Lol I just got accepted to Amazon Vine a week or so ago
Thanks! I’ve just wanted to sho yall how I finished it off, there’s so many more little steps to things than people usually see haha
The brass inserts went in just fine with the drill and none of them pulled up the wood, I drilled the hole size the inserts requested as well. Put them in the way rosco said with the slot on the bottom and it was pretty easy
It sure is going to be cool to ride this BlueBIRD! 
My buddys build is damn similar to this one, so I’ll be showing him this as a preview.
Excited to see range numbers and all that.
Yeah bro me tooooo! @ahrav penguin man is sending me the Artic Blues that are meant to go on this build. The black ones were a placeholder.
I am considering glass frit but I kinda just want to ride this soon so I’ll probably go with some griptape for now. Glass frit seems like a more expensive and time consuming option. Obviously the build deserves it but idk if I wanna go there yet
Sent 
griptape seems to work for a lot of people hahaha
Mostly removable as well, wonder how to get the adhesive off tho 
Ah smooth top would help I see.
Lol true especially on the hummie, should come off without leaving too much adhesive due to the smooth top.
Just ordered, I think this will look pretty cool for now until I decide to do a cool glass frit
It’s kind of like Navy camo, so it goes along with the theme, and will match the lighter color of the blue wheels
Can’t wait to take some photos of this thing when I finish
Thank you for telling me what these are called, I needed to order more and this helps a lot knowing what to search for 
Lol no more searching for “plastic wire clippy things”
There is another SR-71 that eats rabbits and clavicles.
I do like the look.
Oh lord was that the one you wiped out on in that gif? Thx! Almost complete
Yo I mean thank goodness the helmet was on, looked like his head took a hit on the ground pretty hard
The board also obliterated itself lol
Not trying to hijack. That gif fall was me. This was him.
Oh god ya I remember that lol that’s a big L
I’m still alive, just waiting for my clavicle to heal up.
ALLLLlriiiiiight guys this is the penultimate post that yall have been waiting for. Have you? Who knows - anyway this is the final “build phase” post. I’ll hide the last few pics in a drop down so as to not spoil the final product, as the next post below this will have the final build pictures in it.
So we left off in the last post with the skinning of the enclosure, and I will have to say that I probably could do a better job on the front part. It’s not bad bad but some of the wrinkles on the edges are coming up a little more than I’d like. People that have been wrapping for a while probably could do it without that happening, but it’s alright, looks fine to me.
Interestingly enough, a package arrived that I wasn’t expecting (wow that never happens lel). The MakerX heatsink arrived just in time for me to be closing up the enclosure! Thanks @YUTW123 for helping me out and letting me buy the heatsink separately from the ESC.
I was thoroughly impressed with this heatsink. The machining and anodizing look great, and it’s a solid hunk of metal. Since the MakerX retro has 6 fets on each side, it’s got a solid metal upper half and solid metal lower half.
Since the metr pro that I got as part of the group buy won’t arrive until Monday, (and for other reasons) I stuck one of the temperature probes from the BMS on the back of the MakerX so I could monitor the true temperature of it. The other temperature probe is about in the center of the pack, pressed on a battery terminal to monitor nickel strip temperature.
Included with the MakerX heatsink were two long thermal pads which I cut up and installed onto the parts that contact the fets. After installing it and MESSING WITH VESC FIRMWARE FOR 2HRS (rant later don’t worry) I could tell that the heatsink was doing its job.
Anyway, I installed the heatsink on the ESC and tossed it back into the enclosure. Now it was time to install all of the neoprene padding into the whole enclosure, around the battery, and as a gasket.
I did actually add a little bit more closer to the ESC since there was a little bit more gap.
I finished screwing in all the enclosure bolts (16mm or 20mm depending on where on the enclosure), I was able to finally close up the board. This literally took so long and I had to widen all the holes in the actual enclosure to make them fit as expected. No one ever tells you how finicky this part is, but I will say it is much easier to do through-deck bolts than these inserts.
Took one last picture before cutting the griptape and installing it. Looks pretty epic as is but the griptape gives it that special touch. I kind of like how the black wheels look but the blue wheels are going on anyway.
I got some pretty awesome looking grey camo griptape to stick on here, and I wanted the carbon fiber to show through, so I made a large diagonal cut through the center. I needed to make sure all the lines were straight so I used a big carpenter’s square and cut it all out.
One last thing before the pics. VESC TOOL RANT OH MY GOD.
LITERALLY %$%&%($*%$#@&@( why is vesc tool such a pain?? I am not going to go into all the errors that I had because it’s literally just so annoying and I don’t want to relive it again. Here’s the basic breakdown:
1: MakerX ships with firmware 3.65, okay no big deal, plug into vesc tool 2.06, update bootloader, and install 5.1. Sure, no problem. Configure motors, everything is good, UART remote just works automatically, cool. Switch to BLDC mode, cool.
2: ensue: smart reverse sucks. The braking is bad, it couldn’t even pull me back up a hill or stop properly, if you’re rolling backwards, you can’t brake properly… I literally just want current brake no reverse. HOWEVER, NAH. You can’t seem to set current brake no reverse with a UART remote. Someone please explain to me why this is a thing. I tried everything I could think of, but nope. No matter what I’m stuck with smart reverse.
3: text @KaramQ and complain to him. He ends up insisting that @pookybear swears by 3.62. Alright cool, fine I’ll rollback to that - more problems. couldn’t read motor config, “vesc firmware not updated” etc etc. I ended up fully starting over on 3.62 and just configured everything with the things that VESC tool wanted me to. FOC mode, UART, nothing else. Okay great it works now, and for some reason, smart reverse on 3.62 is better than on 5.1 Who knows.
I hope no one is offended by this rant, it is just my experience tonight, and I really don’t consider myself a noob in this area, so I’m not sure what was going on.
The final question, I don’t want to have to tag @Trampa but really, why can’t you activate anything except current with smart reverse when using a UART remote? Am I doing something wrong? FW5.1, FW5.0, FW3.65, FW3.62 - I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I don’t want to have to use PPM because I feel it’s outdated and when I receive my Maytech dual trigger from @kevingraehl I want to use UART and get the telemetry.
Anyway. Rant over, enough negativity.
Here’s the exciting part. The build is unofficially out of the “building phase” and has moved on to the testing and upgrading phase. The outstanding tasks that still exist are: install Maytech remote when it arrives, install metr pro when it arrives, order and install Riptide bushings. I’m still waiting for the charger for this so I had to make an adapter to use my old one for now.
Here’s a few pics of the griptape installation that kind of spoil it before looking at the real final pics:
This is definitely my best build to-date and I’m extremely proud of it. Can’t wait to take it on its first test ride tomorrow.
This topic is long from dead though, all further updates will go here as well.
There should be an option to switch smart reverse to false to disable it or add more delay so it doesn’t activate right away.
Fully agree with this!
