For some of you HaD readers it’s winter and heading up to a mountain to go snowboarding is quite convenient. Unfortunately, for the boarder-holics, the off-season comes too quickly and lasts far to long. [jfaneumann] is a snowboarder and wanted to get that same carvey feeling during the summer months so he made a DIY skateboard that rides like a snowboard.
[jfaneumann] didn’t come up with the design, it’s modeled after a commercially available product called the Freebord which is basically an oversize skate deck with extra-wide trucks and integrated pivoting wheels (think casters) in the center of the deck. The pivoting wheels stand a little bit proud of the other 4 wheels which makes the board only ride on the pivoting wheels and two of the remaining wheels at a time. This setup allows the rider to carve, slide and spin down the street like a snowboarder would. This looks like fun to ride but at a cost of about $250 for a Freebord, it’s not cheap.
The project started with a home-made deck simply cut from plywood. To get that extra wide stance standard skateboard trucks were modified. Long coupling nuts were screwed onto the truck axles and epoxied into place. On a normal skateboard the wheel rides on an axle that is part of the truck. Since the axles were covered up by the coupling nuts, bolts were used to secure the wheels to the now much wider trucks.
The pivoting wheels for the Freebord look like standard casters so that’s what [jfaneumann] used for his board. He did remove the rubber wheels and replace them with inline skate wheels with real bearings. Wood shims space the casters away from the deck to put them at the right height compared to the other 4 skate wheels.
In the end, [jfaneumann] got the summer riding experience he desired without spending a boatload of cash.
I don’t know if they’re still in production, but there used to be a thing called a “flowboard” which was a kind of skateboard where each truck was an arc of 5-7 wheels, so it handled more like a snowboard and you could “carve” at pretty serious lean angles. They weren’t exactly cheap either though.
i’ve still seen those recently in a toys store in france, and rode one (a lot bigger and expensive : around 300€ ) in the netherlands, this definetly does not ride the same way, still very awesome, but probably a lot heavier.
I’m going to try this one out . great build!
Just learn power sliding! Same thing without extra wheels just some extra boardskills. Skaters were doing this since the 80s. You don’t need 2 extra wheels to powerslide. And also even though this looks nice in the video your wearing down wheels fast and get flatspots when sliding a lot like this… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCmGj9VbYE4
Walter, downhill/long boarding is a bit different than free-riding… picture digging into a power-slide with some caster wheels to pivot on, I can feel the adrenaline just thinking about it.
There is no power slide Freebording. And if thats all you can do you suck. Also give your self a chance to live and get a real Freebord at Freebord.com
Don’t be a hater Bob…
Nice to see a build on HackADay that gets you out and being active
Go away Freebord shill
Freebord Mfg. here, we saw this post the first day it came out and thought it was awesome. Our product was born from a DIY/Hacking mindset, so we have absolutely no quarrels with you guys hacking our product. Moreover, the entire company is 4 dudes/riders that just love the ride. So in other words, we don’t condone what Bob is saying, we like you guys.
Best,
Freebord
@freebord your comment just renewed my hope in humanity. I am a Betty from Victoria BC Canada and I was originally looking for ways to hack my deck for snow so I could skate today. I’m glad I found this…..and it’s official #nofunbob why do you have to be a negative Nancy?
Don’t ripsticks work the same way? Except for the fact that they don’t have 4 more wheels.
I wonder how stable the ride is. Freebords use a spring biased caster that spins 360 but tends to orient itself in both the forward and reverse position for better control.