Alrighty folks, really waited to the bell for this one but screw it, this build carried me through literally all of 2025 and got me to my one (and only RIP) esk8con pro final, it deserves a build thread.
This process started early last year when @Avi was moving house and had a bunch of goodies to give away, one such goody was a bunch of diy mtb bits, mainly a tomiboi deck and enclosure, which @DeadLightning was gracious enough to pick up for me (thanks again both of yall)
With the deck in hand I was now faced with the possibility of building a mountainboard, but first I started the process of cleaning this old soldier up. And so began the long process of sanding then priming and painting, but after about half a day of that process I was finally left with a fresh deck tooooo…..build absolutely nothing with for multiple months because I was dead broke
It was around this time that I really got to have some hands on time with @stan_he ‘s “Star Platinum” mountainboard on @Titoxd1000 ‘s duality trucks, aaannndddd despite having spent months building out Chabuduo (my first diy on a @tomiboi liquid sword with rosa trucks) the dualities really were just worlds apart, and soooo clearly there was only one option: start from scratch and build a whole new board of course
It was going to take time to save and get built but I just had to have it, and ohhhh boyyyy did it take a while
After months of saving (and moving to an apartment in DC) I finally had some disposable income to make use of, after already going 18s on Chabuduo I knew I wanted to do the same for the mountainboard, and I knew I just had to have dualities, so with a set of 151kv 6485’s and some @Boardnamics XL mounts I procured from @Evwan almost a year prior I finally had what was starting to look like an actual mountainboard
From there parts procurement got far faster, I finally set up a sale thread and sold off many of my aging (and dust collecting) parts and could finally start allocating parts and money to my dream build. After ordering some tires off aliexpress, some lovely hubba hubs from @tomiboi and some belt drive pulleys from @MBS I finally had something that was really starting to look like what I wanted
Once this was done I could focus on the hardest part: learning how to build the spicy pillow. Now I had never really done anything like this before and while I knew my way around a soldering iron this was farrrrr more than anything I had done before, so armed with a malectrics I bought second hand off @AlexB and after annoying @BenjaminF and @jack.luis with farrrrrr too many questions I somehow had a pack built, and I didn’t even blow myself up!
The final piece of the puzzle was the esc box, and it just so happened that @hoytkid was running a group buy for some unreleased ones from @ApexBoards
I rammed my battery into a pelican 1200 and slapped it onto the deck with some ratchet straps (that were the wrong color but oh well) and finally my board was done! It also was officially time for CarveNYC, where I even got to try some real track riding for the first time, also got my hands on some meepo 165mm tires from @SyluxV which looked fantastic on the hubbas
Carve NYC was a blast, and after coming back I only had ideas on how I could improve the board, first off were the tires, the meepo’s were good but a bit soft and after getting a flat on them they had me thinking I wanted something that could grip similarly well without being as prone to wear, in come the Xcell RS tires
Armed with the new shoes I now only had one more gripe: belt skip. It was shortly before this that I got to try @piepowered ‘s Overkill build running stooge open gears, and between the noise and the performance I knew I had to have them. I placed an order for some @IDEA short mounts and picked up a set of 67t spurs off @SakuraDemon and I was all set. No belt skip, all the grip I wanted, and noisy enough to piss off just about everyone at a group ride
It was at this point that I was purely just chasing aesthetics, and considering the carbon flare of the ESC box I knew I wanted to have a battery box that matched that, sooo after designing some printed parts and cutting some top and bottom plates out of 1/8” carbon fiber I now had a new battery box!
With that it was now time for esk8con prep, I had been fully bitten by the racing bug at this point and was purely focused on getting faster, I swapped the old 151kv motors for some 173kv’s from @Lahkun and also picked up a racebox mini. Aaaannnddd that about does it for changes I made to this iteration of the board, from here it was pretty much just i2s, group rides, and racing, it really ended up being my do it all board. Soooooo I’ll just include any and all pictures I can find, some notable achievements I’d like to list for this board: Esk8con 2025 pro final my first year ever racing on it, 2nd Place at Tef1 Atlantic, and third place at Heartland PEV festival
Alas, this platform was amazing but after all was said and done I wanted more grip, so I took the deck off and it became MRB (separate build thread for that)
MRB is great butttt I missed my daily group ride board, nothing else came close, and it just so happened that @Red_souls had a VERY blue tomiboi mtb deck he was willing to sell me. With that and some blue xcell hubs I had procured I had everything I needed to bring my baby back from the dead. Soooooo in the pursuit of giving this kick ass build the treatment it deserves with a BOTY nom I took on the task of getting it back together and bluer than ever just in time to submit it for build of the year. (in fact, as I’m writing this it is currently 11:40 and I said I’d be rolling over the thread by 11:59 so really really down to the wire)
Aaaannndddd that’s about it, couldn’t be happier with how the board came out, all it needs at this point is a binding and maybe a frit job.
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