It’s amazing that you are planning for trip like this! With the huge range covered per day this distance would be done in two weeks, right? That’s crazy.
BTW do you know Mike In The Woods? I have stumbled on his channel two days ago. He does videos about esk8 touring.
Also, will the rims be 3D printed or you will have them machined?
I’m planning on doing light Vlogging (start of day - end of day and if something relevant/interesting happens during the day), not gonna stream the whole trip or gonna lug extra camera gear, probably just my phone and maybe a lavalier mic and a wireless audio transmitter, so I can put the mic into my helmet and record on my phone with good audio. I have done some mic tests and if I’m gonna record while riding I need to get the mic into the helmet with good windproofing or the audio is otherwise unusable.
I think 2 weeks is a realistic schedule. So the journey is gonna be at least 2200km there-n-back, so this would come to ~160km (~100mi) a day on average.
They will be 3D-printed just like my rims for the 8" tires are currently. There is a thread I’ve been running about 3D-printing rims and I’m gonna be posting updates on there about the bigger rims for the 10" tires.
This design is currently looking to be the actual one I’m gonna be using. Everything fits and everything clears everything else, so they fit. Wheel bite shouldn’t also be an issue based on my testing.
I think I have seen some videos about skatepacking on YT, but haven’t delved deeper into them, but I think I’ll check couple of his videos out. He might have some good tips that I haven’t thought about.
I didn’t know it was possible to 3D print rims, will have a look at that thread. The design of these 10 inch tires looks good, it will be efficient ride for sure.
What belt ratio will you run? That wheel pulley looks small.
I’ve been running the 8 inch wheels with 22/68 ratio and speed wise I top out somewhere around 47-49km/h with full 10S battery.
To increase efficiency I plan on loading up the motors a bit more and lowering their rpm, so I’m sticking with a near identical 22/70 ratio, but the wheel diameter increases that 25% going from 8" to 10", so top speed should increase around ~20%, not that I will be going that fast, but it will be more efficient.
I will lose a little bit of torque, but I still have overhead on motor current and I think I’ll get more top end acceleration, as I can pull a lot more battery amps from the i3 module. Although, considering as I’m moving from my current 10S battery to the i3 module, which is 12S, it also gives me 20% more battery voltage to run the motors at a higher speed for around 40% increase in theoretical top speed, I’m more focused to improve the motor efficiency and all drivetrain losses by lowering the motor rpm and increasing their load.
That’s interesting, I thought that gearing for torque increased efficiency, but I have searched on the forum now (Gearing for efficiency thread) and I see that I was wrong.
However your gearing seem to crazy. Not sure what motor KV you have, but even with the 140KV, the theoretical weighted top speed would be 76.14 km/h. You said you will be cruising at 30km/h if I remember correctly? I can’t wait to see some numbers what Wh/km you will get.
Being a mountainboard setup with pneumatics, it’s pretty much gonna be worse compared to PU tires, always.
If it’s a really warm day and I don’t gun it hard, I can get 14Wh/km (~30km/h, 18mph), which I would say is decent for pneumatics and terrible in comparison to thanes. During the winter, with thicker air due to the cold and much more of a washboard road surface I getting around 22-23Wh/km with the 8" numies. The thing here is that it’s a long distance journey and bad road surface is very likely to be found at some point and I don’t feel like destroying my feet.
Temperature has a big effect on the overall efficiency, when it’s warmer the belts are able to deform and make the bend around the pulley easier, the tire’s rubber more easily deforms against the road surface and doesn’t loose as much kinetic energy there, air is thinner, battery pack is warmer, so it has lower internal resistance.
This is a great deep dive into electric motor efficiency. 41:10 he goes in-depth with the motor efficiency calculations and factors.
But essentially the reason why the motors are more efficient at lower rpm can be explained with an example like so:
Motor X, needs 1 Amp to be able to turn itself, this would be called the no-load current, it’s the torque needed to defeat the bearing friction and stator cogging torque.
So say, you output from your ESC a 1V RMS voltage to the motor phases and it spins up to whatever speed it does and uses 1 Amp at 1 Volt, so it doesn’t do any work, but it uses 1 Watt of energy just to spin the motor itself.
But say you output 50 V, as that’s your battery voltage, so the motor is now spinning much faster and the applied voltage is 50 V, but it still needs that 1 Amp of current to be able to defeat the internal losses, so now it’s using 50 Watts just to run itself and it’s only because it’s spinning faster.
Now let’s apply this logic to a imaginary esk8 example. You skate at a steady speed of 20mph and your drivetrain is optimized for high torque, so say the motor is spinning at max duty cycle and you have a 50 V pack and you know that the motor needs that 1 Amp just to spin itself, so the total power needed is whatever power you need for your board to defeat the rolling resistance, drivetrain losses and air resistance + 50 W, just to keep the motors also running. Let’s say you need 400 Watts to go that steady 20mph, so your motors are operating at 400W/450W = ~89% efficiency
You then optimize the gearing ratio to have the motor spin slower at the wanted steady speed and sacrifice some torque. Your motor now turns half the speed it was before, so it now only has 25V on it and it therefore now only needs 25 Watts to spin itself, so now the efficiency rises as you still need the 400 Watts to keep your speed at 20mph, but the motor itself doesn’t need so much power to spin itself the efficiency rises to 400W/425W = ~94%
Hopefully you understood the idea of lowering the motor rpm and why that can be used to raise the total motor efficiency. There are also other factors, when the motors run slower, but you need the same power as before with lower current, this means your motor current will be higher and more power will be lost in the copper of the phase windings due to resistive losses. I would also expect that the belt drive might be a little more efficient as the belt speed lower, so the belt needs a little bit less energy as it deforms less often, which takes a little bit of energy. Also as the motor spins faster you will start to get more losses in the rotor itself, called hysteresis losses. The stator also exhibits eddie losses as the winding’s cause the electromagnetic field to flip around and the internal structure of the silicon steel laminations need to flip it’s internal magnetic path.
I have closed the rim color voting now, we are going with Mid blue for them and I have ordered the filament.
Got the new Haven tent and I recorded my second night, as I was testing it in a bivvy/ground setup.
I’m gonna do a third night in a row outside tonight, but try it again in the hammock setup.
I love the way you talk 
Keep the videos coming, really entertaining! 
Well, I’m necroing this topic back from the dead.
I did have an attempt at this trip in September back at 2021, but I did not make it the whole way, not even close, but I’ve been re-planning ever since on my next attempt on how and what to improve based on the first attempt, but more on that later.
Just a little note. I was at the time dealing with what I would now recognize as a depression and a lack of purpose in my life. I felt like attempting/going for a long trip like this allowed me to have some control and an escape. I’m better now both physically and mentally. I feel like things are now going okay and that I am in a good position in life all things considered and I’m getting back on track and moving towards where I want things to be.
So how did it go?
In summary, I did roughly 470km in four days and I’ll break down the trip below for each day.
Day 1
First day was a planned route to Ähtäri Zoo’s camping area, where I could sleep and charge my trailer. This day wasn’t too bad all things considered, but my later than initially planned start of the trip in September meant that the weather was starting to turn colder (luckily no rain), which meant I was wearing multiple layers and was still a bit cold.
Also I might have stealth camped in a bush at the Zoo’s camping area and charge my board from one of the RV posts during the night…
Day 2
This day killed my feet, my battery and my spirit to go further. There were a lot of mistakes and effects from those mistakes that caused this day to be an absolute PITA.
This day I learned that google maps may sometimes recommend DIRT roads (I think I wanted recommended routes for a cyclist) and I spent the start of the day smoothing and vibrating the feeling out of the bottom of my feet and spending extra electrons on the first 30km on a horrible gravel road. This then caused a snowball effect of not suddenly being sure if I could trusts Gmaps route recommendation, choosing to go a longer route that I knew was going to be paved, figuring out that I wouldn’t be able to do the needed distance at a higher speed, needing to lower my cruising speed slowly over the day essentially trading speed for efficiency at the cost of time, which still ended up culminating in me running out of battery, at the side of the road, on a bus stop, about 10km away from the friends house, where I had planned to sleep and charge.
But yea, roughly 12 hour day, most of which was spent on my board, so it absolutely killed my feet. Luckily after my friend came to pick me up, we sauna’d and had a couple of beers at his house and I decided then to not try to go further than the next town with a train station and head back home.
Day 3
A short ride day, as I had already decided to retreat last night via a train back to Tampere from Ylivieska. I had another friend at Ylivieska, which I had arranged to meet and hang out with for the afternoon and I would then get on the night train leaving for Tampere.
Night train
It was pretty cheap at around 28€, although it left around 1 AM, so maybe that was the reason…
Day 4
This is “technically” the 4th day of riding, but it’s just the short trip from the train station back at Tampere to my apartment.
I do have quite a lot of video material from the trip, but I’ll have to see if I’m gonna edit it into something watchable.
I did edit the first day into an uploaded video, but watching it now, I gotta admit that it has a lot of “fluff” content in it (at least in my personal taste, although it is much more reflective how the day was actually spent), which I would condense or edit out, if I were to make the video again, but I guess I’ll leave it linked here in case anybody wants to suffer through it. Also, I can’t help but cringe at my own voice.
@SimosMCmuffin THIS,this is very cool! Your feet must be made of IRON i did 110miles (177km) a few weeks ago in like 5 rides in a day,i was sore! Thank you for talking about depression,we need to shed light on it,im glad you are feeling better. I like your voice btw,no one likes their own voice on video. Nice work,thank you for sharing
The sub titles were nice, but i have no problem understanding you
Nicel to see you back to this thread, and to hear you’re feeling better.
Funny thing I dug this thread out no more than a week ago while talking to my coworkers about how huge and cool projects can get on this forum
There’s going to be one very fundamental change for my next attempt and that is the equipment I’ll be trying it on.
I’m switching from esk8 to an e-bike that I built at the start of this year and have already ridden it over 1000km in the winter conditions, during freezing temperatures, snowy and slushy conditions. Got the frame for free from a colleague and he sold me a hub motor that he wasn’t using for 100€. Spent around another 100€ on new parts (the gear levers were toast for example) and some TLC to restore the bike into working condition, but since that it’s been performing without problems.
I started by first opening up the hub motor, as it had an integrated chinese ESC in it, that I didn’t want to use. I was going to use one the VESCs from my esk8 to power the e-bike.
Rotor has 46 magnet poles.
I’ll be using the already available hall-sensors in the hub.
I was originally planning on wiring the phases out with 14AWG silicone wire, but they + the hall-sensor wire wouldn’t fit through the hole in the axel to get them out.
It’s a very simple motor mechanically.
First test setups.
I wanted either a twist or a thumb throttle and I found a cheap one for 15€. I also wanted a dedicated motor brake lever for the regen brake, so I bought a cheap “bafang” brake lever, but it turned out only to have a ON-OFF kill switch in it, so had to design a solution to get a real analog reading out from the lever based on it’s position. I did this with a DRV5056 (https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/drv5056.pdf?HQS=dis-dk-null-digikeymode-dsf-pf-null-wwe&ts=1679819609232) linear hall sensor and a magnet. The lever, which has the magnet moves the magnet closer and farther from the sensor and the sensor gives out an analog voltage based on how strong the magnetic field is that it measures. The throttle is fed to ADC1 and the brake is fed to ADC2 on the VESC.
Figuring out if I could make the electronics enclosure in the back between the wheel and cargo rack.
Later iteration of the electronics ecnlosure.
The mounting ring’s plastic on the thumb throttle broke some time later, so I 3d-printed a more ergonomic mount for it.
After the first couple succesful test rides I immediately started fully using the bike for all my commuting. The battery is also from my esk8 and I made a mounting position for it using the water bottle holder bolt holes and also the same ratchet strap as on my esk8.
More on next post.
I bought a super cheap 5€ head and tail light set, meant to run on couple AAAs from Biltema and modified and hard-wired them to be powered from the VESC’s 5V rail. Did some extensive modding on the front light especially to make it much smaller, as it wasn’t going to contain any batteries. The red connectors are JST’s RCY-connectors, also found in some smaller RC LiPo packs.
Works well and don’t need to worry about replacing batteries!
The bike has been working without problems even during the rougher weather.
So, let’s get to some numbers
I found the esk8’s energy consumption during my road trip a little disappointing to be honest. It was arouind 20-25 Wh/km, which meant that even with the beastly trailer pack I was going to get about 250-300km at most if I were to run at a slower speed, less clothing and warmer weather. During normal summer esk8ing (no trailer, warm weather, less clothing, smooth road) I think I have topped my efficiency at around 14.5 Wh/km.
Now let’s see what the e-bike achieves.
This day had a particularly bad weather with heavy sleet and the road surface being more like a slushy milkshake in consistency and this is an outlier in the efficiency.
Especially cold day, had to stop couple times on the way to get some feeling back into my fingers. Have bought proper leather mittens since and haven’t had cold hands since.
It’s averaging between 5-6 Wh/km in around -5C - 0C temperatures, with sub-optimal tires (studded & aggressive tread pattern, medium pressure), road surface conditions (snow, gravel & slush) and clothing (baggier winter clothing). It’s absolutely blowing the esk8 out of the water in terms of efficiency. + it has REDUNDANCY, you can pedal! So even if you run out of battery you can still keep going (albeit slowly, but still continue), which really wasn’t possible on the esk8 and it gives something to do especially on a long trip where you’re mostly just staying on straight roads. And it’s also more ergonomic as you’re moving and you have more support points on the bike (left and right feet and hands + butt, 5 points) when compared to the esk8 (left and right feet, 2 points).
I got a ~42km max range test with my esk8 in the autumn of last year (still better weather than currently, when I have cycled), full to completely empty. With the same 10S6P 35E pack I have already done a 132km roughly full discharge range trip on the e-bike. Same battery. Although I did pedal, but that’s also the thing is that you can choose whether you want to or don’t want to pedal and how hard. I have discovered that I like cycling. I think I can conservatively estimate that it’s going to be about a three times as efficient compared to the esk8, especially when factoring in the better environmental conditions and tires during summer, so I believe I could get around 750-900km range with the trailer.
But wait, there’s more…
I was originally planning on building a new 12S7P pack with samsung 50E cells (high energy capacity) and put it into a bigger pelican case than black one shown in the earlier images, but unfortunately the bigger case would not fit inside the frame like the small one, so I’m currently doing some prototyping for a custom enclosure that fits in the bike frame and is able to house the 84 pieces of the 50E cells (~1.4kWh). This should give me at least about 250km extra range on top of the battery trailer’s 750-900km, so with both packs this thing could be capable of 1000km/600miles of range! The center frame enclosure is going to have a decent amount of free space in the bottom area, so I think I’ll move all the other electronics in there as well and remove the back rack enclosure.
