I have front inner position (springs very loose) back outer position (springs very tight) 45 km/h is doable but not enjoyable Don’t think the dampas help a lot. I think a steering damper on the back is the only thing that really helps. And a stiffer deck should also help a lot so that it can’t twist that much.
I have right now
Front inner position using yellow dampas with hollow top and bottom bubbles Back outter position using same yellow hollow dampas 15 ply holy pro deck
With dampas I lost maybe 20-30% percent of turning angle can’t do anymore really tight corners and U turns in two lane street but I gained stability so now I could do 50km/h and be bit more stable, second problem is now my 15 ply holy pro which yesterday at high speed started flexing on it’s own…
I have in mind making something similar to Baja board with independent suspension and use active steering damper on deck pivoting to control how easy to turn deck to stiffen on higher speeds… But it’s only idea level yet.
All very interesting, thanks for sharing. I was also thinking of a simplistic Baja reworking, combining both inner and outer positions using home made spring retainers like so
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I think it’s not a position of spring problem, but idea that dampa limits the travel of spring. I have idea to make bit more softer dampa than yellow one…
Yeah, it’s something @banjaxxed and I have shared a few messages over. Lightweight BajaBoard kind of thing, in dot points;
- Under 10kg
- Option to run pneumatics or urethane wheels
- Stiff chassis (CF tube construction)
- Concave / rocker (ie; nice deck shape)
- suspension designed around 165-200mm long rear MTB shocks
Would go for a single parallel suspension linkage up each end (not independent). Rear MTB shocks are designed to support half a person and this would allow 2 per board. I’d think that any truely independent suspension design would soak up steering input into its compression making it a bit sluggish. There’s a build thread over on endless-sphere that is a similar design (obviously I’m thinking smaller scale). Maybe reuse Trampa hangers.
One of these days I’ll get some time to spend in CAD. There’s a bit to go through designing proper bushings, making sure the shock leverage is ok, etc.
As much as I have done an investigation into the design, shocks have nothing much to do with turning ability. The connecting rod to the deck rotation controls it. On bajaboard it uses trampa springs with dampas to control deck turn ability so I thinking of using active steering damper in conjunction with VESC to control turnability based on speed.
Springs will bend over time doing such things. Tested already… With our current gear everything is already quite adjustable and it should be easy to find a good setup that works for the average ride conditions. If you want a board that turns on a dime, you usually can accept some top speed losses. If you go for speed, you can usually accept less turning radius. Making something that can do both, will get technically more complex and heavy.
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For my my board is daily commute device, so weight and complexity is not an issue… The problem is that I am riding at bicycle highways and streets and speed is important because to ride slow for hour is not an solution and riding fast without decent stability kills my legs even with all this mileage on training…
So something stable and with really decent turn ability would be awesome but for this wide range of stuff active management is required.
There’s two sets of springs on a BajaBoard; one set is part of the suspension, the other for turning. Compressing the suspension causes no turn as you’d expect, compressing the turn spring obviously does. Problem is when you shift your weight to one side that weight is supported by both the suspension spring and the turn spring; they both compress, when really as you’re trying to turn you only want the turn spring to compress.
Another possible issue with independent suspension is that you’ll probably see some wheel camber when the board rolls. Pneumatics would be fine with this, but you’d probably want to avoid anything apart from 0deg camber on urethane.
I recon there’s something in this. It’d be nice to adjust stiffness and not just damping, but it would be much harder to implement the mechanical side of things. Also motorcycles only vary steering damping, so maybe it’s good enough.
IMO we’re making poor use of having two independently controllable driven wheels. You should (maybe? honestly NFI really) be able to dampen something like speed wobbles with torque vectoring. You may be able to detect speed wobbles with a rotary position encoder on the kingpin. Developing and testing this solution could be “fun” 
.
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That would be elegant…
Still I prefer the KIS way. Keep It Simple.
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As I have played with active steering dampeners, I think if used like linear one on connecting deck to wishbone for turning it would allow to control how fast/slow it can turn so at 0-15km/h I could allow it turn fully and then fully engage dampening at higher speed so you could still turn but it would be slight turns and not instant so it wouldn’t cause wobbling. Thinking that even springs wouldn’t be required if used steering dampeners but that’s everyone on idea level, still have tons to read material to even imagine how to design this kind of stuff… I am also thinking of maybe using only single motors per wheel base and use differential and etc 
Baja explains this on video
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Winter has actually been pretty good so far (little rain), still a lack of daylight and excess work means the board hasn’t been out much. Once a weekend kind of thing. It’s still going well, feels slower, but I’m pretty sure that’s just me coming to terms with it.
A local YouTuber organised a hill climb test, and having no idea how this board performs compared to others I though it’d be interesting to see how it went. . .
Apparently slower than an evolve up the hill 
. Ironically it probably had too much torque for this test and was fairly challenged for traction on a lot of concrete dust. Honestly think the test rider did well to get that time having only ridden the board for 30seconds prior to the test.
Guess what I’m saying is the Trampa wants a rematch 
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Oh to have pneumatics for that, those 6.5” Trampa pnummies would probably be ideal
Oh and throttle curve, probably a lot of tweaks in the esc settings
Current temptation is one of those Trampa Orrsum longboards with the 6.5" pneumatics. Pneumatics get swapped to the street carver, and the ABECs end up on the longboard.
Funny thing about that day. Was keen to try out some of the other boards that day, as I’m still yet to ride another board. After all the test runs were done I finally climbed on a Raptor 2; got all of 10m down the carpark before getting the ‘move on’ from the security guards.
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Good idea that, they have nice dual mounts for £100 as well.
The Orssum complete makes sense fiscally, I was looking at the trucks and mounts but worked out at £300, the entire board including 6.5" trod superstars was £500; £600 with mounts iirc
If they are using a motorbike like compound in the 6.5" as claimed, there would be no traction problems on that grradient even with dust.
Then you are gonig to look at the original Stickies and wonder about a mini travel board, this is how the disease takes a grip 
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