Super light Speedster Build Idea

For the past couple months I’ve been brainstorming my dream electric skateboard. Bc I’m going off to college soon I want something that’s lightweight, super robust, and comfortable. However, I’m also a speed demon and a downhill skater, so i by know means want it to be weak. I like carving at speeds of 40mph+ on the regular and love a balls to the wall powerful board. Recently, ive been seeing boards popping up with much more reasonable power to weight ratios (DKWAN’s Parsec and Mach 1) and figured i would take a crack at it myself.
My goal is to build a board to emulate my downhill racing setups (Small, Stiff, narrow trucks, smaller grippy wheels, stable) and fuse it with Eskate racing setups (insane power, grip, durability, axle deck rail alignment), while also having it be a great casual board!


Functional Requirements:
-Sub 20 lbs
-Compatibility with 80mm-177mm wheels/race tires
-Modular battery (programmed to change config based on battery chemistry (lipo/lion)
-Stability at 60+(given ideal road conditions)
-Truck width less than 200mm
-Fast charging

Looking to design and manufacture
-trucks
-deck
-modular battery system
-Motor mounts

For the deck, I’m thinking about something similar to the Rocket Simplex construction wise. I may throw in a few plies of maple for added shock absorption. A symmetrical deck is ideal as i would like to add LDP style brackets to raise wheelbase and drop ride height. Also to make it compatible with more wheels.

For the trucks, I basically intend to close my 111mm Zealous trucks and make them closer to 200mm. I’m a huge fan of how they slide and feel in corners, partly in due to their very deep round tapered bushing seat.

For motor mounts a drive train parts, I already have a set drawn up in CAD that are ready to be machined. Key traits of these include pocketing for extra weight savings, X shaped crossbeams for added rigidity, bash guards, and a cloth carry strap on the back. I did take heavy inspo from the IDEA motor mounts so shoutout those!

I did just only recently start this design a planning prosses, I’m considering making content on the building of this board and I’m considering making a GoFundMe or something because I’m lowkey broke :'(. If you would be interested in seeing content, funding this project, or have any design recc’s lmk!

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If you’re going with a skeleton mount design like that, I would consider having cross braces between the mounts both behind AND in front of the motors. Or just beefing the mounts up. Running any decent sized motor on skeleton mounts and urethane seems like trouble for the mounts.

Also if you’re producing these mounts as a one-off, there doesn’t seem to be any real need for a clamp AND a mount, to save weight and space on the hanger, you could integrate the hanger profile/clamp into the mount itself.

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For the skeleton mount, I’m prly making it out of 7mm 7075 Aluminum with X style cross braces between the mounts(think X bracing between car cages), also the bash guards should brace a bit more too. I was thinking abt making the plates out of carbon fiber but I’m not to sure how well it would hold up.

Why would there be trouble with skele mounts, big motors, and thane?

For integrating the motor clamp into the truck, I don’t have a 5 axis mill so that would be lowk tough to do without doing a bajillion setups :sob:

While this is certainly a possibility, in my experience the wider the clamp is the better the mount holds - so to make it really robust it’d need to look like the radium mounts kinda, which is makes it harder (and therefore more expensive) to manufacture

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I was also considering using a medium width mount and mabye just welding it. 7075’s kinda a pain to weld tho

Minimal material will fatigue faster than a solid mount

Big motors putting a lot of weight and force will fatigue the mounts faster

Urethane wheels passing a lot of vibration through into the mounts with the heavy motors will fatigue the mounts faster…

It just doesn’t seem like a great recipe to me.

I can’t argue with that, definitely a good point.

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How do mounts fatigue?

Do you even esk8 bro?

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Heavy vibrations are the worst enemy of all, and they do crazy things.

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Did You made weight calculations to compare Your mounts include cross bars with basic strong mounts cross bars free? Results could be very interesting. Produce Your mount will be costly so make correct math behind. I would create it more simply but from carbon.

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Naw I’m more of a downhill guy :sob:. Just have a diy board for fun
Wait but is still don’t understand what mount fatigue is. Is it metal warping, micro fractures?

For sure. The amount of vibration and stress those mounts will see is pretty massive. Especially considering that they look to be quite long, there will be a considerable amount of leverage on them.

There’s reasons people don’t make skeleton mounts like that for esk8!

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Damn im all for that 200mm Zealous trucks

Make sure your motor mounts are beefy as everyone said!

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Next what I see is that Your skeleton motor mount are absolutly ignored load flow inside mounts compared to my CAE calculation from past. Sorry but it will be most probably fragile. Depend on how strong motor You will use and Your riding style but next point is that in case of crash it will be probably damaged. Normaly behind any weight reduction need to be CAE calculation which will show You wher You can remove material and where not. Also Solid Works have this kind of module but to know how to use it it is not so easy. And regarding @IDEA mount, I can clerly say that his new models v11 looks wery good regarding weight savings. On Your place I would buy it and save a lot of time and money on Your side with this purchase.

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Love your idea I have the same going, going for hubs can lower your clearance and is lighter. Something to consider I bought the Mach 1 and want to buy the parsec. But nailing the lightweight is nice. Carbonfibere the way to go. Looks good thus far

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Tysm! I must have infinite money to get a Mach 1 and Parsec💀

Will for sure do some CAE stuff. For crashes, I don’t run bindings so it’s unlikely the motors will be damaged.
The reason I don’t want to buy mounts is because I’m a student Machinest and would like to gain experience in mfg as design
(Side note: try not to be so harsh when responding to a 16 year old’s skateboard designs. Especially for the younger kids on this forum, such harsh language may dissuaded them from the ESK8 community)

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Ya, I would rly like to get into skateboard MFG and design, so I’m looking to gain XP in truck design

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Sorry bro:) do not want be harsh. That great that You are studying engineering. Hope our inputs will help You and You can learn from our failures. Definitely will be nice from You to share here Your results. If You take this like engineering task, iam sure You have more time and bigger support in school than we have occupied by our families and job:) Lucking forward on Your progress!

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ur good bro! thanks so much for the input👍

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