you don’t even need a press!
if I want to pursue it again in the future, i’ll likely make something like this – DIY Skateboard Press - Cheap and Easy! - YouTube
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Yeah this is exactly how @Tasventouras pressed his last deck.
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This is beautiful
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Found some valuable minutes… this thing feels fucking huge. Axle to axle I have 1015mm on the outermost mounting positions, at a guess I would say it’d be more like 975mm on the inner positions.
Standing platform feels really roomy, but gonna need to mock up the top box to determine binding positions, which I reckon is gonna be a bit tricky to accommodate my posi/posi stance.
Flex feels like it’s gonna be good! I need to add some reinforcement to the deck as the hoop pine alone isn’t gonna cut it, but I need to be careful not to add too much, I don’t want this one super stiff.
The aluminium plates for the enclosure are roughly cut and drilled, need to snag some sikaflex from work to fully assemble the enclosure, will bond the enclosure walls together and to the aluminium and then i can sand and paint as one.
Getting keen!
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this somehow looks too easy, makes me wanna try
I goofed around with a parallelogram shaped enclosure but didn’t want to go with a 3d printed one.
Do it. For science.
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for sure! it should be capable of a huge amount of force as well. I’m definitely going to try it one day
haha i’m not sure if there will be any benefit for me. I’m not going with the cells in the top box standing upright, just 2 layers of them laying flat. and then the escs and bms in there too. My problem isn’t so much with the available space, but more me feeling weird about locking my back foot in I suppose. Stance is def posi/posi, but the back foot moves around quite a lot, and I’m worried about locking it down.
I feel as if the best place to start with it will to be to have the rear binding positioned as if my foot were going to be at 0 degrees and go from there.
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Didn’t you run bindings on MADNESS? What were your angles like on that?
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haha that deck looked like swiss cheese by the end cos i couldn’t find a rear binding position i was happy with 
hence the hesitation here
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Yeah understandable. I thought I would nail it first time but my board has a few ‘extra’ sets of binding mounting holes also 
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Yeah I feel that. I keep the back binding 1-2 ratchets looser than the front.
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The next few parts of the build required me to get some stuff, so i went shopping last night.
Lifetime supply of grease for the drives
Got a bunch of m5 bolts and t nuts for the enclosure. Plan is to counterbore the top of the deck so that these t nuts sit flush, and then skin over the top. Gotta hope that i never ruin the treads, but shouldn’t be too much of an issue considering the bottom box will only be holding batteries.
Also need to get some of these in m6 for the bindings.
Dudn’t get a photo, but i scored a half tube of black sikaflex from work which will help fully assemble/seal the enclosure.
Ordered a couple of metres of basalt to be used as face layers for the deck. Ideally i wanted flax, but couldn’t find any in stock locally in 300gsm twill. Will use this top and bottom, with some other sections of glass as well.
It’s all happening, just gotta find some more time!!!
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Found a tiny bit of time. Slapped on the Contino Condoms and got messy with the sikaflex. Sealed between all the aluminium/petg/tpu sections, as well as sealing in the joins where the petg walls connect together for the larger sections.
Didn’t realise how heavy this enclosure would be 
it’s not ridiculous, but definitely got some heft. Should be tough as nails tho!
The weather is also making a turn for the better it feels like, today was a ripper. Really starting to notice the days getting longer 
I doubt i’ll get any time tomorrow, but hopefully onto gear drives on Friday!
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Things happened yesterday and took away my gear drive time, but i had an hour this morning to play with the enclosure.
Removed all the temporary bolts and the sikaflex polyurethane sealant is doing its job perfectly.
There are some bolts that won’t go all the way through and have a housed nut inside the petg walls and the tpu flex connectors.
The nuts in the tpu don’t hold when trying to tighten them so i’ve superglued them in and hoping that will do the job 
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Gear drives installed!!!
Was a super easy and pain free installation, start to finish, fully loctited and greased in 1.5hrs
Thanks @ApexBoards !
Deck is gonna need a slight haircut, but that’s ok, I wanted to tweak the shape slightly anyway 
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I took a minute to reclaim my bench space in the garage! So much better working off a proper bench! Enclosure is looking super sleek, i am stoked with it!
Drilled all the holes through the deck and then counterbored them with a spade bit for the t-nuts
I tried clamping them in and while this did work, it tended to follow the curvature of the deck, rather than following the line of the hole… this resulted in some of the screws cross threading when I tried to install the enclosure 
The problematic nuts were removed and replaced. If i ever do this again, I will skip the clamp idea and just go straight for bolting them in. The bolts pulled the t-nuts in beautifully.
I still don’t have the basalt fabric I ordered, so I think the next step is to position the bindings and install t-nuts for them as well as for the top box.
I also need to countersink all of the aluminium holes to appease @Bavioze … i wasn’t going to do it, but I tried a few and it looks great.
I haven’t actually designed anything to interface the deck and the top box, so I’m gonna need to find some CAD time!
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It’s looking so good! U always seem to try out of the norm things.
Very much looking forward to seeing this one finished!
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Its all about the experience dude! You never know if you never go!
This enclosure method has been brewing in the back of my mind for years, its exciting to finally be making it.
Wait til you see my parallel battery method once I have the top box completed 
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Have you tried heat set inserts?
I imagine that would have the same problem as the nuts (the tpu would deform around the inferface features allowing it to spin) only worse (because those interface features are smaller).
For my money, I think his strategy of glueing the nuts in place is his best bet, as it actually bonds the interface features of the nut to the faces of the plastic. Maybe a t-nut in the TPU would be even better than that, because its interface features would anchor into the plastic 
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