you’d be extending the motor size anywhere from 10-20mm in length per motor. For MTBs it seems like a good idea to extend.

@deckoz A bit but not as much as before. (screen insert)

  • The keyway shaft are you referring too similar to what @b264 has mentioned before? or differently?
  • Can’t change bearing to a skate bearing. Could entirely customize stator size but I haven’t looked into it entirely yet.
3 Likes

I would suggest a sealing mechanism/attachment for wet and dusty roads

4 Likes

You need a big ass bearing, two if you can fit in each end of the motor.

Oversize them, dip the stator and windings in epoxy trap. Same for magnets. These factors take space but will tremendously help in reliability against all the hazardous shit we put them through.

4 Likes

Waterproof hall sensors plz :slight_smile: Oh, and for unsealed motors – a sieve of some sort to prevent pebbles from getting in.

4 Likes

@Vanarian in a perfect world I agree. Lol

4 Likes

What would be more reliable than hall sensors? That’s all I’ve ever seen used in our motor sizes. I would be curious about the alternatives.

Automatic upgrade for buying motors too early in a build and actually being able to fit bigger ones on the new trucks.

That’s the only problem I’m having right now.

4 Likes

I think it’s not right. Yes the truck would give you that width, but with the increase gear drives in our builds that width is reduced due to the motor siting more close to the hanger. 100mm motors will very likely hit the baseplate when hard turning. Sure that depends on the length of the gear drive, buuut than also a gear drive shouldn’t be longer than the 8“ wheels to not hit the ground when doing wheelies. Hope that wasn’t too confusing :sweat_smile:

Higher kV and more torque oriented gearing seems to be better as well. Thinking about 170-200kV with 1:5-1:6.5 gearing.

From the pictures I have seen of your battle harden motors @torqueboards I would wish a bit more epoxy between the magnets. They can easily be filled up till the top.

Covered sensor pcbs already standard I think.

5 Likes

Keyway on the shaft is a great idea imo.

I’ve had issues with the shafts backing out or pushing in thanks to set screws/grub screws or socket head screws like in this pic backing out or straight up shearing off under load (?!?)

Initially I tried replacing the grub/set screws with socket head screws for more torque. It worked for a while until they sheared off/head shaped off somehow, but there’s gotta be a better way to do this. Grub screws you can’t get enough torque on. The keyway solves the rotation, but not so much the pushing in and out.

Maybe this issue is solved somewhere and I just wasn’t paying attention?

6 Likes

One other idea which would need a special mount thou…
80xx motors have the shaft on both sides sometimes. Why not with 63xx motors as well and add a bearing on the back side which sit in a motor cover which is mounted to the motor mounts. That would take away the side load on a belt/chain and helical gear drive, plus the extra cover would protect the motor when you hit rocks or something.

1 Like

Mass pouduse the motor cans I hate may motor thay look like a shaved @Brenternet . So it will be easy to replace and get em pretty just like Brent with his ginger beard :kissing_heart:

Thats not an option. A broken magnet at 30mph can be no fun. Better prevent that from happening than mass produce and change after 100km.

2 Likes

What a scrotal wart. Don’t invoke my powers to drive your comment home

A 2wd off one motor with two shafts would be kinda cool for a lightweight build. 63100 or something.

1 Like

I’ve been thinking about how to make this work for ages.

Your wheels will spin at different rates when turning… can’t have a rigid link between both wheels to the same shaft. I was looking into one way bearings on the motor pulley, that might work in some configuration allowing one wheel to spin faster than another… but that just means you get full torque across 2 wheels, or full torque on one wheel or the other when turning, and braking on only one wheel period.

This is what makes those differential gear drive threads interesting imo… but that’s so much more complex and they come with their own downsides beyond complexity, so much more hassle than just one motor shaft to two pulleys.

Didn’t Carvon have a 3 motor setup? how did he make the one motor driving two wheels work?