Hello all. Time for a short adventure. This build was quite special for one of my good friends; he has been riding with me since I first built my board and has wanted one for quite some time now. He finally came across enough money to pull this off, and we just completed it in early September.
Usually, on rides, he would take my Landwheel build, but this time, his opportunity to shine had come.
This build log name comes from the absolute fiasco of a time that we had getting his custom deck from the company “Whatever Skateboards.” I really am not here to complain about it, but the reality of it is that it took 6 full weeks to receive a $130 deck. Granted the result, in the end, looks pretty decent but overall it really was not worth the time. Will not be ordering from them again - from what we understand it was sort of a weird fluke and we got unlucky, but not worth waiting again in the future.
Anyway here are a few finished pictures to satisfy y’all impatient folks.
The main power points of this board are the Maytech 6374 motors from the recent group-buy, Boardnamics mounts, TB VESCS and Lipo batteries. The full part list can be found here at this live Excel link: Where’s the Deck? Parts list
This build started off with assembling the electrical system because we got most of the electrical parts before the mechanical parts (besides the Boardnamics mounts that Kevin dropped off, more on that later).
These batteries that we selected ended up being super convenient because they came with bullet connectors on them that I was able to chain together in series. Usually, I have to solder on bullet connectors to make my series connections but this time it was a bit easier, I only had to swap out the main battery pos and neg to my 5.5mm bullets.
This was all pretty simple soldering for me, bunch of bullets, some balance connectors, and some XT’s. The BMS connector took a while because I had to remember what order to do the leads in. The most important part of doing this is that it stays unplugged until you triple check the balance connector order. The BMS I ordered was one of the encased ones from Ebay and it seems like great quality.
It’s wired for charge only, so not a big deal that it is only 45A. I will check back in a while to ensure the cells are all still in balance but I have heard people have had good luck with these so I trust it for now. They are a bit cheaper than ordering one from SuPower that I usually get, and we didn’t have time to wait for the shipping.
While I was busy with the electronics, my friend put on his custom griptape and assembled the Boardnamics mount kit. We had some troubles with the belt length on this, since we ordered 320mm and it was working out kind of weird. Basically the idlers were running into his massive 97mm wheels, and the only way we ended up being able to solve this was by making some spacers for the wheel pulleys. My friend works at a machine shop and he was able to make a couple of delrin spacers to slide behind the wheel pulleys.
One of the things I hate to solder the most is a dual-wire connection into a single XT-90 plug. This parallel connector was super annoying to make, but it ended up working pretty well after I finished it.
This is just a simple connector to split the battery pos and neg from the loop key and battery, to the two VESCS.
The battery came out pretty sleek looking, and I taped it up nice with Fiber tape to ensure all the balance leads would stay isolated and not endangered by vibration wear.
Here’s most of the electrical components laid out
One of the super fun things about the motors that we got from the group buy is that they had ridiculously long sensor wires, 500mm to be exact. We ended up actually needing most of the length on both the sensors and the phase leads.
This shot gives a great look at the whole electrical system, it ended up not being super big, but it looked pretty clean in the end. We planned to do Kydex enclosures for this build as well, and we laid out some paper on the board so we could start drawing out the outline for the components.
Like normal, I made a positive buck out of wood and cardboard to support the size of the electrical system and leave some extra space for padding and what-not.
The paper on the top is covering the hot glue that connects the two lengths of wood, so as to keep it from getting all over the kydex. Due to forgetting about the negatives, I didn’t bring cardboard to school to make them, so we did our best without them. Fortunately, we had a simple rectangular enclosure here, so we were able to make it work out. I heated up the kydex in the oven like normal for about 8 minutes, and then we formed it over the rear end first.
It feels crazy to oversimplify this process into just a few pictures, because in reality it is a lot of annoying work with the heat gun and pressing to get the right shape on the Kydex.
The front was created in the same fashion:
After finishing cutting out the enclosure shapes, I cut a battery meter hole into the enclosure and drilled holes for the through-board screws. Interestingly enough, the buck actually left a ridge along the center of the enclosure, which we ended up liking. It could probably be fixed easily with the heat gun but we left it there.
After finishing the holes, I packed all the electronics into the enclosure and glued in the connectors. The batteries were well padded with some leftover weather stripping after lining the edges of the enclosure.
At this point, the enclosure was about ready to put on. I realized I had left my step drills at home, so I had to use an old soldering iron tip to make the holes for the phase leads and sensor wires. It smelled really awful, so I made sure to open a window.
There are a few spots for dust ingress but I am not really worried about that. The seal around the edges makes a really great
After screwing it all together, it looked great!
Thanks for reading! Here’s some more shots.
We got some nice riptide bushings in the Boardnamics precision hangers, but the board still ended up being kind of hard to turn due to the fact that it is a mini-drop. You can see how much shorter this board is than my board and my other friends’.
Personally I really do not like the deck, I feel the foot-base is way too short, but my friend says he likes it. Maybe he will swap it out eventually, but at least that is pretty easy. It is a nice deck, just not for me.
He still hasn’t maxed out the throttle yet, these motors are strong boys. Unfortunately we have had some troubles with things vibrating loose, but we loctited everything and hopefully in the next few rides it will tighten up.
