To be honest I am no longer sure why I thought it was a death trap other than speed maybe. My brain is fried after 3 hours in 100+ f heat. Watching the video probably helped me see that is less sketchy than the mock up makes it look.
That wasn’t my issue with it seeing as I enjoy that feeling. Bending down to gain extra stability is also something I’m not a fan of doing since it isn’t as fun. I can do it but only bend down when my motors need some extra help fighting against the wind.
Although if you do fall, or get launched off when something breaks, how does the whole leg throttle thing work?
This is fucking amazing. So many custom parts, and love the forged carbon fiber. I was wondering what the 80mm motor was for, but would have never imagined this. Well done
Man this build is the kind of skill I strive to achieve eventually. Custom everything and an (almost) completely new form factor.
I feel like you take the ideas that pop into my head and I just dismiss as wayyyy to hard and go “yup that’s definitely possible”.
Also is this another remoteless board? Or is the linkage attached to your leg just for the braking? Super interested in how you set all of that up, and how the combo of Regen/disk braking works.
The board is harder to control in a tuck, I mainly do that to get the energy consumption down. Moving at top speed and will get the motor pretty toasty if I don’t do something about air resistance. It also gives me more fidelity with my control leg
Yeah this heat wave hasn’t been kind to me either, I feel you.
The 5V wire powering the twist throttle runs up and down the control stick, and is separated across the telescoping joint by a small loopkey. If I fall off the board, the throttle is shut down, the ESC is forced to read 0V, and the board hits the brakes on its own. The couple times that I’ve bailed so far, it’s worked well and the board hasn’t run off.
I appreciate the compliment, but I don’t actually have that kind of confidence lol. I do have the advantage of already having a lot of experience working with composites, but the forgings were a new process for me, so I didn’t know if I would be able to pull it off going in. I didn’t even know if I would be able to assemble the steering mechanism accurately enough to keep it from binding. But I guess if you want to get new skill sets you need to be willing to take the L sometimes (cough cough my last board cough cough ahem)
Yep and nope, respectively. The linkage is connected to an analog twist throttle, which handles acceleration and regen break. The mechanical break is set up to engage at the extreme end of travel, just as an emergency measure.
I was more worried about your leg being stuck to the board and getting bent in an unpleasant way that could break it during the fall. I didn’t even think about needing a deadman switch to shut the board off to be honest.
I also want to make sure everyone knows this guy compiled some firmware for me as a random favor so that I wouldn’t need to use a janky arduino middleman for throttle after my ADC1 died. Muchas thanks
Oh my. I’ve wanted an electric dirt surfer in my collection for so long but never got around to it.
You build looks amazing. Crazy that this many batteries for so well in this format.
Also I think the technical term I’ve seen used before is a caster board, searching this will find you some similarly older builds made long before I started esk8.
I love this quality in people. You don’t even need to have a particular drive of your own, contentment is achieved just knowing that you’ve done it better than someone else
Yup. I don’t see anyone beating this. The build alone is enough to win, but the thread pushes it even further out of reach. Is this the first build thread with a video intro?
P.S. My wife saw this over my shoulder and is leaving me. Apparently, I have “too many wheels on my boards” and I’m “not a real DIY man.”
Probably, if you get it going fast enough. I’m not too keen to find out though.
Thems the breaks, kid. You can try arguing that a skateboard behaves like a two-wheeled vehicle, but just has two wheels per wheel, but I don’t know how that would go down.
Isn’t that the term for ripsticks? Since they use actual bolt on Caster wheels. The dirt Surfer has negative rake in a similar manner to that, but this one has positive rake. Idk.
Well the deck is 36x13 inch, that probably helps lol
