Beamboarder Lets You Skate At Night; Won’t Blind Oncoming Traffic

beam-boarder-night-skating

Whether you use your longboard as transportation or pleasure riding, night-time sessions can be harrowing if you’re screaming through poorly-lit places. The Beamboarder is a solution that is simple to build and easy to throw in a backpack whenever that giant ball of fire is above the horizon.

Boiled down it’s a high-power LED and a Lithium battery. How’s that for a hack? Actually it’s the “garbage” feel of it ([Lyon’s] words, not ours) that makes us smile. An old hard drive with as high of a capacity as possible was raided for parts. That sounded like a joke at first but the point is that early, large drives have bigger magnets inside. You need a really strong one because that’s all that will hold the LED to the front truck of our board. From there it’s a matter of attaching a CREE LED with thermal adhesive and wiring it up to the Lithium pack that has been covered in shrink tube to keep the elements out.

The headlight is under the board, which is courteous to oncoming traffic. Once you pull off this hack we’re sure you’ll want to go further so we suggest wheels with LED POV displays and there’s always the option of going full electric.

11 thoughts on “Beamboarder Lets You Skate At Night; Won’t Blind Oncoming Traffic

  1. Looks cool, however, using the magnet and MU metal clamp to also heatsink the led, is a BAD idea. Unless you keep going at speed all the time, no airflow will cool that, and it will get hot, thus, decreasing magnet strenght, so it might detach out of the longboard
    Worst case is where he uses two small magnets directly as heatsinks…

      1. I’m sorry, but LEDs can most definitly get hotter than 80C depending on heatsinking, I have used that one and it has gotten much hotter, but you must keep in mind I was running 20 of them at 1A each. Leds output heat, not temeprature.

  2. i must have missed something? how does this not blind traffic? it doesn’t appear to have any beam control at all. sure if you’re next to the board, the board blocks teh light from your eye’s, but there’s nothing that prevents the light from blinding people 5+ feet away…

    1. Under bumper fog lamps, when correctly installed, work on exactly the same principle. Don’t ask me why, I’ve driven around them enough though. Problems come in when some dumbass redirects them to “match” their headlamps or drives around on a white surface (snow) with them.

      I would question their use on a board though. Being repositional makes it too easy to misalign them blinding oncoming traffic. But how bad would it be compared to the stupid asshole who drives with their highs on all the time or installs overhead lamps?

    2. I used the inner ring of an old skateboard bearing as optic. Put some space blanket into the inner ring to increase the reflection. From my experience you will not blind other road user because they cannot look directly into the light source. That is why the light should point on the road in front of you and not directly straight forward. The video is under construction. Filming at night can be really difficult :).

  3. There is one mistake in the description. You will need a NiMH instead of the lithium ion battery. The voltage of the lithium ion 9V block battery I have tried will not get higher than 8.5 V. That’s not enough for this Cree LED.

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