So much yess!! What assembly routine you thinking. Getting some external help. And pump em out quick and efficent.
Count me in either way.
Have you considered a Gofundme page? I think it would help interest if you could get some pics up. Youāll need to get the business legalā¦sooner the better.
just stumbled over some braille skateboarding fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asX93wSpvgI
the small one looks actually pretty fun and thats for just 200$ 
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Iām in for one too. I have been kicking myself for not getting on carvons kickstarter, I wouldnāt pass this up.
Nah, looks sooo bad compared to anything else. Itās basically a āhoverboardā with four wheels.
Since you might not be able to warranty these quite you like you can with your custom boards would you at least provide a replacement part list and useful assembly notes?
Also, that makes me think that you could add value to a collection of parts by testing them and giving your seal of approval to them in a certain configuration. That is, how do you feel about making a kit version with instructions?
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that seems like a reasonable solution if the target market is diyers and tinkerers who maybe just want to start with a working unit they can mess with later. Iāll hang on to that idea, thanks.
iād like to put a complete kit together at some point. That was one of my original goals. A 12S kit that was basically a blank dissasembled esk8 like i typically sell would be amazing. you could paint it and mod the deck and run the wires however you want. I think the only thing holding me back there is getting it down to a decent price point using volume pricing. It would still be expensive, but not as much as one of my completes for sure because the hours involved would be a whole lot less.
hmmm. Maybe thatās the direction this should really be going. I sort of have most of what i need to do it already.
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its a fully functional flexy electric bottlenose board for 200$. i cant even build a normal deck with trucks, wheels & bearings for that amount. its a crazy pricepoint for something thats clearly somewhat of a normal board. braille crew obviously had fun 
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As the kit price increases so does my wariness of my own assembly abilities. If you did sell a kit for $1000, say, Iād almost rather try to talk you into building me your 10S 360Wh single for $1500 with no customization (that is, Iād tell you to just do a quality build but donāt worry much about appearance and skip the high end flourishes if necessary).
But if you did a $600ish kit then I could slightly roll the dice with my own assembly abilities.
Also, if you felt really confident about this hypothetical $600 kit and you demonstrated it well with videos, photos, write-ups, maybe got a neighborhood kid to build one following your instructions (to show you donāt need LHB abilities to assemble it well enough) then Iād order 2. One for me and the other just to help you do a bulk part order but then Iād just have you hold onto it and when it sold through your website (because many more dudes like me, just getting into this, with sufficient mechanical abilities will see, after hours of reading, this is the way to go) you could send me $600.
Both have pros and cons.
A pre built board is attractiv to more people. Esk8ters are quite a few, but builders not so much.
And also I fear that you would get swamped in a flood of emails asking for support if you go the kit route. And those countless hours will also play a role.
While I am a fan of large batteries, have you considered offering a dual drive without a battery pack? I am sure this would reduce your costs/price further, and it would make it easier to ship to your new customers in Europe and Asia. Perhaps include an enclosure with instructions/schematics or recommendations for a lipo battery?
It would also give you some flexibility to get creative with deck shapes, maybe offer a flexible deck? 
Just some suggestionsā¦
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thatās true. I would get swamped with orders. Thatās something i keep thinking about, and something a few people have kindly reminded me of.
Several people have raised the point that doing a budget board could literally destroy my business if anything went wrong on a number of levels. Thatās true. Not being able to deliver, not being able to support, and not being able to make money on them are serious probabilities.
Also i fear providing a quality, unassembled board as a kit would probably only be $1000 cheaper than buying one i put together. $1000 is a lot of money, but when you consider you can get a functioning board, and not a crappy one, for $1500, it makes it hard to justify a kit for people who havenāt done a build before. It would be more of an advanced kit for people with skills and talent, so that wouldnāt be a high volume product, would be subject to the same filters and throttles my current business benefits from, and could potentially be doable provided iām not building every single one of those battery pack and i can get some vendors to give me discounts in the spirit of DIYing.
Iām setting the budget board idea aside for now. Obviously thereās demand for a $750 9S dual drive but until i can get the parts cost down to less than half of that i think its dead in the water. And at that point weāre talking volumes i probably canāt handle. In fact i know i canāt handle them now for sure. Basically if we wanted it to happen weād have to find a manufacturer to build the whole board, fly over there so we can test their products, and by test i mean me and Jake break them all by doing what we do, slap our name on them and hope they donāt catch fire. None of that sounds appealing to me.
maybe when my shop is a little bigger and we have more access to more resources we can revisit this possibility. Right now weāre in a sweet spot of low volume high margin take-my-time-and-do-them-right custom builds and iām kind of enjoying it because its not only paying for itself but also slowly paying down the monstrous debt i incurred by starting this ridiculous hobby 3 years ago. who knows, i might actually go into the black next year. Provided i can stop constantly buying shit on amazon.
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Thatās an idea. Iāve been trying to simplify the build inside the box as much as possible and wrap up the BMS, eswitch, fuse, and volt meter into the same shrinked pack, but I suppose its entirely possible though with some re-arranging of components to ship literally everything but the cells themselves and provide a spec sheet, recoomendations for securing, (silicone is amazing stuff and its cheap) and extra charge/discharge connectors for overseas orders.
It would certainly be more cost effective than the $400 i spent shipping that red white and blue monstrocity of a crossover to the UK.
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hah by reading this whole threadā¦ it kind of makes me wonder whener it would be possible to make āāopen sourceāā esk8 
@lox897 by now seems to be pretty good with making āāopen sourceāā VESC remoteā¦
Then there are āāackmaniacksāā firmware for the current Vesc 4.12
Letās throw in some more ācustom featuresā and letās make a board for the masses lol
just a crazy ideaā¦
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oh that can be done. I could open source my boards. I doubt i would lose any money. People come to me because they want me to build them, not because they just want a board.
I would be willing to host an open source board project on one of my domains fi there is serious interest in that. And provide some of the content as well.
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@longhairedboy Yehā¦ with this I meant that perhaps more people can āāhop ināā and develop this idea furtherā¦
Heckā¦ if Enertion has managed to pull off a big bulk of parts from manufacturersā¦ why some esk8 build enthusiasts couldnt pool their resources together and also make something similarā¦
Though, this probably makes it clear that there needs to be some sort of community with its roles, to develeop these ideas in the proper directionā¦ Otherwise I might foresee nothing much will come out of itā¦ and it will be just way more chaotic than it should beā¦
ā
So yeh, Im definately For thisā¦ Even though I think it might be hard to come to the right choices in what parts should be selected and what notā¦ after that someone would need to take up the role of organising all the ordering process and also manage financesā¦ which we still need to find the source forā¦ similar like you had an idea about āāpre-ordersāā
To be honestā¦ my vision is for a somewhat āācustomizableāā boardā¦ Where it can work similar like evolve does now, where you can switch out the tires and āāstylesāā
Maybeā¦ in the future, a more prospective idea will be to develop āābooster packāāā¦ so everyone can just buy the booster pack and put their own deckā¦ might save us at least 50usd or so on the deck alone I think 
organization would not be my thing for sure. Iām terrible at it. Thatās why ULINE has all my money.
wellā¦ u could always work on the designs or throw in ideasā¦ youāre good at āmanufacturingā / complecting things, so that would be your field, I think
Someone else could organize all the marketing, visual materials etcā¦
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For an open source eboard, we have a lot of the parts already: ESC: VESC Motor Mounts: We could use one of the community designs, Iām also working on a spur gear direct drive. Deck: Integrated deck Iām working on? Or maybe different options? Battery: Open source BMS and modular packs? Enclosure: Well yeah Wheels & Trucks: Deal with Labeda for some custom kegel style wheels and caliber II (maybe clones or sort out deal with Caliber)
It can all be done, but it would take lots of time.
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@lox897 yeh, this is what Im talking about! So far I think I have seen almost every part available on the forum or specially made by someone to make it work!
I even forgot about the @raphaelchang BMS and the further direction @JTAG took with finding manufacturers for his(?) designā¦
If I got something wrong, someone can correct meā¦ but yeah, we already have 2 BMS āādesignsāā (products) which need to be further implementedā¦ right?
And a lot of problems seem to happen with diy / chinese bmsāes these days, so using a custom made one looks like a good choice for meā¦ at least āquality wiseā.
We could always, maybe, āāsplit the final productāā and offer BMS and no BMS options, to reduce the cost, for these who choose to go without one.
@lox897 Idea about integrated deck does not sound bad 
im not sure who is going to lead the operation but perhaps those who have tried their luck in making one, could figure this one out tooā¦ on how to āāexpand itāā and make some sort of manufacturing batch, to make at least a dozen of them or so.
Yeh and the pulleys and mounts, like you said, we also do haveā¦ and they have been made with different iterations over all this timeā¦
Then it is just the batteryā¦ motorā¦ remote controller we still need to decide on