This is the first time I’ve discovered two names I planned for my boards were already taken WITHIN THE SAME DAY 
Great to see more people designing suspension the correct way, eskate suspensions should be treated like 4 wheeled motorcycles rather than a pickup truck. Good stuff.
I do wonder tho why are people always going for extra angles when suspension gets loaded… You’d think that either reduction in the baseplate angle or even maintaining the angle might be more preferred. Anyways.
I think that depends on context a lot. For this board, where it will mostly be used on fairly smooth track, and loading will primarily be done in a corner, I think it makes a lot of sense to have the angle increase. It kind of makes it more snowboard-like, where the harder you press the board, the tighter it wants to turn.
I could see a decent argument that, for an off-road board, where the loading will come from going into or out of a jump, the opposite may be preferable. I think that would be hard to achieve, but I haven’t thought about it much.
100% agreed that the way the independent suspension boards do it is wrong for an esk8.
A suspension that increases truck angle makes the board feel snappy and alive under your feet, the same way a flexy deck just feels good to carve on.
Without that, a board of this caliber would feel slow to respond and would be hard to turn. With such geometry, you end up with a very snappy and incredibly well manouverable board, no matter the weight and inertia. Given that the suspension gets loaded well when cornering hard on track, it boosts the steering in the slower corners (where it will be loaded the most) which means I can run a harder and more stable setup to begin with, and with an unloaded suspension in the straight I’ll be more stable due to lower effective truck angles. That’s the main reason why I went this way.
And the reason why I chose to design a suspension in the first place is that for an esk8 to feel good and be well controllable on track, there must be something that alters steering depending on how much the tires are loaded. Most esk8 race setups get this from tire slip angle. A stiff deck for this build just wouldn’t work (I started testing there…) because the kart slicks have so much lower slip angle compared to regular esk8 tires. Flexy decks synergize with the kart tires’ low slip angle very well, but they also flex torsionally, which is bad for stability and predictability. This suspension design is supposed to be the best of both worlds.
It’s just that you’d want more turn at lower speeds, where you wouldn’t have that much centrifugal force exerted onto the deck, whereas if you were in a high speed corner, you wouldn’t want that small of a turn radius anyways, so the shallower truck angle makes sense here for the same amount of lean.
I actually was referring to track use, although good point with it being useful for off-roading as well.
Depends on what you want to achieve. For mountainbike trails sometimes the extra turning is very much needed unless you like bunnyhopping. But for big jumps, yeah it’s not ideal. But it’s less bad than it might seem at first, because it allows you to run tighter and more stable setups to begin with.
I’d argue flexy decks feeling good to carve on is kinda countering what you’d want for racing, similar to how stiffer suspensions handles worse than more rigid suspensions on cars.
I do see your point about how the system can decrease the truck angle for straight lines, I think that’s a more fair argument than improving turn at corners.
I’ve been designing my own “vertical” (if you look at the board from top-down) suspension setup for a while now, should be able to share some progress and do some testing after I’m done with my current projects (I have about 500 people chasing me for a new remote design…)
It allows for more straight line stability for a given turning radius. Well, yeah it’s most useful if you use the extra turn it gives you and turn it into more stability throughout the whole range by using stiffer bushings. Even for a stiff setup it feels snappy. You can have it setup for insane turning though and still be very stable on it.
It is actually a benefit depending on riding style, you ride this more like a mountainboard or a snowboard, not so much like most raceboards. Definitely has it’s own style of handling, but personally I get way more performance out of this handling compared to traditional setups. And this is pretty much the only way that can get large and heavy boards to feel snappy. You need a snappy board for racing shorter tracks.
Can’t wait to see what suspension design you come up with!
Collected the aluminium purchase. I should be able to get started with it on the CNC on Sunday.
Got some extra alu for some miscellaneous stuff as well as enough the full chassis with some extra incase I need to alter swingarm geometry a bit after cutting the first one out. Next week will be very busy!
Tapping arm just showed up
Looks really nice, will make tapping holes effortless.
Doing some workshop organization and hopefully also the first CNC’d alu part today, which will serve the purpose of being a backing plate for the mount of the tapping arm.
Also have a new 3d printer coming tomorrow or the day after, a qidi q2. Excited for that. It’s supposedly a really good printer especially for engineering materials.
I decided to make the board 20S6P instead of 5P. So its a bit longer. Here’s a deck mockup from an ABS sheet:
875x286mm. It can house up to 4x g300 and a 20s6p. Also planning to make a shorter 5p version later. I like a wide stance personally, but the 5P version will be more comfortable for some people for sure.
Today I’m finalizing the geometry of the footpads, so that I can order the lasercut parts asap. That way there’s a good chance I can still get them just before Easter. Ideally I’d throw everything together and start testing during the Easter holiday already. We are planning to rent out a kart track in Hungary with some friends for some practice sessions the week after Easter. I want to ride the new chassis there. Means I have about 10 days to finish my CNC’d parts and a weekend to assemble the board in Hungary. The lasercut parts for the prototype will be made in Hungary.
Heres the redesigned footpads.
Doing a quick test print which I will pull at the first layer, superglue onto the ABS deck mockup, and confirm that the many binding mounting holes contain holes that I like. If it does, then the footpads are finalized.
Milled out an MDF footpad. I like how it feels, so it’s geometry wise 100% final. Should probably make some more aggressive concave version as well eventually. 9mm concave sounds like a fair bit but the footpad/deck is so wide that the width mellows out the concave to a quite comfortable level. More aggressive concave would need taller stock material than I bought.
However, I don’t think that I need more concave than this with bindings on both feet. Will mill out the real thing and test.
So now that footpads and chassis length are final I’ll prepare the lasercutting files.
Also been working on the mill itself.
One of the thrust bearings supporting a ballscrew came a little loose so I retightened it pretty hard, hopefully it won’t come loose anytime soon.
And mostly been working on the enclosure around the mill. Now it has a top, and the rear is starting to take shape. I need a small door on the rear for access and to have the ability to have large stock stick out, which is why it’s still not done.
Also I ordered the wrong size limit switches, they just showed up and they are way too big. Need to decide what to do on that front. For some axes I can print adapters (printer coming tomorrow), but its not that simple for every axis. Might have to order the correct size as well and use the machine without limit switches for the time being
Did the first bit of alu milling today, so far just a quick test part. Still have to figure out speeds and feeds. Broke 2 endmills today! Probably in good part because I didn’t hook up the air system when doing the test part. But also have some CAM part to refine.
4x 10mm bored holes with no finishing operation, just roughing. They look really good for roughing and not even having chip extraction. Almost mirror like finish. So the mill is good.
This is a backing plate that I needed to mount the tapping arm onto the table. Basically an overkill antisink plate for the screws to not pull through wood.
I ruined the plate a lot cosmetically with the chip welding but it’s supporting the tapping arm well.
I might have underestimated the size of a tapping arm a bit. Also I need to pull the table forward to when I want to use it. It is what it is, I can live with that. Haven’t played with it yet, but it’s looking very promising. And it has an automatic oiling system fitted as well, which was a nice suprise as they don’t advertise that feature.
Will do one more test part in alu in the morning then get started milling the real deal 
little afraid I’m not ready yet to nail everything on first try, but I must get started before I run out of time before my Easter vacation.
Also got a new printer, a Qidi Q2. Very happy with it so far, and it’s capabilities are going to be useful if I get into exotic materials. 370C hotend and 65C chamber heating. Gone are the days of tinkering just to get something to print. Did some PLA prints so far, but got some ASA prints lined up as well for the near future.
However, I might have underestimated the size of the printer too, seems like a tendency of my workshop acquisitions 
It needs to be like 30cm away from the wall on the side so that the filament box can open, and 25cm away from the wall behind it so that I can slide the top back to print cooler filament. And still manages to block most of my (admittedly not very good) pegboard system. So I’m having some workshop organization troubles now.
Been also playing with the CNC enclosure, the rear is pretty much done now, just polishing left. Got an access door in the middle that flips up. Also installed two Arctic P14 Pro PST fans with a 3d printed bracket and HEPA filter in front of them
Yet to wire up the fans though, need to run another cable up the cable channels with 12V power.
Been also playing with the limit switches
Originally I couldn’t get the ones on the machine working, so I bought new ones. These are however much bigger and thus needed redesigned brackets, designed and printed some. But then I figured out how to get the old limit switches working. So I’ll probably have one axis with new limit switches and two axes with old limit switches, as the X axis is already setup with the new ones, no point in putting in extra work swapping back. The old limit switches should be running tomorrow for Y and Z.
And lastly I did a shitty install of the air blast system. This is very much temporary, just can’t be bothered figuring out how to do this properly right now.
It’s powered by this small “silent” compressor, it’s not too loud but definitely a bit annoying when running indoors.
And acquired a quite large mitre saw for cutting up the aluminium stock to size before it goes into the mill.
The cnc is such an awesome side project, i admire your ambition Bence!!
whew chonky 2.2kw spindle. This thing is sick dude
Thanks! And I’ll be upgrading to a beefy ATC spindle eventually! But need to build a UPS before that to power the mill. I want to draw way more power than the single phase 230v 10a outlet in my room can supply
Unlikely to finish the chassis before my Easter holiday unfortunately. Been working 16h a day for the past 4 days setting up the limit switches, probing, and debugging toolchange related gcode generation. Turns out the stock fusion postprocessor doesn’t work unless used in clearance height retraction mode (which isn’t perfect for small Z machine), the one I was recommended to download on the control board website also didn’t work stock, but I could do the modifications so that the specific commands I need are automatically set when needed.
I basically had to force with an extra pause to make sure the toolchange is done, otherwise it sometimes did the first features of the next operation then realized it should’ve switched. Would have meant broken endmills if I didn’t fix that.
And also had to do force G53 (“go to 5mm below limit switch”) retraction by editing the post processor because the post processor kept replacing it with G28 (“go to some random absolute position that sometimes doesn’t even happen to be within the work area”) even when I specifically set it not to.
Been a pain in the butt to get this working, but finally got it. I’m going to sleep now for a few hours. I basically have 16 hours or so tomorrow and 8-10 hours max on Thursday to get everything cut out. I’ve got 7 parts to make… 2 footpads, 1 chassis part, 2x2 swingarm parts. Footpads should be simple, the rest however is all quite complex. It’s a miracle if I make it before the scheduled departure to Hungary.
Probably more updates to come soon, will give it my all to try and finish, or at least progress as much as possible.
In the meantime enjoy this sad 8mm endmill that was supposed to take a very thin facing cut and due to wrong Z offset tried some full slotting instead
noooooooooooooo
Ono
I’ve pulled this stunt with a 6mm endmill, but my machine immediately stalled. I got off easy
