Righto cocks! This one was quite a while in the making, but I’m very pleased with the final result!
Deck: Kaly XL medium flex
Enclosure: eBoosted double stack with infinitysink
Trucks: Matrix Ii
Wheels: MBS Rockstar II with Evolve 7 inch rubber
Drives: Moon gear drives, 44:9, 170kv Maytech 6374 sealed
Battery: 12s8p P42A stagger stacked with LLT smart bms
ESC: Xenith V1
Remote: Puck Puck Bruce!
Accessories: Robogotchi with GPS
As with most of my builds, I like to start with the inside and work my way out. It always makes the most sense to me to start with the battery.
I’ve really been getting my kicks lately by (crudely) designing and printing functional parts. The concept for the BMS triangle was shamelessly stolen from Quinn, but this one was 100% tinkerdicked by myself.
It allowed just enough space so that I didn’t have to stack components, and the bluetooth module for the bms tucks away nicely into the inside of the triangle.
Working on the enclosure is one of the easier jobs for me I find, but its also stressful. Not the kind of thing you wanna fuck up i deliberated for some time on how I wanted to make the motor connections and finally decided that I would design and print my own… things.
The idea with the things was to have something that secures the MT60 connectors to the enclosure, without having to rely on permanent (and messy) solutions like epoxy, glue, silicone etc… the prints were designed to house m3 nylock nuts, which I glued into place post print.
In addition to securing the internal connector to the enclosure, I also wanted the things to bolt the external MT60 together with the internal. I have had issues in the past with these kind of phase connections coming loose, and its a pain in the dick.
Of course, I couldn’t help myself but to add a loop key, I really believe every build should have one if possible. I challenged myself to make this one as low profile as I could.
I’ve jumped around with the timeline of the build a little bit here, but I’m just trying to tell a story, so deal with it.
With previous builds, i’ve had minor issues with rattling from inside the enclosure, with absolutely no clue where it was coming from. I wanted to completely mitigate that with this build, so pretty much the whole inside or the enclosure got lined with adhesive EVA foam.
This seemed like a fucking fantastic idea at the time, until I realised that it made the fit of the battery a little too tight to be comfortable with. Especially considering the deck is carbon skinned and any rubbing on the battery could be a potential short…
Soooo I made a gasket. 5mm thick, 65A polyurethane. I traced the shape of the enclosure onto some paper, transferred that to some MDF, cut out the shape, tried to seal the mold, and poured the urethane into it.
All said and done, it worked, but getting the urethane to release from the mold was a bit of a bitch, and I’m not likely to try that same method again.
There’s not a great deal more to say about the guts of it… i fused the charge port with a 20A mini blade auto fuse, jammed the robogotchi in a nice little nook, hooked up the sensor wires and robo GPS to GX12 connectors and everything just worked nicely. Fuck yes.
However… the gasket had knock-on effects…
- it reduced the ride clearance
- it caused the enclosure to no longer line up with the pre-installed inserts…
Ride clearance was easily solved. Hit up Joel at MBS for the rubber riser CAD file, modify CAD file to include cable tunnels that I didn’t end up using, print, make a silicone mold, pour urethane risers. Badabing badaboom madafaka.
The pre installed deck inserts needed to be completely removed and filled so that new inserts could be installed to suit with the new gasket.
eBoosted uses rivnuts. Initailly I tried just threading a bolt into the hole and bashing out the rivnut from the bottom with a hammer… this worked, but I felt it was a little too savage.
I decided to investigate if heat would help. It did. I heated up one rivnut at a time with the heatgun, and they came out with very minor persuasion with the bolt and hammer.
I taped up the underside of the deck and injected epoxy from the top with a syringe into all of the insert holes. Earlier in the project I had done the same with the existing truck holes as the stock holes don’t work with Matrix II. Well… two of them do.
I used the two holes that did work to bolt old Randall baseplates to either side of the deck and used them as drill guides to drill the new truck holes.
New inserts! Sex bolts are my favourite! Also called barrel nuts, chicago screws, cabinet screws etc… they have lots of names but sex bolts is the best!
Drilled new holes, counterbored deck so the bolt heads were flush, installed with 5min epoxy, filled over with epoxy.
Sanded deck, applied 2 white base coats, then skinned and fritted. Very happy with the frit application on this one, i am very much a fan of the fine frit rather than medium.
Cleaned up the edges, washed down the deck, painted the rails with a posca pen (can’t believe i’ve never thought of this before) then 3 coats of clear.
Last step is the gear drives! To be honest, this was my least favourite part of the build. The little stacked washers between the wheel gear adapter and the wheel hub are really fucking frustrating. Took me a few goes to get it right…
Circumcised motor shafts with the trusty angle grinder. Put the motors inside ziploc bags first then poked the motor shaft through the bottom of the bag and then sealed with kapton tape to avoid any metal dust getting into the motors.
Bashed on clamps with a hammer like a savage, and wished I had’ve known @Venom121212 trick of using an appropriately sized piece of pvc piping to bash the clamps on i ended up with some slight marring on the clamps that needed to be tidied up before the bearing would seat properly.
Loosely followed the instructions from Moon on how to install the drives and after a few pull aparts and back together agains, got them working nicely.
Oh! Almost forgot to mention the awesome antisink plates from @Savage1 at Nebula! I drilled a hole in the deck to route the wire for the gps module through and bolted the GPS on top. These antisinks are beautifully made and are real nice and chunky.
I was a little concerned about potential water damage to the gps module, so before I installed it, I filled the case with silicone and squeezed it together, fully potting the module inside.
If you made it this far, you deserve a beer.
Cheers legends!