Had to bail and do a run out, at a speed not appropriate for running it out. Which resulted in me giving the pavement an almighty Slap.
On my normal board I’d be totally fine to bomb this hill, wearing my slide glove.
IDK what the solution is.
Today I did the run again, and I just wore a slide glove on my off hand, but the thing is IDK if I’d be able to slide this board with is massive heavy wheels on a narrow bike path, let alone with only one hand.
Maybe I’ll just dedicate some practice to that. Because what I really want to do someday is have somebody drop me off at the top of a canyon and skate all the way home. And in a scenario like that I absolutely need to have a 100% reliable option to slow down, even if the remote or board dies.
It strikes me how nice it would be for a board to have a fail safe built in, in the event it loses connection with the remote, rather than just instantly going into free-rolling mode. I’ve had the remote disconnect twice before, but both those times were just in flat parking lots.
Anyway, one of the great things about Eskate was it opening up all these cool runs that didn’t used to be practical because of all the ups and downs, and now I don’t have the confidence in my board to take full advantage of it, and its a real bummer.
Yeah that sucks hard man. Not speaking from personal experience but I guess with the right technique you can realistically slide any urethane wheel that we use in esk8. I’d be shitting bricks if I lost brakes in a similar situation, did you try and foot-brake first?
Yeah, I foot braked first.
I could have committed to that a bit harder, but there was an upcoming soft patch on the side and a turn after that, so I elected to run it out toward the soft patch.
Suppose that brings up an idea but im not sure how well it would work. In scenarios I’ve considered for physical brakes the thought was to simply have it mounted to the board and just crouch down and pull (this is in reference to Mountain Board style brakes though).
Something else someone with more time on their hands could attempt would be a PPM/UART Injector? Most receivers have a way of indicating a connect to the remote, so why not build a programmable module that can inject PPM/Control signal with priority over the remote receiver to either:
Govern speed - EG: if no signal is found, apply steady braking until a set speed is found. Then hold that speed for X amount of time until going to a stop. (This would require UART not PPM).
Wait X seconds for a new Signal to be received otherwise apply brakes gradually (or aggressively, could be programmed).
Trigger a controlled stop (see point 2) based on a button press hard wired to the Module.
No idea how one would implement this but really it doesn’t seem to terribly difficult. I’d pursue it if I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself in the /r/homelab community.
The Mini Remote (and other ones I’m sure) have a failsafe setting, and you could set that to light braking if desired. I wouldn’t, but you could. I definitely wouldn’t set it to hard braking.
So if you turned off the remote or it lost signal, it would go to whatever your failsafe is, which is typically neutral. But it could be set to light brake.
Analog mtbs sometimes have a disc brake. As long as it’s not a 4wd board, you could throw a brake on the front wheel with a super short brake cable and mount the handlebar to your deck.
Really only works for pneumatics though… Not sure how well it would transfer to a urethane board.
Yeah, but I’m saying if you start riding uphill the incline decelerates you and you don’t even have to think about it, and nobody is being thrown off their board by it.
My remote had two settings for failsafe. Hard brake and soft brake. I have it set to hard. And I’ve had it cut out on me a few times from a loose cable. The braking force isn’t huge but enough to stop me from 30moh to 0 in about idk like 15s?
It’s honestly great… I do recommend adjusting your riding style though. I have a very large board so I can speed my stance out.
It’s definitely a “woah” moment. But depending on your setup, it could be just fine. My setup was very low torque, so the amount of jerk I could experience was relatively low since there wasn’t much torque to suddenly disappear.
Not to mention if you’re strapped on (giggity) then you won’t go anywhere.
I’d agree though that in general you’re right. Just saying that it’s not a hard and fast rule.
It should at least decelerate enough where if I do bail I won’t have to worry about the board rocketing into my face at full speed. I can bail only having to worry about myself and not the risk my board poses to me.
I still agree with your wife hahaha