Well, the gears are holding up okay, but I do not think it’s the best idea to run these without some sort of enclosure. Rocks and pebbles are really beating them up. Structurally they are 95% fine, and they still don’t skip a beat, but they sound funny after a while of riding off-road. If these things are going to last a while I need to finish up a fully sealed enclosure and print some fresh gears. I can’t wait to hear what they sound like with some liquid lubrication in there…
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I don’t know what render what’s real anymore. The heatsink looks sick. Got a link for it? maybe I missed it, I’ll check again.
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ever tought about printing a mold, and molding gears?
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I’ve thought about it, but it seems like an investment without much value returned. Every time I print something, something changes… Rarely if ever have I printed something over and over the same way… And if I did that more often I’d be considering molding parts more than I do now.
randall 35 degrees baseplate on TB218 hangers? 
Ah yes, before thats what I had. I’ve swapped back to the standard TB baseplates though, since the damper really kills speedwobble regardless and I wanted the turning radius back.
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Lubricated (silicone, Teflon, white lithium) herringbone Gear drive enclosure with sealing TPU… Test spin. I can’t wait to see how these ride once I get the other side on. I’ll just go crazy and hope they don’t fall apart. And, if they do fall apart, well then they weren’t good enough and I have other options to fall back on.
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Got both gears on.
Here’s a video of the new gears in action.
The noise sounds a lot quieter in person, something about the video really accentuates it, but if you listen close you can tell for most of the video the sound of the wind is louder than the gears themselves. I have since added even more teflon, white lithium and silicone grease just for the heck of it. I have a feeling these will break in nicely, assuming they don’t go flying apart… lol.
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Awesome dude !! You ride it! It sounds really good too 
most of the noise being the wind.
I’m a total noob in this 6" tires and wheels, but I see most and most on build over the years … I have to check that!
Well done 
good continuation!
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Will you sell this after testing, or have it on thingverse so we can try it out? thanks in advance.
Not going to sell it. It may end up on thingiverse.
I took them out on a groupride today and they held up well all the way until the end of the ride. I scraped the bottom and one of them cracked in half.
They were so beautiful, the ride so insanely quiet… they roll forever, the torque is instantaneous… Everything about them is great except for one major downside. They are fragile… they can’t take a beating, and I doubt I could design a 3d printed enclosure for gears to withstand the kind of riding I want to do. Next step might be to mill these things out of aluminum or something… but for now I think I am going back to belts. I might even toss my superflys back on just for something different.
For now, I know I love gears the most- more than anything else out there. They are amazing in every way… but I gotta stop tinkering with my drivetrain. Maybe if I printed the enclosures out of nylon they would hold up well… Oh jeez, I can’t get sucked into re-making these out of nylon. 
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now to make this out of aluminum the measurements should be the same so it would be awesome to have em somewhere for “perhaps” next summer. Thanks for sharing your experiment with the community man 
Should be, lots of areas have 0.2/0.3mm tollerances built in for 3D printing, and for most circular spots that means 0.2/0.3 for the radius = 0.6+mm
If you wanted it to be perfect, some work would have to be done. Plus, something needs to be done about the TPU. Maybe having perfect tollerances will square things up, but for 3D printing… I still believe having reliable 3D printed gear drives / enclosures is possible, especially if it were all nylon and didn’t rely on sub mm tollerances (like my TPU gaskets), but this (although closer to reliable compared to my last iteration) is not it. Belts work well enough for now for me to decide that keeping on spending $20 on $20 for rolls of filament to test with is no longer viable. Lol. Until I get some good ideas, check out these pics of the aftermath.
I guess it’s not as bad as it may look, but if this is the result of one extended ride… then back to belts for me.
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What part wore out most? The pics are not very clear.
What’s the issue with TPU, again?
Printing in nylon is the best case scenario, so definitely try it. I am building an enclosure and a heated dry box. Won’t print nylon before that.
The TPU is fine, it just rubbed on the tires and turned black, so I need to work on those tolerances a bit.
The gears were in perfect condition. I do need to do better to seal the enclosure, there were a few bits of shredded grass inside the enclosure after the ride, but not much… and no rocks or sand thankfully. The PETG enclosure itself took a hit from the edge of a sidewalk and shattered, nylon would just bend, and if that were the case i’d still be riding my gear drive probably.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this thread. My antispark switch blew out on me. 
I’m working on a 2S16P pack, hopefully to be able to deliver 80A, out of salvaged laptop cells, to booost my 10S to 12S.
Putting together an antispark XT-90 to replace the rocker switch.
I’ll update later on maybe when it all comes together. Beer. 
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Got just enough beer. Board works again. Yeeeeeet yeeeeper yeeet
Ah I’m gonna glue the cable thing to the enclosure now.
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Thingy glued 
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Progress finally on a voltage booster.
I was sketched out about using my 2S many P vruzend kit due to the 4A per cell limitation, and because of the overall size. Also, it really is a mishmash of cells from all over the place, but at least the P groups are as closely matched in overall Ah as possible.
Regardless, I decided I don’t need to go 48 mph weighted, up from 40mph on my current gearing with that crazy pack… whatever it is.
So I used some old salvaged LG laptop cells 
to put together a gigantic 1S pack to boost voltage 3-4v, giving me an extra 3-4 mph top speed.
It’s a 1S26P. The cells capacity tested out to around 2750mah each, so 71.5Ah, or 257Wh. This is nice, because hopefully I won’t have to charge it as much… Maybe once every 4 times I take it out. I needed a P group much larger than my main batteries 4P because of my main packs range extender / boost converter that I carry an extra 400 - 600Wh to charge while riding… And that won’t be keeping this voltage boosting pack charged, only the main pack.
The cells are only rated for 5A discharge, so I needed 26 of them to reach my boards max battery load of 80A. Each cell should only need to output ~3A to match the 80A requirement, also I don’t want to push old laptop cells to their 5A limit.
I used fish paper where the 12AWG wires run on each side and before wrapping it all up tight I sealed everything up with electrical tape and around the protruding wires with I padded with some 7mm thick or so thick neoprene rubber and a final layer of craft foam to make sure that no matter what I’m taking any stress/pressure off the nickel strips, since I wasn’t able to fish paper underneath (they were already spot welded on from being in the laptop batteries, and I figured I’d just keep and reuse them as-is so I wouldn’t be soldering on top of the cells directly). I’m pretty sure this will suffice, having the standard terminal ring and battery wrap, since the pack itself was also hot glued like crazy in every single open crevice and taped over again and again.
I don’t have any other pictures of the build, but each side has two 12AWG silicone wires splitting the load to the main +/- which is 10AWG. The whole thing plugs into my loopkey and tested out it adds 4mph to my top end successfully. Tomorrow I’ll be doing some stress tests on it.
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Took the 1S 26P pack out for a stress test this afternoon. Thankfully I got out before dark. I calculated that i’d reach a max of 44mph and that’s exactly what happened. yeet!
Overall it seems to work well. My lowest voltage under load was 34 volts and the booster pack under load would drop to 4.0v. Because of this, and so I don’t stress my 10S 25R pack too much (since it likes to sag quite a bit and I rely on the vescs low voltage cutoff of 28-30v often instead of the BMS low voltage cutoff), I’ll probably only be using this pack under full load down to 38 volts on the main pack.
It works great with the charger going at the same time, that’s a relief. I noticed under load, the 26P pack sags at most 0.1V, which I think is crazy compared to 8-9V on my 25R pack. I guess it’s just all that P.
Enjoy the video. Skip to 3:00 min for the speed test.
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