The Domino's Board | Senderized Hummie deck | "Budget build"

[rusins]

THIS BOARD IS FOR A FRIEND, NOT ME

Backstory

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Imma be honest with you. My friend’s a pretty weird guy. He’s very ambitious, and to achieve his many goals in life, has contracts with his friends (me being one of them), where we are responsible for making sure he completes a set of weekly goals or activities on time, and if not, he has to punish himself by rewarding us in some way, usually monetarily.

Well, his deal with me was to spend at most 200€ on some esk8 part, a body pillow for a person of my choosing, and 50 cheese burgers from Hesburger. (As you can tell, I had input on the esk8 part, but the rest was his choosing)

Well, he failed his commitments once, but since I was abroad, I couldn’t receive any of the rewards. Or so I thought, when a month later a fucking body pillow showed up at my door.

Few months later he failed again, but this time I made a deal with him –

And so we came up with a look for the deck that he liked, and sent the concept art to @Sender for him to do his magic.

Looking pretty good with the arctic blues, don’t it?

Tim needed a high resolution image to work with. So we paid a guy on Fiverr 8$ to upscale our original image. But somewhere in the process of sharing files, compression got in the way, and @mmaner was forced to painstakingly redraw the whole picture into higher res

In the end, all of the money went into the deck and enclosure + shipping, leaving me with 100€ to finish the build. My friend didn’t want to analog skate, because “he’s not a pussy”, so every part in this build except for the deck was just something I had lying around.

Parts:

• Hummie deck with custom artwork by @Sender (fine frit)
• @BigBen single stack enclosure
• 12s2p 3Ah battery with LG HB6 – 60A discharge built by @pjotr47 (salvaged from my 1st build)
• Refurbished Trampa Vesc 6 plus from @seaborder
• Mini remote from Nexus Boards (@Anubis)
• Torque Boards direct drive kit with 75KV motors bought used from @Thomas I believe?
• TorqueBoards 110mm 78A wheels from the same guy
• Used e-caliber truck on the front from @Jamie42

Building process and rationale

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The final plan for this board involves Surf Rodz TKP trucks in drop through, arctic blue 72A wheels, a puck remote, 12s4p 30Q and dual 6355 motors mounted rearwards. Well, my friend ain’t paying me shit, so I’ll lend him what I have.

The battery is from my first build. It has terrible range, because it’s flight safe. Has a discharge BMS though, so I don’t have to bother with an anti-spark

I started by putting a layer of craft foam in the deck cutout, and used the same sticky foam meant for gaskets to create a foam wall on the edges to protect everything inside.

After putting some more foam around the battery, it fits snug as a glove!
It’s got some Velcro on the top which will connect it to the enclosure, so that it doesn’t slide up into the empty space.

The previous light switch I used for this battery was pretty sketch, so I went out and bought a new one

Here’s everything plugged in and foamed-up against sharp corners. Charging port is fused of course. I also routed the receiver antenna to outside the enclosure

Since I only had a single ESC available, I took one of the direct drives off the hanger. Free roll is amazing, but torque not so much.

Vesc settings are as follows:
Mode: Current with reverse (because you get poor braking otherwise)
Motor: +80A -80A
Battery: +60A -20A
I enabled current limiting for ERPM to kick in at around 28km/h and end at 35km/h. My friend would definitely kill himself on this board if he went any faster. + the baseplate for the direct drives is 50 degrees, and it did NOT like me trying to use an angled riser on it.

Finally, I bolted the enclosure shut with nice washers from @Sender and some blue loctite (the only time I even used loctite on this build ), and finished the build up by velcroing the on-off switch to the riser between the truck and the deck.

And that’s it! It’s quite weak due to the single drive, and the motor heats up fast, and then it’s REALLY SLOW when thermal throttling starts (I set strict limits due to current FW bugs), but braking is passable at these speeds, and it’s very quiet when cruising at a constant speed. I don’t recommend others try using just 1 direct drive, but hey, gotta do watcha gotta do. Friend will pick the board up next week, might have some videos to share then. Ta-ta for now!

Sexy photos:

[Anubis]

Single drive DD 2P? How is the torque?
Also we all know you’re a weeb in disguise, you probably built this as a body pillow

[rusins]

It’s not great. If you think about it, usually we have at least a 1:2 ratio for motors, but direct drive has 1:1. So with only one motor, it’s actually far worse than a normal single drive belt build. It is adequate enough to be useful (not as powerful as pushing, but almost). Biggest problem currently is that due to Vesc FW bugs, I have strict temperature throttling limits set, so quite fast the motor heats up, and then acceleration sucks a lot.

Luckily these limits don’t affect braking, and with regular current mode and a small value for direction change, it’s pretty good. I might experiment with powered braking instead of regen on belt setups as well going forward.

Also: as this is clearly a budget build, I can’t afford a metr module for gathering logs. All I can say is that I don’t recommend single direct drive. (Well, if you were building a push board with electric assistance, then this would be perfect actually) I’ll be stealing those off this board soon for myself, and then putting a belt drive instead.

[tipsy]

Any wheelbite in the front with the narrow trucks?

[rusins]

Nope! Hummie decks have their truck holes quite far out. Hence why so many people use them with pneumatic wheels as well. I’m not running the trucks drop-through though. If I was, I would get slight wheel-bite. Use Surf Rodz if you want drop through – their hangers are further away from the mounting holes than calibers would be

[Jamie42]

Those skinned decks look so good! And I told you you’d use the truck for something, it’s nice that you found a build for it😃

[Creavenger]

You should call it “the simp board”

Really like the build, looks really clean

[murdomeek]

that feel when you blow your entire budget on the custom deck

"and then the rest of the board was the crap I had laying around…

• Trampa VESC 6
• TB DD’s
• TB110’s "

… that feel when someones junk build is better than your best build

wait lol, HALF a TB direct drive?
haha made me feel a bit better XD

The deck turned out great though

[Fosterqc]

@rusins

I can’t afford a metr module for gathering logs

I must know the wh consumption

[frame]

Can we be friends? I need a board

[rusins]

Sure! Just move to Latvia so that we can ride together

[frame]

I would love to travel there one day… one day

[Dred]

@rusins

and if not, he has to punish himself by rewarding us in some way, usually monetarily.

This definitely feels like it’s sexual fin-domming through esk8. Nice board though I have a similar idea to get some bara art done of Tim and Damien and then having him skin it.

[amanuelamanuel]

Not gonna lie, this build is beautiful. Probably wouldn’t dare to ride it in public tho

[Bavioze]

I like the look of a single direct drive plans plans plans

[sambright91]

this is aweome, this looks BEAUtiful

[rusins]

Apparently my friend rode in the rain and the board no longer worked. (Also the motor now stutters at high temperatures again, thank you vesc FW! ) So I took it in for repairs & upgrading…

Apparently the charge port disconnected, so he had another friend solder it back and apparently it is now held on with a piece of plastic:

So, let’s open this puppy up and figure out what’s dead!

Hmm, looks clean. Hold up, what’s this?

Looks like the charge port fuse blew / melted somehow. Can’t really read battery voltage; turning the battery on gives me 30V, but then it auto shuts off. Guess it’s just really empty…

But then, I noticed 1 corner of the battery’s velcro was wet. Only that piece, so if there was more water, then it already dried up and left no marks.

I need to change my charger’s plug to try and bring this battery back, but until I do that, does anyone have any ideas for what happened here? Did something short the chargeport and blow the fuse, and water had nothing to do with it? Or did the water somehow cause this? Vesc seems unharmed thankfully.

Update: charged up the battery, checked cell voltages before though, everything is good. I guess the 6.5A fuse was not a good match for the 4.5A charger I gave my friend. Or he actually shorted it somehow with water. Oh well, I’m just glad nothing is broken

[ZachTetra]

Put paper with dots of marker in the enclosure, if the ink is messed up then there was water there even if it dried up cleanly

[jack.luis]

Water-evident stickers are stupid cheap.

[rusins]

Update

After continuing having direct drive issues (I think the vesc didn’t like actually running one motor at 80A. FW5.3 might have even solved a few issues in that regard), I decided to just swap it for the proper long-term drivetrain I had in mind for this board.

• Surf Rodz 177mm TKP trucks
• @Boardnamics 8mm step-down axles
• @IDEA mounts
• @3DServisas 48T kegel pulleys (thank you @RDs )
• 2x 6355 170kv Maytech motors purchased from @BigBen

The mounts are awesome, really easy to assemble and hold on great. They even support idlers, which I was going to use, until I realized the idler is really close to the wheel pulley, and bends the belt quite a lot. I decided to forgo them, and use a shorter belt. No belt skip, and free-roll is excellent. The board is actually quite quiet in fact

I mounted the trucks drop-through, and ran into an interesting issue – truck bite! Also motor mount bite. I used sand-paper around a crown drill to sand wheel-wells in the deck, and then repainted them black and clear coat.

To solve the mount-bite issue, I not only made the wheel-wells extend to the sides of the deck, but I also used a grinder to grind the mount clamps smaller

Since the trucks are now drop-through, I needed to recreate the charge-port holder using a bit of sheet metal and my dremel.

I also received some Cheap Focers from @doomy for Secret Easter. Free ESCs means less money owed to me by my friend, and vesc 6 HW is awesome. Thank you @shaman for helping me set them up. One of my focers had an issue with flex, but the other 3 seem to be working fine. I soldered 4mm bullets, XT-60s, added an additional capacitor to the on/off pins, and conformal coated them before mounting them to a heat-sink. Tapping holes and cutting aluminum was a first for me, so it’s cool to learn new things (I don’t think I’ll ever be doing that again though, as long as I have my job It’s hard work!)

Luckily my new Pinecil soldering iron made things a lot easier. I’m not too sure I trust its power, but for this it was perfect. I digress;

I also replaced the fuse holder with a beefier one. Turns out the small one I was using before just melts at 5A charge current

Here you can see everything mounted inside the enclosure. I used foam to hold the ESCs in place. Crimped JST connectors for CAN (I hate crimping, urghhhh), added foam around the small connectors to prevent them from rattling inside the enclosure. Used fiberglass tape to tape wires down. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the charge port wires actually go OUTSIDE the hummie cutout. There’s obviously space there between the deck and enclosure, so it makes routing wires really easy

Finally I added braided sleeving and heat-shrink to the motor wires to make it look professional af, velcrod the stupid on/off switch to the back truck, and closed it up with butyl tape

(Note that due to the wire channel in the enclosure, the board is not water-resistant. But it’s probably good enough for the occasional puddle imo.

So, how’s it ride?

Well, it BEGS to be carved. It turns way too well. However, urethane wheels do and WILL lose grip, and I actually fell once while test-riding the board and carving.

I actually feel scared riding this thing because it’s so easy to turn. I’ll experiment with tightening the trucks way down to see if that helps, but I’d love to get some input on other people with the hummie x surf rodz tkp combo. Maybe harder bushings than the default surf rodz ones?

At the moment I have the board limited to 70% max duty cycle and only ±30A for the motors because I fear that my friend will just kill himself instantly otherwise. I did ride it at 95% duty cycle with super loose trucks, and although it’s rideable, the wobbles are real if you don’t keep your weight forward lol.

Some other remarks:

• The TB110 wheels are amazing on cobblestone roads (I literally don’t even notice them)
• I expected way more torque with a 15:48 gear ratio. Although I guess theoretical top speed is still ~45km/h, so I guess 44T might be better for ground clearance for future builds.
• I don’t like the deck shape. Feels a bit too wide, and the symmetrical concave kinda forces your back foot to be completely perpendicular to the board. Definitely prefer my Switchblades.
• Picking the board up by the back to avoid dragging the motors is annoying. Maybe I’ll go back to doing forward mounted builds again.
• Battery can still do 6km on flat, so that’s good. Hopefully my friend really falls in love with this board and pays me to do the upgrade to 12Ah vs the current 3Ah