Oh sorry for spamming your thread! @xsynatic take me please!
Lol it’s fine, educational discourse
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the redember north camp has a hole bored in to the edge but not through.
Yeah this time around I drilled through the SemenDeed to drop it as much as I can. But I’ve had thoughts of moving the nut to the top and jamming from the top against the baseplate. That would mean needing to make the hole even larger to accommodate the nut.
Hate it when that happens
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Aight fam, time for another update, following the last big racing event of the year, AVS Race n Ride, hosted by @MoeStooge and team. Big shoutout to the team that put on the event, and thanks to them for all of their hard work, making the event super fun. Here’s some awesome glamor shots from the one and only s_m_l_s
photo credit: s_m_l_s
Aaaand here’s a couple more:
This weekend of fun started off pretty rough. On Thursday before the event at our ARD team practice, I noticed my braking was acting super weird, feeling a bit too loose on the backlash, and sounded pretty strange. I went through the whole practice, hitting 40 and pushing hard, and ended up opening up the drives when I got home, at like 12am.
Lo and behold, I found a massacre in the gear department:
The sharpest gear teeth you’ve ever seen. These were about half eaten away. These are @Boardnamics gear drives, running the now-defunct 3.95 ratio. This ratio consists of a 21-tooth motor pinion and a 83-tooth wheel gear. Due to the design of the gear drive, the length of the slot is very important to get the mesh of the teeth correct. Unfortunately, the gear drive was not originally designed for this straight-cut ratio, and I had to pull a @Shadowfax and take my Dremel to it. I did this quite a long time ago in the first video of my Inazuma series. All of that to say, due to the uneven surface of the increased length slots, the screws slipped over time and resulted in very wide backlash.
Fortunately, the motor pinion wasn’t quite as bad, and I am still running that today. However, the wheel gear was in immediate need of replacement. (also yes, I was running this with 0 grease, which probably did not help anything)
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I found out that one of my Flipsky motors had (presumably) slipped a magnet, and was now presenting a much higher amount of resistance than it should.
This discovery induced a bit of panic since I would need to be racing in just two days. However, I hit up my boy @Boardnamics and was able to get over to his house on Friday before the race, on my drive up to Apple Valley. At his house, I picked up two new 83-tooth gears that he happened to still have, and he kindly replaced my crunchy case bearings (the older ones were not as good as the ones he stocks now)
On top of those gears, I was able to take his last 170kv motor from his stock. Thank goodness, otherwise, I would have had to get 190kv ones and sacrifice some torque (I kind of wish I had picked them up, for reasons you’ll see later.)
Anyway, this brings us to Friday night, driving up with my new gear(s) and new motor that I would need to swap out at the team Airbnb. I brought my blowtorch, green loctite, and related tools, so I could swap it successfully.
So, on the floor, I was able to swap out my motor pinion and got the board all ready for Saturday’s practice and relay race.
After fixing up the gear and mounting the new motor, I re-ran motor detection on that side of the Solo, and got it working as it should. Felt pretty confident about the setup and was excited for Saturday!
Saturday was set up this year for something completely different - a RELAY RACE! In addition to the Relay we were supposed to have lots of time to test out the track, and possibly do some pre-qualifications to prepare for the Sunday races.
For the relay, it was teams of 5 people, with a requirement for each team to have one EUC, one Bike/Scooter, and one Esk8. The other two members were able to be whatever vehicle you wanted out of that selection, and then you also needed to add one person to time your team. ARD organized 3 teams, from both our members, and other members that were looking for a team at the event.
In my team, myself and Dylan (ARD member) were both on Esk8, Jon Talvera was an additional esk8, Levin Aceirto as our bike, and then Fletcher Leese as our EUC rider. We performed quite well and came in joint 3rd place with one of the Alien Rides teams.
This relay race was truly one of the most fun things I’ve done so far in esk8, so exciting and different to race against different vehicles, and the pass-off of the rope really gave it some interesting spice.
I also got to hang out with @ARCTIC @poastoast @Swol_Moon @zero_ads @Skyart and some others, which is always a great time!
The schedule on Saturday got a little bit behind, so there ended up not being any qualifying, and the team decided that it would be best to do all of the qualifying on Sunday.
I got some pretty good qualifying laps in on Saturday and broke my top speed record, bringing it up to 46mph. Pretty huge for me given that a couple months ago I had barely broken 40 - believe me the difference feels like a lot more than 6mph. Here’s a couple metr logs and a screenshot from one of my dragy laps:
As yall can see, I’m still not pulling a ton of amps, I think this log was my max, at about 94 motor amps per motor.
Here’s a dragy screenshot from one of my best laps - I managed to cut off two entire seconds from my riderfest time, with this new time coming in at 1:22.27
This is the same exact setup I was running at riderfest, but due to the experience and higher confidence I was able to knock off a few seconds.
After this last weekend at AVS I’m convinced that BRP’s are going to get me a whole lot more time in my laps, because of their higher grip. They may have moments where they’re a bit less grippy, but I think they provide a lot more grip than my meepos. I do love these tires a lot, and in fact, at this race, they are working their way down to the cords. I’ve got another set that I’m probably going to through on the board until I’m able to afford the BRPs
Saturday night I went on a super fun group ride with a couple friends and cranked out 17 miles on the Black Mamba build (build thread coming soon)
Sunday
Alright - Sunday time. Qualifiers and Races!
Sunday morning, we were scheduled to have our qualifying times. This year, at AVS, there were about 45 EUC riders, and about 29 skaters, with a handful of bikes/trikes. Qualifying went decently well and I ended up with a 1:22, which I was quite happy with, given that was my best time on Saturday as well.
This was enough to grant me a 3 second lead over everyone in Sportsman, and put me at 7th fastest overall.
Here’s the qual times from the other classes of vehicle - I think the most insane one for me was seeing max whip it around the track on his highly modified Surron.
EUC:
Bike/Trike:
After waiting quite a long time, we were presented with the classes:
Due to the amount of racers in the esk8 classes, there was only one race for each, unlike the EUCs where they had “A Main” and “B Main” to narrow down the racers for the final, but for Esk8, we just had one race each.
You did have to pay quite close attention to the order of things to make sure that you got to your race on time, but other than that, it was a matter of watching the other races, and waiting. My lovely wife came out to support me and watch the races, so shoutout to her for coming and hanging out.
I was honored to end up in pro class, despite being 7/7 - but among a bunch of other fast racers. @MarioChacon @Ruxx @HAIRYMANJACK @tuckjohn @zero_ads and @MetroLinkX4.
Prepping for the race
Well - race on! We were legit running out of light because of how far behind the races had gotten, and the track had started to get a lot colder. The wind all day made it quite cold and I was wearing my @XBoard winter jacket the entire day and didn’t get hot at all.
Anyways - I stayed in my pole position the entire race, to be honest, most of the first lap, I stayed within a turn of the rest of the guys, but after the second run at the straight, I fell to about 2 turns behind and it stayed around there for the rest of the race. It was a great race, and I pushed hard, but my race times were not as great as I would have liked. I messed up a couple corners and the cold track didn’t help either. Despite that, the rest of the competition was extremely fierce. Honored to be on the track with the rest of these great racers.
Big shoutout to @HAIRYMANJACK for getting second place on his Vesc board, as well as to @MarioChacon for his crazy fast lap time, and to @Ruxx for having a spill, and still pulling back up to 3rd place. I believe that @tuckjohn and @zero_ads had a pretty good showdown between their two 4wd boards.
Overall, this experience was awesome! But it did not end on a positive note for my board.
After finishing the race and rolling off the track, I quickly found out that my right (heel side) motor and drive were nearly completely locked up. I managed to roll it free a little bit, but it still feels awful and I haven’t gotten time to open it up yet. This side is opposite of the one that I just replaced the motor on, so my guess is that it’s another magnet slip. (looking at it at home again, I can literally see the slipped magnet inside, contacting the motor face plate.
So now, I need to fix this drive side before I can ride it again, so I’m not exactly sure what the plan is yet.
Here’s some videos from first, my Qual lap, and then second, the pro final (no one else shows up since I was at the back and accelerated late on the start lol)
I know I said I’m not sure what the plan is, but I know what I WANT to do:
Required: Fix motor. It’s currently unrideable. In interest of money I may try to disassemble the motor and see if I can fix it instead of buying two entirely new motors (I’d want them to match)
1: Upgrade rear hanger to HD and swap out the drive adapters. I’m super tired of having my drives shift every time I hard accelerate and brake, so it’s time to fix this issue.
2: Upgrade to BRP’s. I lost the most time at AVS in the corners, and I believe that upgrading to BRP, especially for short track, will give me a huge advantage over the current tires I’m running.
3: Drop trucks into the deck. My ride height is quite high, and I think this will be a great change.
4: Tear apart the entire board and paint. This will be Phase 3, and I’m super excited for this.
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Second video is private? @fessyfoo shoulr have Ron’s handle.
It was awesome getting to hang again and race!
wow. last min excitement. impressive saves.
Ah, ARD results. this must be what upset poor @Sobrik3t … /s 
ARD made up for it the next day tho. 
sry.
and u deserved it… as u mentioned, a good 3s ahead of the sportsman.
but does have an account @MetroLinkX4
The 4k might still be processing. It should be on unlisted
To be fair two of us were in 3rd with our AWESOME team name lel
It’s okay fess u were working hard lol
The more you know
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Nice you’re the only one to catch warming up tires on video lol
i have a motor i overheated with a heat gun and dropped a magnet. (was trying to get a tiny gear drive bolt un loctited ) … in retrospect I should have used a soldering iron.
it’s just sitting there waiting for me to try to fix it, or give up and say it’s not worth it.
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I think I’ll at least disassemble it first
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Congrats making the pro class! 
What a nightmare build up to the race too. You did well to get the board back up and running in time!
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Thanks man - this was my first real push at AVS, the Riderfest event was not nearly as serious as this one, I pushed quite a bit harder
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Super sick post bro! Always a pleasure hangin and riding with you!
I recommend this for the flipsky motor. No worries about magnet slipping out of place 
Love these posts of yours, Top notch man
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Hmmm thanks. I will have to see if the magnet is damaged too much once I open er up
Glad people are enjoying them. I think I’m going to make this last post I wrote into a video
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i told my mate who used to work BAE that i run my steel/steel gears on grease and he winced, but raw dogging it…
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Lol to be fair, the side without the backlash issue didn’t look bad at all
Steel-steel is not meant to be ran without lube. Steel-brass would work better in that regard.
Im also amazed that the slave gear wore that fast compared to the pinion, does anyone know if they are hardened?
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