Saturday, October 15, 2005

Head turner

Howdeh.

news - finally finished the (prototype) motorised skateboard. it works, but has had a few hiccups leaving me with a pretty clear idea about what i need to fix/modify.

first of all. testing the thing the afternoon i got home, i found to my discomfort that the pivoting section is not exactly the strongest thing around, and when you leant sideways to turn the board, you ended up turning in a VERY tight circle due to the shithouse length of 6mm bar giving up to my bulk and bending. next on the list is a better engine mount to suit the chain given the enormous amount of slack it has, and a tendency to fall off it's runnings. a more important problem could be the lack of power - it accelerates very slowly, although kept up any pace i got from the little brother pushing me along. engine just cant hit the powerband/has a shitful lack of torque hence you dont go anywhere quick.
Saturday (today) i got up and thought fuck why not give it a go. on the whole it was better n yesterday, having packed the pivot joint out with washers. still bent though, and you had to straighten it every second go or so. might have the solution in a rod stolen from maccas which normally holds up a teflon sheet. see how it goes. the biggest slight on an otherwise good test session occured when starting at the top of a very gradual slope (to get it in the power band, etc). in any case, i staged at the top of this thing and started rolling down after starting the engine. enter the speedbump - front wheel went over fine, back got unbalanced, i bail backwards whilst still holding the throttle in full bore, so the engine is revving its little fucking guts out. at this point the chain slips off and the engine slips it up a notch, free of any load. my foot happens to cross the path of this whirring sprocket of death, and it sliced clean through the side of my old runners and sock, not managing to touch my foot. thank fuck!

so mods needed are
- chain guard
- strengthened pivot section
- foot straps
- braking
- new engine mount section after grinding the old one off

pictures may come, depending on the availability of a digital camera etc.



in other news, skeen is having a party tonight. theme is black and white (as she's black and we're all white, bit of a pun there :)

shall tell how it goes.

1 Comments:

At 17/10/05 10:40 PM, Blogger Dave said...

the magic is in the madness.

im in grade 12 and making this under a manual arts subject (design and construction is the gist of it)

basically, we had free roam for this project - make absolutely anything we wanted. i chose to make a motorised skateboard. id never seen one, but thought the idea of a skateboard style deck mated to big bubble tyres and a small motor to drive the lot whilst you stood on the thing would be pretty fucking cool, and unique to boot.

turns out they do exist, but ive made this from scratch anyways. i'll post some pics as soon as i can get hold of a digital camera.

 

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