I’ve built a couple of hub motor boards out of Chinese parts from eBay and Ali. It was fun and they work fine. But I enjoy building and learning and it’s time to move on to a belt board. My two little girls 11 and 7 ride them too.
As my first belt motor build, I’m just trying to stay middle of the road. Not trying to build anything to brag or show off or set any speed records. Not even planning to use it as a commuter except maybe the occasional short run to the store or library (about 3 miles each way, mostly flat). Mostly I cruise up the neighborhood hill, and carve my way back down. Sometimes I just walk up and carve down on a regular unpowered board, or get my wife to take me up.
So here’s what I had in mind to buy to convert my dual hub motor longboard to belt drive:
-two 6355’s for rear mount (seem to be out of stock in a lot of places, requesting recommendations on what to buy and where I can realistically find them) I like the idea of sensor motors
Caliber 2 trucks which width should I get to fit rear mount 6355’s?
-which motor mounts for a rear mount setup? Seem to be out of stock a lot of places
-Was thinking trying FocBox Unity, opinions?
Already have:
-I have 90mm ABEC flywheels already in service on a dual hub board
-I have a bamboo longboard deck already in service with as a dual hub board
-I already have two Turnigy 30C 5s lipos in series, in service on a dual hub board
Looks good to me! Where are you based? I have some Maytech 6355, but I’m in Australia, so might not be the best fit for you. For the esc I would go with a Xeniths rather than unity for reasons
Good morning mate. I grew up in Australia, but I came to USA to go to Uni and have been ever since. I used to go back for visits but have not been back since COVID. Would have been fun to come out and bring your motors back with me. I’ll go look at Xeniths.
Don’t get calibers! They don’t have enough axle space for push-fit pulleys with integrated bearings, which is definitely what you want because bolt on ones are a hassle. It’s only like 10$ more. And calibers bend if you abuse them.
I think Boardnamics 184mm hangers or wider should be enough. His hangers + pulleys are the best value for money, highly recommend.
The guy selling them is not a trustworthy vendor. You could get a BKB xenith instead (it’s the same thing but fixed power button), or a makerX or flipsky ESC, which could be cheaper options that will be good enough for dual 6355 anyway. (You would need to use a loop-key or dedicated antispark switch with those options) Or if you want something that is definitively better than a unity in every way (performance, customer service, features), get a stormcore 60D.
As for motors – Flipsky battle hardened motors are the best motors available currently. But other motors could be fine too, if you can get them for cheaper.
The Unity/Xenith are older tech and work decently, but the guy who designed those started from scratch with the Stormcore which is the best of the single mcu controllers IMO.
The MakerX DV6 is a great choice too (dual mcu, phase shunts, 12 fet)
I think the maytech 6355s are a bit too long to fit two on standard caliber or similar ~180mm trucks? Not 100% sure on that, I ran one before and it definitely took up more than half the space but that could have been cloudwheels being obnoxiously wide
+1 on the boardnamics recommendation, I butchered some calibers to fit a big bearing on the hanger itself but it’s not a fun time
My only caution is that 220mm hangers handle very differently to narrower 184s, and unless you want to upgrade to much bigger wheels (if you push them further out from the board they don’t collide with the deck, so you kind of need wide hangers or big risers to run big wheels) or bigger motors I wouldn’t recommend
+2 on the flipsky motors, they’re cheap already (but with slow and sometimes expensive shipping from China), but Banggood occasionally sells them for crazy cheap. I think I paid $85 for a pair of 6354s and it only took ~2 weeks
So thanks to everyone who pointed me to BN. As it turned out, Kevin had everything I needed in one place, and was communicative and super helpful with advice. So I bought the whole dual 6355 driveline from him. I’ll report back when it arrives and I have a chance to get it all together.
Right now for my dual hub motor rigs, I’ve been happy enough with Ali/Ebay ESC’s. But with dual 6355’s IMMA guess those will not be adequate. So far, (for the USA market*), some something VESC…
So far, we’ve got MakerX as a recommendation.
FlipSky has come up online for good solid ordinary builds for people like me who are not looking for a hyperspeed/bragging rights type of build.
Anything else?
*Due deference to our Aussie mate who gave his advice too. Even though I grew up there, I’ve been in the USA since Uni, and COVID has made my visits to my old home pretty much non-existent for the last 20 months.
FlipSky have a very mixed reputation, a good number of their electronics are marketed beyond their capabilities so they (rightly) earn the reputation of being really unreliable at the stated power levels. Because most of us haven’t run lots and lots of ESCs, a bad reputation for some of their products often gets somewhat unfairly applied to all of them.
So I think your summation of “pretty decent for ordinary folks” is pretty accurate for some of their stuff like the dual VESC 6 model (someone will correct me if that’s wrong) but the 4.12/4.20 tiny ESCs that claim to be “50A” units can be considered useless at that rating
so got all my parts from Kevin @boardnamics. great tolerances for easy assembly and thoughtful design.
was hoping for a rear mount. for no good reason other than I think rear mount looks cooler. but it looks like with the superb 33 degree BN base plate, the motors are too close to the pivot. so I flipped them around to the front and all looks good.
Wonder if they would rear mount with a stock Caliber base plate? Anyone know? These are the BN mounts with the idler.
