Yeah, the chargers are a concern especially cause those are especially cheap ones. I only use them for Endurance Rides cause they’re light & cheap. If they break it’s easy to replace them. We’ve had people break expensive chargers using the board/cargo net system.
I’m going to place a neoprene pad underneath then for the next Endurance Ride to cushion the vibrations.
I’m actually planning on doing exactly that big battery you describe with the help of ChiBatterySystems.
Going to mount a large battery underneath the board & have 2 cables charging the batteries as I ride. The drives function while the batteries are being charged. Basically a Charge+Ride system.
Going to use a Tarab so I can still swap batteries when I want to. It would fit on a Crossbow but then the batteries wouldn’t be easily swappable.
Hoping to get 25+ Miles Range out of a system like that.
So I think the Chi battery guy has a great idea with the portable recharging banks. However I don’t think its the right solution to extend your range. Here is my rational:
I don’t think the Chia board bank is ruggedized for bolting to an esk8. Its intended to carry in a back-pack and charge when stationary. All sorts of stuff could break if you mount it to a jackhammer.
The charging connectors in particular are not ruggedized. They will vibrate out, scrape on the ground and get damaged.
As I understand it, the board bank has a higher voltage battery array and it has a buck board to step down the voltage for boards of different voltage. It would be much more efficient to just parallell in a 36 volt battery. A 36 volt battery in parallell is going to keep all batteries at the same voltage and it will protect your revel Kit batteries from voltage sag on hills and accelleration. Letting the revel kit batteries sag and then waiting for a power bank to charge them up at wall charger rate…thats really inefficient.
Imagin if you put a motorcycle gas tank as the main tank for your car, then you used a windshield washer pump to replentish the motorcycle gas tank. Thats the best analogy I can think of for using a power bank to charge on the go.
Also, the Chia power banks are pretty expensive compared to just getting a battery of the correct size.
Its really not hard to parallell in some extra batteries with a Revel Kit. I’ve done it a dozen times with the old Landwheels. The Revel Kit is not much different. You just run a positive and negative wire into the Revel Kit electronics compartment using the exact same path as the motor wires.
I recommend against using the Revel Kit charging port as a the parallell connector. If you hit an obstacle, you will snap the DC connector and would likely damage the charging port.
The Tarib would be a good choice for a mega battery Revel Kit. It’s not the only option but it is a good choice.
The Chi guy knows his stuff for sure. If he’s willing to do a custom 36 volt battery for you with an XT connector then I’m sure it would be great. Just make sure you are not using wall charger connectors and wires to connect your booster battery to your Revel Kit batteries. You want to tap into the main power wires that feed ESC. Do a good solder joint and heat shrink connection. Make sure you turn the power button on with no battery installed to deplete the capacitors That will make it safer to operate on the Revel Kit.
Yeah, slightly skeptical regarding the Flux as well but the first batch seems to have gone well & they’ve made a bunch of improvements to the second batch.
The Trucks are MBS trucks that are used on the Jaws.
The enclosure is ABS but seems well constructed.
The Flux appears to be somewhat of a mix of different LaCroix models in terms of features.
I agree that the pre-order is a big risk. There are hardly any reviews of the Flux yet & LaCroix’s track record is proven.
@EboardSolutions:
So I probably should have PM’d Joe with my impressions of the Flux instead of posting publicly. Some of my impressions of the Flux were incorrect and it was all off topic for this thread. So i’m just going to delete those two previous posts.
I feel that my impressions of the Flux were colored by the high profile placement of the word “Pre-order” on your shopping web site. – so much so that I missed the fact that it was a pre-order for the second production run. But there might be a lesson to learn from my incomplete skimming of your store front web site. How about eliminating the word “Pre-order” . It is often associated with kickstarter type campaigns where the product is still just an idea.
How long does Revel support usually take to get back to people? They haven’t responded to neither my email nor the multiple chat messages I left them about the cracked battery case. Feels like they’re ignoring me now. I never had to wait over a week for a reply from them before. They responded and replaced my remote battery super fast.
I would say that it depends on how busy things are with the limited staff. Some days there are more messages than others, you could always try kindly prodding them to respond, maybe your message got lost in the noise
Has anybody here swapped out the front truck for something else? Something that gives more maneuverability? What size or angle should I get if I decide to swap it out?
My suggestion woudl be to stick with front truck geometry that matches the rear truck geometry.
I had two experiences that reinforce this idea:
Installed the Revel Kit on the back and Landwheel L3-x trucks onthe front and the steering and stability was quite poor relative to Revel Kit parts front and back
Installed double hung trucks on the front of a 2WD Revel kit. Seemed super cool for a few runs up and down the street. Then on the third run I encountered a spectacular slow speed wobble that I just barely rode my way through. I went lock to lock about 8 times before the wobble tapered off. I was eyeing the front lawns as a soft place to land but managed to stay upright.
Trying to find trucks that are 200mm wide hangar size like the stock front truck but it seems pretty rare. Most on the market are 180mm hangar size. Maybe I will just try to stick to the stock trucks and order a surf adapter for better maneuverability. I’ll keep your advice about the same geometry in mind in case I do find trucks the right size. Thanks!
My gut tells me that for the waterborn surf adapter, you also want to get the extender:
I don’t have any first hand experience but Fabi reviewed the two parts together and they worked well together in his video. He has since removed the video. I’m not sure why.
My gut just tells me you want a longer wheel base if you are adding highly responsive steering to the front end.
I don’t have any first hand experience with either part, but I am certainly curious about your resutls. Suit up like a knight in armor anytime you try something new, even at slow speed.
Pretty much nothing will happen if you run 180s instead of 200s, your track width will be different obviously but this will have no performance consequences(not ones you’ll notice unless you’re sliding or riding at the edge of your grip, anyways), only cosmetic ones.
You don’t need to keep the same geometry between front and back trucks, plenty of the downhill precision trucks use different geometry between front and back and those are obviously very stable.
What you should avoid is having a more agile truck in the back, and since the default revel trucks are quite dead this is very unlikely to happen unless you put some low angle downhill rear trucks in the front, which you obviously shouldn’t do as their name suggests.
If you want to avoid wobbles don’t use tkp/surfskate/double kingpin trucks, as those are designed for agility at slow speed and will wobble easier at faster speed.
I’d recommend paris V2/V3 trucks(paris technically made 200s way back but those should be hard to find by now).
So not just a guy ordering parts and assembling them 