Well I’ve taken a punt on some backfires with spare thane. My reasoning is the availability of spare thane, a decent (for hub) power rating and portability as other have mentioned. One other thing about backfire is that they are 80mm which means less wheel bite to circumvent then some of the other monsters coming out now.
Application I have in mind would be a Chris Miller Schmitt Stix, I’m thinking this would be a good portable platform to bring on holiday to France via ferry for instance, France has really nice cycle paths in the parts I’ve been around.
What? Belt drives certainly have FOC. I wouldn’t say no maintenance either as I’ve seen way more messed up motors from hubs than on belt drives. Additionally my 12mm belts have never broken on me, nor did I ever have to adjust my tension or drive train. Free costing on my belt boards are just as good as any hub I’ve ever kicked on as well.
The only thing I’d give you is that hub drives do look more stealth.
free coasting is better with hubs than a pulley setup in my experience and hubs if done with the right magnetic design can have no resistance and coast as good as a regular wheel. mellow for example has a stator that doesnt have rachetting teeth as they’re all connected, or you can use many poles and reduce the rachetting.
hubs are much quieter and thats a huge plus to me.
hubs dont have a problem with high speed in fact they really should be able to get better efficiency at higher speeds as they dont have the belt resistance.
can generally get lower to the ground with hubs as they dont need clearance for the motor.
You should try my board again this Sunday, the rolling resistance is pretty minimal, and belt drives that are properly setup don’t have much noise, at least when you’re actually riding. I wouldn’t say hubs don’t have problems with high speed as the power it takes drive hubs at 30+ mph gets exponentially higher. You can easily gear a belt drive to go as fast as hubs, which is a benefit of belt driven systems, customizable gearing.
Of course Belt drives can run in FOC …but in reality how many belt setups do you know that do run in FOC ? even if they do they are not nearly that quiet as hubs …and even if they run foc the noise at high speeds often sounds like BLDC.
As for maintenance …I bought my Carvons in february…I took them out of the box …mounted them on my board and never had to look at them again. It has been well over half a year now without a single problem. Of course there are some cheap ass hubs that fall in your hands …but hey …you get what you pay for. Well made hubs need no maintenance at all.
But hey …guys we all know that …belt guys dont like hubs …hub guys won’t ever jump on belt setups This is Atari vs Comodore …Amiga vs PC …Playstation vs Xbox
A lot of belt drives run FOC, it’s not like an exclusive club for hub drives. FOC is a control method for brushless DC motors, the same motors used in belt and hub drive boards. It won’t be any quieter or louder on a hub than a belt at high speeds. I rode the Raptor 2 which also produced a whine at speed.
Same for my belt driven system, I haven’t had to do anything at all, so can I call my belt drive “no maintenance”?
I did say in my first post I bought some hubs, so it’s not like I hate hubs, I just understand their short comings and know they don’t as well as hubs for the city I live in.
the old raptor version, pre-production it was called, had more of a whine but the newer was pretty silent. Both were at the meet in gg park that day and it was noticable the sound difference. in my experience belted drives like the boosted make a lot more noise than the hubs I sold. foc helps a lot but at speed the belt compresses air and makes noise. we’ll have to do a comparison and I’m sure illl have some new hubs very soon we can use for the comparison.
Yes those. Are you familiar with those? And what do you mean by tiny? power rating or size? And I don’t understand what you mean by very little urethane. Don’t all hub motors have very little urethane? except carvon? I’m pretty new to using these so I don’t know much about them but they seem competent from riding them. I’ll ask kv spec from Kieran.
Its hard to have an idea without knowing how they’re put together. That being said they aren’t very big, and size (very rough i know) is essentially analogous to power. Unless you’re using really fancy internals which for the price I doubt they are.
Also the urethane isn’t very thick which means it will have to be high duro so you don’t feel the can. And yeah that certainly is a significant design challenge for hubs. Carvon has a solution, hummie seems to have made his motors longer instead of higher diameter so as to perserve some thane depth while still increasing power. I believe enertion has done the same.
That being said my comment was more generally speaking to the fact that many other brands have been using very similar motors and their nothing special. So what sets Meepo apart other than price? They’ve either skimped somewhere on quality or their margins are lower than other brands. You don’t get quality for free.
Thanks for your explanation. Size wise I think Meepo motors are pretty large compared to many other hub motors. It’s inside a 90mm wheel with a contact patch of 55mm. When the battery is full, it feels plenty powerful, almost as powerful as Boosted v2 Dual+. Immediate torque is noticeably less however but top speed is slightly faster than Boosted.
It is one of the cheap and mass produced Chinese motors. However, in that context the one that’s widely used could also mean its reliability. It probably can’t match the quality of specially crafted motors but if it works within limits of operation and is durable, i’d consider it a good product.
Also, the urethane on Meepo motor is on the softer side at 82A and it feels nice.
@Eboosted, hey dude. I have to disagree with you here. What you say sounds exactly like my thoughts 2 months ago, when I was not understanding neither why direct drive. Clearance is shit, power is not enough have been my arguments as well. But I risked, invested a lot of time and tried it. I will never switch back to belts! As I said in my topic http://www.electric-skateboard.builders/t/fliess-3-einmal-directdrive-immer-directdrive/32279, I would rather add a 3rd motor than return back to belts. Yes, I like to ride really hard also, yes I like not to care where I ride. If your direct drive motors are properly protected, then you just crash bigger rocks by your motors and you don’t give a shit Sometimes, if there is really something big, then you may be afraid to get suddenly stuck, but so far it didn’t happen to me and I just stopped to be worried. So, I am relaxed (it is your requirement) and I have a soft and super smooth ride Okay, I only did ~300-400km on my motors, but so far I am 100% happy about direct drive.
Ive had three belt drives, 3 hubs designs and 3 direct drive set ups and all have their advantages and drawbacks currently.
What Ive found is that the carvon V3 on Abec 11’s and foc has the quietest and smoothest operation hands down. The board is dead silent, seriously. All you hear is wheels rolling on the pavement. I didnt think that mattered until I experienced it, but now its really important to me. Belts on FOC arent even close to being as silent.
I’ve also found that assuming the hub motor is big enough and you can supply enough amps, more than enough torque from startup is available.
Heat has also been an issue for hubs with me but with the availability of sensored hubs and the vesc’s newly implemented ability to limit motor temperature Ive found myself riding without worry of overheating my hubs.
Ride quality and urathane fastening continues to be a challenge for hubs, as are materials quality and parts tolerances, but Ive already seen major improvements in those areas withh many more in the pipline, and it really doesnt seem like it will require rocket science to find and implement solutions.
I also dont see belt drives comparing to hubs on topspeed on a standard 2.14 VESC with the 60k eRPM limit.
Direct drive offers the ability to fasten off the shelf wheels which allows us to take advantage of the years of R&D that have gone into urathane formulations and core binding technology. The clearance issue is a definate drawback though. Atm, the trade off seems more than worth it, as my Carvon V3’s on 107mm Superflys rolls better than my regular longboard and I havent caused any irreparable damage to my motor cans from debris . The drag is almost indiscernible.
All the belt drives I have slip the belt under heavy braking and always worried that a popped belt coming down a hill will leave me with no brakes. Tightening the belt helps but ads even more noise, drag, heat and wear. They are also bulkier, heavier, and uglier. I will say they have been more reliable. I dont attritbute it to an inherantly better design however but rather to the level of refinement the belt drive set up have acheived with the longer amount of time thry have been avaialble.
But what if you do tricks on your trucks or jump curbs. Maybe the application is just for coasting. But wouldn’t crashing over and over on your wheels or wheel truck assembly crack the motors?
EDIT: Totally ignorant about hub motors… just pointing out a layman’s observation.
Totally valid if thats what you are into. Belt setups wouldnt work well for that either but a full hub motor could assuming the wires are tucked away well and the enclousure is rugged. These things are so expensive thoigh I cant imagine anyone using them for that but its possible. Ive seen Moja kickflip the raptor2 in person and Ive seen video of it grinding coping lol so who knows.
Clearance:
Of course are direct drives closer to the ground. But when something hits you in this area, it would most likely also hit your belt. Most debris, stones and stuff will puncture the belt and will leave some scratches in the motor. I even think the motor can will handle that better. And if something hits you really hard: Motor will be damaged and has to be replaced; belt will have a broken belt, wheelpulley and motormount. Should not really make a huge price different considering the damage.
So i think these two, belt and directdrive are comparable it this point.
This is Atari vs Comodore …Amiga vs PC …Playstation vs Xbox 
Sometimes, if there is really something big, then you may be afraid to get suddenly stuck, but so far it didn’t happen to me and I just stopped to be worried. So, I am relaxed (it is your requirement) and I have a soft and super smooth ride 
Okay, I only did ~300-400km on my motors, but so far I am 100% happy about direct drive.