Hey guys, I’m in the process of building my first electric mountainboard, I am building this for a school project. My budget is somewhere around $1000 USD. I am pretty new to this community and I would like some suggestions and insight on parts, putting the board together, electronics…etc. I am light, 110 lbs. I have already purchased a comp 95 silver hex deck. I had an old set of ambush warrior trucks and wheels, the tires are 8 in. I’m replacing the hubs with MBs five star hubs.
I’m planning on 3d printing the wheel pulley=72 teeth. The motor pulley= 16teeth 5m 15mm
Motor: 6384 flipsky battle hardened 170kv
Vesc: flipsky 6.7 dual
Battery: either 2x turnigy graphene 12ah 6s 15c or maybe a higher ah? I was also looking at the mboards 12s3p, I would prefer lipo because it seems more affordable.
I am also planning on printing the vesc enclosure out of either nylon or ASA filament.
The battery enclosure will be a pelican case, not sure the exact specs, depends on the batteries.
I would really appreciate any advice you have to give and if anybody has parts to sell that are similar to my specs, that would be great!
I still don’t understand a lot of things that happen in this community, but I hope to learn a lot of cool new skills through this experience. Also, I am curious how much soldering will be necessary and what other connectors, and smaller electronics are needed, like a bms. One more question I have, is how to put the lipo batteries in series, and what other things will I need to achieve that. Is the battery compatible with a standard lipo charger, does there have to be a balance charger or could it be straight from the wall?
(Dual motors by the way)
Me either and I’ve been here for too long 
Feel free to utilize the beginner questions thread for common questions you can find in the search bar. Good choice on choosing an emtb, they’re the most fun!
I’ll check out that thread
What do you think of the parts? Do you have any suggestions?
The addition begins.
What do you mean?
Those trucks look difficult to mount motors to, have you found motor mounts compatible with the (seemingly round) profile of those trucks?
They might be more trouble than they’re worth.
I’m anti flipsky (for ESCs) due to my own personal experience, however with enough knowledge and understanding I’ve been told they can be an excellent and cheap power system, I’m just salty about 3/4 flipsky VESCs I’ve bought lasting a collective <60 miles. I’ve had much better luck with my makerX DV4s (I bought 2)
Both are good options in my opinion, li-ion is likely to have greater cycle life and a lower lifetime cost but lipo is an excellent way to get started for low initial cost, just be sure to change your low voltage cutoffs as vesc default voltage settings are substantially too low for lipo.
I’d be concerned about strength but there are people doing similar things successfully @IDEA vesc boxes have printed walls with machined aluminum plates on the top and bottom (I assume that design hasn’t changed since I bought mine, Tom could confirm/deny that)
Likely a decent amount of soldering, if this isn’t something you’re confident/familiar with I’ve had really good luck going to a local RC shop for soldering jobs I’m not confident enough to attempt myself (of course with a generous tip included).
Other connectors are kinda up to you, I personally like MT60s for phase wires but those may be harder to solder for somebody without as much experience.
Many people use bullet connectors as well which are certainly easier to solder as there’s no plastic to melt on accident and you can space wires much further apart before soldering.
To put lipos in series you simply make a connector that connects the negative of 1 lipo to the positive of the other, then use the remaining positive and negative into a connector, if you don’t feel confident doing so you can also just buy an XT90 series connector pre made.
I’m pretty confident that MBoards batteries all come with a pre-installed LLT BMS. Lipo batteries will not come with a BMS and will require a dedicated lipo charger.
If you want to charge a lipo pack
You’ll need to buy and put the effort in to wire a BMS, this is a relatively simple job but is also relatively high risk and I wouldn’t recommend for a beginner, I was actually in the process of doing this for a set of lipos myself before my shoulder surgery.
There’s a great guide for how to do this here
I have several years of experience building esk8s and am still nervous doing this as the risk is still relatively high. I imagine any of the battery builders here would be willing to wire up a BMS harness like this for you to install yourself which would still likely come out to a good bit less cost than a fully built pack.
Yeah this sums up about all of what I was going to say.
Thank you! That made a lot of sense compared to some of the stuff I’ve been reading
This mount seems to be compatible.
It’s MBS
How does it secure to the truck? I’m still not entirely convinced they’ll be up to the task without a hangar profile that’s designed for taking acceleration forces
Matrix 2s have a decent enough hangar profile to work pretty well with most lower power stuff like a DV4S. You can likely find a used set of those for pretty cheap.
Ok, I’ll look into those
I’m assuming you have built an electric mountainboard?
Yeah, I believe that board came with the original matrix trucks.
I also have one matrix 2 hanger you could run in the rear that would be more compatible with current drives.
Ok, good to know
Technically a few at this point but there’s a ship of Thesueus argument to be had about how many mountainboards I’ve actually built being between 1 and 3
I have my primary MTB Boardy McBoardface
I have a Spare parts board
And technically my primary MTB has gone through enough upgrades to only share a few screws with the original build.
Those builds look sick.
What range do you get with those 12Ah?
Admittedly haven’t used the new ones yet, I had a pair of the same batteries prior that I was getting ~15 miles from. Those batteries were in pretty rough condition though so I expect the new ones to do at least a bit better. The graphene version should do a bit better at higher current than these as well.