Well I just finished my second esk8 build, I spent all the money I had on it after saving up for a couple of months, built the deck myself, designed and 3D printed a bunch of the parts myself, only to watch it explode in a giant fireball along with my hopes and dreams. Please learn from my mistakes and double check everything, I don’t even know what caused this to happen but it could have probably been prevented somehow… Having watched about $1200 of my money literally burn away in front of me, I think I’m pretty turned off from building another esk8 in the near future, but hopefully I can get back into it again when I’m able to find another job and save up for a while. I’m pretty dang sad. Anyway… here’s the pictures and stuff:
UPDATE: Here are some charred pictures of what remains. Poor thing :’(
What remains of the electronics:
There’s nothing fun here! We are only a few more fires away from having all electric skateboards banned for public safety!
To all the new members there is no shame in having a expert build a battery for you and it’s cheaper than having a battery fire!
Two torqueboards 6355 motors
two torqueboards v4 motor mounts
10S4P battery pack with supower BMS
custom deck
two torqueboards VESCs
torqueboards antispark switch
some LEDs and a GPS tracker and some other stuff
don’t get me wrong, you could still have a problem with a loop key. but atleast if you see smoke you can rip it out and isolate the batterys from the electronics, which 9 times out of 10 may just be what you need to stop it from going further.
I bought the pack but I don’t want to point fingers because I bought it without a BMS and wired the BMS myself, so I probably screwed it up somehow. Live and learn I guess.
I was testing the board for one of the first times and when it happened I was going pretty slow on flat ground when I heard a pop and lost throttle control, I then saw the smoke coming out and backed away.
Trying to imagine what could’ve happened. You’d ridden it before you say. I’m assuming it was the bms either improperly attached or not. To have it go up in flames while not charging or even doing extreme discharge. Never see that
Were there a lot of pops?
I had ridden it before but only as test rides around my neighborhood, probably none of the rides were over a mile. This ride I actually took it up and down the street, going a little bit farther than I did before. I heard the first pop and saw the smoke and it took about three minutes before I started hearing more pops and then the burst of flames. At one point it sounded like popcorn/fireworks going off and the flames got pretty huge. Luckily no one was around though, and some neighbors were kind enough to help try extinguish the fire before the fire department arrived.
It went up in flames right in front of an elementary school
Somthing must have shorted the pack and put one or more cells into thermal runaway. But what? Guess it’s hard to know now.
Makes cell level fuses seem like a real good idea.