For those of you who are not interested in the back story and want to cut to the chase, I’ve added a spoiler.
Summary
A while back I bought a boardup foldable longboard because I wanted a board I could have with me on planes and traveling. This is what the board looks like:
I was quite impressed with the ride and ingenuity of its design, and of course the next logical step is “how do I bolt a pair of 5055 brushless to the back of this”.
So I got a kit from diyeboards and started experimenting. I ordered a random box that looked about right to me off ebay and lucky me look how well the 10s2p pack from the kit fits into it:
At first I just wanted to make something that’ll take me places and didn’t give a damn about aesthetics and such, and this is the product:
Needless to say this isn’t exactly a board you’d want to bring on a plane with those colorful wires sticking out, you could just imagine the looks those TSA people will give you if you have that with you. But it rides mostly okay, good enough accelerations, 23-25 mph top speed as advertised and 9 miles range tested (probably quite a bit more if I didn’t floor the gas pedal all the time).
I rode this board for a while, until one day my board went into a crazy speed wobble at 20mph for apparently no reason. I bailed and landed on my chest, miraculously walked away with only a minor scrape on my elbow.
So I tightened the heck out of my kingpins, and made a few improvements. I replaced the stock 75mm wheels with 83mm evolve wheels, and the stock 9 in truck with indy 10 inch trucks. The board definitely is a lot more stable afterwards.
Oh while I was at it I fixed the wires sticking out too. See below.
Now I still wouldn’t consider this build finished. I used duct tape to hold the enclosure to the deck, it definitely does the job but over the course of a week the tape would get dirty and tear up in the middle. So this time I want to make something that doesn’t look so haphazardly put together. I want to make a build that ticks all of these boxes:
-Foldable longboard deck that allows me to fly with it -Dual belt drive -Good range -Don’t care about torque and acceleration that much as long as it goes up san francisco hills -23-25mph top speed -Reliable ie lasts a long time -Good stability at speed and good turning radius when not at speed -Avenue suspension trucks -Looks good ie without duct tapes
A number of those boxes have already been ticked with my last update to the board. The ones I need to work on are doing away with the duct tape and coming up with a real way to mount the enclosures, and fitting avenue baseplates into my build.
Before I start ordering things, I need to know whether this is a feasible plan or not.
For mounting the enclosures drilling on the deck is out of the question since the new deck BoardUp sent me is a composite deck with a layer of fiberglass. Drilling will cause the board to delaminate, so no new holes can be made on the deck. I’m thinking about bolting a metal strip to the truck mounting holes and the hinge in the middle.
Summary
And this is the enclosure I’m using. Can anyone tell me how to run xt60 cables through the enclosure while keeping the enclosure watertight?
For the avenue truck part I heard from someone on the forums that an evolve gt truck would fit the baseplate perfectly. And since evolve uses 5065 motors I can usetheir motor mounts as well. Can someone confirm this?
I look forward to completing my build, please do give me feedbacks/advices on things I’m planning to do! Any help would be appreciated!