Well hello there.
As most of you know, flexible decks has not been the best friend of esk8, adding complication, where you already have so many.
But some of them, the mightiest of them all manage to do the “impossible” : flexible deck with their flexible enclosure…
But, I hear you little Kevin on the back : “Durr Durr, my Boosted is super flexible, what are you saying you stupid dumb juice ?”
Thank you Kevin for pointing that out : the scooted brand is indeed making some flexible boards, but how do they manage to do such witchery ?
That’s why I separated flexible enclosures in 4 categories :
The separated enclosure : Like the boosted or pretty much all chinese brands, having a enclosure at the end and another on at the front of the board allow them to flex
Examples : Boosted boards, Meepo…
The 3D printed enclosure : Made from smaller 3D printed part, those enclosures have the advantages of being able to flex because they’re made from several pieces, kinda like the scale of a fish (or a dragon, whatever suits you better)
Examples : it’s DiY, no particular designs
The moutain board enclosure : widely used on Trampa decks for light AT or city boards, those come like one big enclosure, with several compartiments, linked together by a thin plastic
Examples : Trampa deck builds mostly
The chunky boi : they’re the magic, they’re just one single and big enclosure, with nothing particular. They usually have more room inside them, but cannot flex as much as others.
Examples : Hummie deck
These are or me the 4 possibilities to make an flexible enclosure for a flexible deck (duh)
Apart from different techniques, you need to thing about the material used.
Fiber is not an option here, being stiff as hell, both for carbon fiber or fiberglass.
Thermoformed ABS enclosure are common, but can ABS plastic bend with keeping the deformation or snap ?
Is there any other solutions to the first world problem (and quite niche if you ask me, we could all think of something else but no.) that represent flexible build ?
After writing this, I realized this wasn’t the most useful of posts, but let’s engage in a conversation on flexible enclosure, lacking on this forum.
But for a flexible enclosure made of several slices, don’t the slice need to slide back and forth to be able to bend ? or the fiber have enough natural flex to dampen this need (like the wood of a skateboard deck) ?
Yeah I currently have a 3d printed enclosure as well, but printed in ABS
But the downside of 3d printed enclosure is waterproofing them, I don’t how to do such thing, whtout making it stiff
That’s what I was going to mention… I took a serious look into doing this myself.
I think it would be perfect with some sort of hard outer casing for the bottom to take scratches and slides. Otherwise, there are quite a few flexible rubber sheets that have good abrasion resistance.
Very interesting ! How did you made it ? The rubber is not too flexible (not protecting against hits) ?
How did you make the corner on the second enclosure ?
And finally having a metal bar on the side to hold the enclosure doesn’t stiffen it a lot ? or it’s thin enough to conserve some flex ?
Looks great! I didn’t know there were so many options already.
What about fiber glass, it can bend like mad before breaking. A fiber enclosure + Kevlar layer is bound to be bullet proof and flexible, could do the trick too.
Note that if you don’t have a direct drive extruder on your printer that you may have a bit of trouble with TPU. Sainsmart is the best around to mitigate the associated issues. I learnt the hard way
