How’s it going everyone I’m fairly new around here, at least posting wise and most of you probably don’t know me so I should probably introduce myself here.
My real name is Josh I’m from Edmonton Alberta Canada 23yrs old living on my own with my girlfriend with no “formal” electronics experience. I’ve always tinkered with electronics and have always had a wonder for electricity and magnetism in general. When I discovered this forum almost 2 years ago and discovered people where strapping 18650’s onto skateboards and hauling ass at 50Km/h+ I immediately fell in love with the idea compared to paying 2600 cad for what a boosted was running for at the time.
The idea got put on the backburner for a while and it kinda drifted off as other things in life took over and I almost forgot about it, or i did for almost a year. Then last year things almost fell into place but after realizing how long it would take to source the parts and build the boards I wouldn’t be able to ride them for at least 6 months after i completed them (damn winters here).
So my plan was delayed until spring but i ordered all the parts early enough (or so I thought).
Anyway my plan was this I wanted a board that could do at least 50km/h with a 50km range and I wanted to do it as cheaply safely possible lol. After sharing what i thought was an insane idea with my girlfriend she thought it was so cool she wanted her own lol and she wanted it to got just as fast and far as mine 
. Definitely a keeper. I guess we both have a backround in ski-racing and 100km/h+ speeds but snow is a whole different set of rules.
My plan was a Direct FET 4.12 controller (vesc6 way to pricey) 2 Torqueboards Mechanical kits with 218mm trucks 90mm wheels and 15mm belts all driven my 2 6374 motors. Remote wise I got 2 gen 1 mini for dirt cheap of Ali, honestly I love the footprint compared to the firefly I’m building right now. No issues, so far… So now the Build has officially been “planned” but its not like anything was ever written down or drawn out or planned other than in my brain. Most people I think would describe this as winging it but I like to call it all calculated.
I knew the footprint my flatpack battery would take plus focboxes and then I’d need some room for the motors. So I did a little google calculator math and started searching for boards with a suitable criteria.
Truncated tesseract for the girlfriend and a Byron Essert Frog for me sourced from a somewhat local skateshop.
Next I decided to form the enclosure this was for 2 reasons I found 8 12x12 sheets of kydex on amazon for 22 canadian rupee’s 1 day prime shipped to my door so, even though my original plan was to build a fiberglass enclosure as I have a bunch of experience from working on boats, but seriously FUCK THAT. KYDEX IS THE BEST!
But seriously
it took me maybe 5 minutes to shape a mold out of a piece of foam another 5 to tape it up and i was already heating kydex on the BBQ My first 2 pieces didn’t turn out to well turns out BBQing kydex takes a little finess to get right lol.
I ended up reforming my enclosure pieces (you could actually see grill lines on the inside of 2 of them) And as you can hopefully tell from my shitty google backup quality photos my kydex BBQing skills increased and i was left with a usable product for both boards.
Honestly I’m pretty terrible at logging photo’s of this and i swear it only gets worse from here lol.
Next thing I know i randomly bump into another eskater on reddit who happens to live in edmonton as well and is in process of assembling his eskate, and he needed a battery. So next thing I know I have 130 30q’s in my house.
Roughly the energy equivalence of a pound of TnT in my 900sq foot condo what could ever go wrong…spoiler alert I’m not an Idiot… yet at least lol.
Anyway so I needed a way to connect all these batteries and the chinese sunko’s are shit and bitch and a half to get for a decent price in canada anyway and sadly I had not discovered the Boss welder yet (literally the day after I started assembling this is when I found that thread).
So I said fuck it lets build my own!
Ez pz right lol, i got a cheap dual pulse spot welding timing board for 20 bucks of Ali and am fairly impressed with its abilities (tho a second transformer would be nice for thicker nickel) It did take me a while to figure out how to get good solid spot welds (i was using far to much pressure at first). Ohh and if anyone else has questions about this just pm me but theres lots of tutorials out there. Just make sure you remove the magnetic shunts and use enough wraps to get the proper spot welding voltage (3-5 i believe? volts that is).
Now my nickel got lost in the mail and I ordered a bunch of fucking extra with better shipping but it all showed up eventually and i finally got started on a 10s3p battery for my fellow local eskater. Pictures say more than words but notable additions are a bluetooth discharge bms and floating P groups as I like to call them.
I’ve got more photos of this battery than my entire build. I’m pretty sure I took photos of every single p group up close after being spot welded and many more lol.
After realizing the FOCboxes I ordered weren’t actually in stock or shipping anytime soon from enertion I decided to cancel my order and order ESK8.de direct FET controllers. A decision I’m extremely happy with so far. They showed up in under 2 weeks and look fantastic and i’ve had 0 issues so far running 12s FOC.
I was however not a huge fan of the warranty void if removed sticker that was put on
Especially considering non of the ports are labelled and there is very little documentation of this layout anywhere.
Back to the battery building now
Again using floating cells (am i the only one doing this?) 12s4p 30Q Discharge 80A Smart BMS with bluetooth monitoring, E-Switch, wireless switch p group monitoring over time current monitor over time completely customizable charge and discharge voltages.
Literally every parameter is adjustable with the computer software down to the mosfet temperature limits. I’m very suprised more people aren’t using these BMS’s they are killer. And at 67$ cad they are affordable as shit for their feature set. You will hear from me if i ever have any issues with them tho.
Well at that point I essentially had all the ingredients for a functioning board I was tempted by ducktape but I at least waited to mount the enclosure which I dremeled smooth JB plastic welded together (PVC pipe glue is the best for this btw 120% joint strength or some dumb nonsense like that is what the spec sheet claims, well at least when you are using the proper chemicals but I couldn’t find the chemicals in anything less than gallon sizes and i didn’t want to spend 600$ on adhesive lmao ) and mounted with m4 threaded inserts(i somehow managed to take no photos of the inserts or current state of my innards will update) But i was using imperial drill bits to drill metric holes and surprisingly only fucked up the 4 corners (coincidence?) that required epoxy. Not bad for the scariest part of the build lol.
I cut a quick hole in the enclosure for the motor wires put down a layer of closed cell foam on the board and the enclosure and quickly started to tighten it all down to take it out for a cruise. It was glorious so glorious i was more focused on riding that fully finishing my board and rode it this way for roughly 3 days before the battery needed a charge. I came back to this
That’s a little ball clenching to say the least. So I “finished” the board again (its still not even close to being done lol) But I made a custom bullet plug using sugru heatshrink fishpaper and bullet connectors and made a female antispark xt90 charge port covered in a piece of heatshrink and sugrued into place.
Now I ride the board to work everyday and its pretty much finished even though I still want some upgrades new wheels loctite enclosure nuts, shorten motor wires adjust motor mount really the list goes on and on. But its still “finished” but the builds aren’t!
And that’s why this thread is called almost done, I kinda wanted to come into this eskate builders scene as a little suprise with high quality first builds not just one but 2 boards. But life took over and my girlfriend wrecked her ankle at my grandfathers funeral, another sad unexpected day as I was hoping to show him these boards and explain the tech behind them as he was always blown away by electronics and had a fairly high level understanding of them as well. Besides the point my girlfriend was cool with me finishing my board first as she wouldn’t be riding for a long time so stay tuned for a really similar build on a truncated tessi. lol
Some more pics as it just tonight with a couple weeks of wear on it running riptide bushings thanks to the goldmine of a thread that the bushing thread is. 93 magnum/canon in the back and 93/87 cannon/cannon up front with riptide pivot cups 95a made these dangerous trucks stable at high speeds so thank you very much for that!
Thought my motor was making a weird sound, nope just a tiny rock wedged between the gears 
Anyway thank you so much again to this forum if you made it this far through my ramblings i commend you. I really can’t give my thanks enough to all the people here this build woulndn’t have happened without the comments and posts and questions so many people had previously asked, i haven’t ever asked for direct help on here and I honestly don’t think you need to, there is no way to index all the knowledge in these threads the search helps but so much helpful info came from random comments or discussions from multiple years ago.
If you have any question about my build what I used or where I got it from i have links for everything and they are fairly fresh, so please just ask there are reasons for everything(i think lol), and please Judge away. How is this for a first build and a half?
