Electric Longboard – v2

Quick update on my Electric Longboard.

It works surprisingly well, and even the fact that the 150W motor feels rather under-powered when I try to use it (it does work but I feel like it could go faster and it does take a bit before it reaches top speed) could be considered a “feature” as it’s plenty of power for when the kids play with it in the park 🙂

One issue that we kept having was the 3D printed plastic motor mount would break when hitting small holes or irregularities in the asphalt.

This was obviously made worse by the hole drilled in the middle of the blue plastic bit, which did a great job at stopping the mount from sliding towards the wheel, but weakened quite a lot the part itself.

1st attempt was to simply replace the 3D printed blue part with a metal one. However, given that I don’t really have the tooling to machine one I settled for using Delrin, which, while still being plastic is probably an order of magnitude stronger that what I could 3D print.

While trying to cut the right shape, I realised that it would be much simpler and stronger at the same time to change the design and use a “slab” of strong Delrin plastic attached with 2 screws to the truck directly.

This also meant changing the design of the motor mount itself, and also being able to add a 2nd mount at the other end of the motor.

These changes and the fact that the motor was already touching the electronics box when turning, meant that I had to also print a couple of 2cm risers

The final result is indeed much sturdier

The updated models can be found in the same Github repository as the initial ones: https://github.com/trandi/electric-longboard/tree/master/FreeCAD_Models