Long Board Takes A Brake

Finally, a brake for your long board

Long boards are awesome. They feel like your surfing on concrete — amazing for hilly areas where you can coast around forever. The weird thing is, none of them come with brakes standard… Even though when you’re going down a hill you can easily hit 30-40mph! [Marius] decided to fix this, so he built his own 3D printed brake system for his Onda long board.

He designed the system in 3Ds Max and 3D printed the parts in PLA using his Printrbot Metal Simple (check out our review here). It uses an off the shelf bicycle brake pad, and brake cable as well as a few elastic bands. Currently only one wheel brakes, but it seems to be enough to slow you down — though he might mirror the system on the other side to obtain more braking power.

The long board he’s using does have slightly larger wheels than normal, but the system could be modified to use on a more standard sized long board.  Stick around after the break to see it in action.

It’s an ongoing project, so don’t forget to follow it and maybe give it a skull to see it continue to evolve!

20 thoughts on “Long Board Takes A Brake

    1. Also braking causes balancing problems (you need to lean backwards). For example braking efficiently on roller skates means you have to push yourself real hard backwards.

      Instead of learning riding safely, this guy builds a brake. I think it’s the wrong direction..

      1. In my experience leaning backwards is the right thing to do when you brake otherwise the momentum difference between you and the board will trow you forward. Imagine what would happened if I would have put the braking lever in the front.
        Actually braking this way i is quite stable and I haven’t experience any balancing issues.

    2. This is similar to the Rollerblade (inline skate) braking problem – it can be done, but you have to manage both balance and reaction forces properly or you’re going to wind up in a heap. For the skates, the heel brakes are built so that you have to squat a bit, pulling the brake foot backwards backwards to engage them (and they’re pretty ineffective which means that your feet aren’t carried out from under you). With the longboard, there’s going to be a steep (and possibly bloody) learning curve since there’s no direct linkage between the rider’s position and the brakes.

      1. oxelo made some rollers with another brake system, I have some and they are quite efficient (but I don’t understand why…) and easy to use: you just move your feet forward (and lean backward, while putting more weight on the breaking wheel), it unlocks the break and push a metal wheel between the two last ones. Also it does not causes too much wear. The problem with oxelo are the cheap materials…
        http://roller.oxelo.com/en/produit/roller-diabolo-homme/

        To break with a skateboard, I tried to use the road instead of the wheels, with just a bit of rope and a wooden lever under the board, it is much easier to make and use, but, as I used bare wood, it wasn’t very efficient (with a piece of tire on it and some less rigid materials, it could be). It was a long time ago, one of the first things I made.

  1. It should at least be a 2 or 4 wheel ABS system, maybe good enough to just do a small eddy current brake by flopping a horseshoe magnet around a disk… good application for an arduino or the like.

    1. or a ring of neodymium magnets and a variable distance aluminum plate. no electronics, if the wheel slides the eddy current drag drops off and the wheel spins up again.

      1. This reply sums up the HaD mindset nicely. “It’s always been bad so let’s make fun of the people who point it out.” Pardon me for expecting a little more from the people who write for a living.

        1. “For a living”? LOLapalooza. What fantasy world do you live in where bloggers on a site this small and niched out “write for a living”?

          James is a mechanical engineer, working as a mechanical engineer, mechanically engineering stuff. He writes perhaps a half-dozen articles a week for Hackaday, for which I doubt he breaks minimum wage, all included. Jeez people, almost everyone who “works” at Hackaday is no different than anyone who reads Hackaday, except that when the “we’re hiring” article surfaces twice a year they say “Meh, I could probably do that.”

          I think even the guy who lives in India doesn’t write for Hackaday “for a living”.

          There’s no need to be polarizing. Writers who practically volunteer to write the content you enjoy for free, who are not trained writers, make literary mistakes. Editors catch about 1/2 – 2/3 of those mistakes. Ideally it wouldn’t happen, it’s not an excuse for anyone to slack off, but, for christsakes it’s also not reasonable to expect perfection from a blog staffed by rushed part-timers earning a couple extra bucks a week for their shops.

  2. easy fix, take two brakes from bikes, (maybe just a pair of front breaks) then build an arm over the back wheels a one shoe stopping set up looks risky. you’ll need the two breaks to close at the same time but it would be tons smother, good to start with the back wheels, also that little bit of metal pointed at the riders heals isn’t comforting.

  3. While I’d rather see people learn to properly footbrake and shutdown slide, it would give me peace of mind to know that there’s a solution out there for those that refuse to do so, since tackling any kind of hill without learning how to brake first is pretty dangerous. I’ve watched a lot of my friends eat pavement because they didn’t know how to cut their speed effectively.

    That said, this seems like an effective way to flatspot one of your wheels if you’re not careful.

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