EDIT: Here are a couple of pics of the final build, turned out awesome
I’m new here, Hi! I thought it might be interesting to share my first build as it goes. I live in rural New Zealand, so wanted a board that was good off-road, but more for a cruise by the river with my kids on their bikes, rather than a full on mountain-board. I’ve not done very much skating, so a lot of this is unfamiliar, but I surf and snowboard so can handle riding a board. And I’ve built and flown a bunch of quadcopters, the electrics are similar.
So when I looked into just buying an electric skateboard, the Evolve Bamboo GT was looking about right. Only problem is, it’s not out yet, and they don’t even ship to New Zealand. So screw em, I’ll build my own!
First up was deciding the deck/trucks/wheels, and I’ve just now got that all together. It’s looking like this
I went with MBS wheels and (Matrix ii pro) trucks, the options for offroad wheels and trucks are pretty limited as far as I could find, and these looked the best. The mountainboard trucks made things a bit tricky, mountainboards have a tilted deck where the trucks are mounted, and I hadn’t considered how that would screw up turning with a flat deck. So I had to build some sort of wedge to rotate the trucks out by ~30-40 degrees.
The simplest easiest thing I came up with was to use plywood. I got a half sheet of 12mm ply, cut it into a few smaller pieces, and glued it together with contact adhesive into a 6 thick 72mm brick. I then cut it diagonally with a hand saw which gave me the two wedges. I hand drilled holes for the trucks first, I needed to buy a few longer M5 bolts, and get a bit creative with the drilling. Then I drilled holes to mount to the deck, didn’t worry about nuts for that, just drilled long 4.5mm holes and screwed the M5 bolts in.
I chose the loaded fattail deck because I liked the design and I thought the shape might work OK with the wheels. Not sure if that will turn out to be a good choice, but I do love the deck. It has loads of flex which I love, but it might snap? Dunno.
Next up (once I’ve had a bunch of fun just riding this thing down bumpy hills) is to build the motor mount. I plan to use ply for that too. I’ve already got pulleys and belts, that was hard for these big wheels! I eventually found a combo that seemed OK. It’s all plastic, might wear quickly, belt isn’t really what I wanted, but easy to work with, and in stock. 78T big pulley, 16T little, using a 9.5mm XL belt and I’ve got the emax GT 5345 170kv motors (EDIT/SPOILER I broke one of these later, went with Ollin 170kv motors instead), Enertion VESCS and will be going 8S LiPo, maybe 12S.
Any of this stuff might fail, and I’ll no doubt end up making everything out of aluminium not plywood, like mostly everyone seems to, but for now I’m just enjoying giving it a go. Fun times!