Replaced my 82 cm Leif board with a Freebord Primal Bamboo Deck, Initially I wanted to take a 83 cm but then I changed my order when I saw the 85 cm version is 2 cm wider - Wheel biting with your toes is a thing when you wear size 12 us / 46 eu shoes.
So I had to extend the battery cache to accomodate the larger wheel base. I reconstructed it with several layers of steel PCI caches / 3 rectangles of hard plastic extracted from a laptop base / fiber glass tape / a lot of Epoxy slow cure. The extended battery cache just feels solid now.
I recycled the 3 mm leiftech raising pads to double my rocker which had seriously tanked when I replaced the stock center wheels with Nowind’s boro mod.
Cabling done. Everything just fits.
Found a new purpose for 2 belgian 1943 10 cent coins with a hole in the middle. Maybe they used to make collars with their coins? I only left the 2 center screws to prevent lateral movements in the battery cache where it is the weakest and added a leather belt to secure the battery cover piece. The screw is smaller than the cache hole it fits in, not screwed in, vertical movement is still allowed for maximum flex preservation.
Planning to seal that gap with sugru once I’m happy with everything else.
Deck top. As few holes as I could get away with
Bottom views
There are still a few kinks to work out with the Vescs setup (acceleration curves are just brutal right now) but it’s already a huge improvement on the stock leiftech.
saw that you extended the battery compartment to accommodate the longer deck, do you know if there’s a max length you can extend? I’m thinking about buying a 77cm leif and fitting a 87cm deck to it, would that cause structural issues do you think?
also would love a more detailed step by step on how you did the battery compartment extension!
I really don’t know if there’s a max length, I pretty much made it up as I went along to be honest. I didnt know if it would work but it ended up being rock solid for the 2 cm gap I had. 10 cm looks like a pretty big gap. The problem is there’s not much flat surface to anchor your extension to. If you try that you may wanna mould a solid join piece in fiberglass first and then attach it on both side of the gap.
First I cut and flattenend a few PCI steel caches from an ATX PC case I had lying around. I glued them inside the enclosure over the gap to form the skeleton of the extension, and waited 24 hours for the epoxy to cure. I then had one enclosure solidarized but the join was not very solid and I had big holes to fill.
Then I cut 3 rectangles of hard plastic that I filled the gaps with and I glued these on the PCI caches, waited 24 h for the epoxy to cure.
Then i placed fiberglass strips soaked in epoxy over the gap. I don’t remember how many layers i placed but the idea is that this is what gives the whole structure its solidity. It adds at least 1 or 2 mm of thickness to the outside of the enclosure. Alternating vertical and horizontal layers in a kind of superposed lattice, if that makes sense.
When I was done with the layering I poured a good dose more liquid epoxy on top of it and spread it around, trying to keep it in the fiberglass by rotating the enclosure to counteract the effects of gravity until it was thick enough to let it rest for 48 hours. at that point the enclosure felt really solid again.
I tried to spread fiberglass paste on top of it after that to get a smooth finish but that did not go too well, it was hardening way too fast and ended up not being smooth at all, I then sanded it and spray painted in black and called it a day.
