It looks great and I like the bracket design going above and below the deck.
I tried lasercutting steel split angle drop brackets and a few things to watch out for is
A. It is difficult to drill steel especially stainless or work hardened from the laser without a pillar drill.
B. Lasercutting struggles with thick cuts close together due to the steel melting and warping entirely, so I had to get them made 30mm tall, machine them down, and realised I should have just bought a block of 7075.
C. The surface finish will be very rough and crappy. You can belt sand for the trucks but between the 2 sides for the deck will be trickier.
Stacking layers horizontally
What might be possible to help surface finish and drilling is lasercutting something like 3x 6mm layers for each bracket with vertical gaps in the middle one allowing for truck and deck screws, then holes going horizontally to bolt the layers and different parts of the middle sheet together. I understand if this doesn’t make any sense I can sketch this either.
This is something I’ve done before, don’t worry. I work at a metal fab shop with drilling, grinding, etc. equipment, which my boss lets me use after hours. 12mm thick brackets cut 6-12mm wide are still going strong on that board
This week’s been a bit slow. I got the underside of the deck cleaned up, removed the inserts and filled the holes with epoxy. The JP40’s are also balanced up and glued into P-groups.
I decided that stress concentration around the rear bolt hole was too rich for my blood, so I stripped the brackets, and welded a bridge between each half to give the area a little more beef:
And with the enclosure mounted, it actually looks like an esk8! it’s now equivalent to a 48" deck. Needs a few things (like different length screws to finish mounting stuff etc.) to really be called a rolling chassis, but I’m happy with this rate of progress.
Thanks! I do love me a drop bracket build, something about how it makes the deck look like it’s floating.
Got back from a weeklong work trip and took a couple days off to unwind, by which of course I mean build shit. I always end up unhappy with my wiring when I do it over the battery, like even when it starts out nice, it always ends up a mess eventually due to maintenance. So with this build I’m laying down fishpaper and gluing down all the wiring I need. I’ve got balance wires down the center, and 2x 10AWG braid down each side.
Since this build is using tabless cells, I’m trying out some high-conductivity connecting strips I found on ebay. It’s 0.3mm copper with little weld spots made of nickel/copper sandwich material. The numbers look better for handling 45A/cell, but the main annoyance is that the weld spots are spaced 23mm on centers (I think it’s intended for brick packs using plastic cell holders/spacers) so I can’t use 4 in a row on my 4p groups, I gotta do 2 at a time.
I’m also not sure how much to trust the factory spot welds, so I tinned the seams such that the solder wicked underneath the joint between the main copper sheet and those little weld squares.
Shit. Well that’s why the novas I ordered a month ago haven’t arrived yet. They miiiiiiight arrive before race day, but probably not.
I should really have the board running in like 2 weeks to start shaking it down. Do I take the ground clearance hit with the 7" version and buy new motor sprockets, or is there another 8" esk8 tire out there with similar grip to the novas?
Enclosure ground clearance at 33deg lean with 8" tires (black line) and 7" (blue line)
I’m leaning towards taking the 7"ers, since I won’t be leaning that much on long track. The downside is that this type of enclosure strike in a hard turn creates and instant reduction in grip → wipeout. Thoughts?
Got less done this weekend than I hoped, i tried to get back into rollerblading this friday after a year out of the habit, and my back hurt like hell the next morning. I got a little bit of physical work done, but mostly i stayed in bed and did some CAD to print this week.
I finished prepping all the tabs and welding up the batteries, 5 welds per cell at 35J positive side, 37.5J negative side.
I glued the batteries into the tray and started soldering series connections, but the big dumb 60W chisel tip iron I bought for the job isn’t big or dumb enough to do it cleanly. The copper tabs must be wicking heat WAY too fast, cuz I barely have enough thermal mass to make the joint flow fully. And it’s leaving a bad finish, plus it’s taking too long and dumping too much heat into the cells. So I ordered a bigger, dumber 100W chisel iron, and I’ll finish up the mechanical work till that arrives.
. How are ya getting there? I’m driving down from up state, I can probably grab you on the NJ side if you need
There’s an Amtrak/bus route that gets me there in 4hrs, but I’m more than happy to chip in gas/grass/ass for a carpool.
