[Tallaustin] worked at Stratasys as an intern this past summer. They let him know that he was welcome to use their fancy industrial printers as much as he’d like. Not to waste such an opportunity he promptly got to work and designed an electric longboard, printable for a mere $8,000.
[Tallaustin] is presumably tall, and confided to Reddit that he weighs in at 210 lbs. For those of us who have had the pleasure of designing for FDM 3D printing, we know that getting a skateboard one can actually skate on without it delaminating somewhere unexpected is pretty difficult if you weigh 80 lbs, 200+ is another category entirely. So it’s not surprising that his first version shattered within in moments of testing.
So, he went back to the drawing board. Since he had his pick of all of Stratasys’s most expensive and fine spools of plastic, he picked one of the expensivest and finest, Ultem 1010. Aside from adding a lot of ribbing and plastic, he also gave it a full rundown with some of SolidWorks’s simulation tools to see if there were any obvious weak points.
Six days of exceedingly expensive printing later, he had a working long board. The base holds some batteries, an ESC, and a 2.4 GHz transceiver. The back has a brushless motor that drives a pulley slotted into one of the wheels. The rest is standard skateboard hardware.
If you’d like to build it yourself he’s posted the design on Thingiverse. He was even nice enough to put together a version that’s printable on a plebeian printer, for a hundredth of the price.
Expensivest isn’t even a hacker or maker word. We’re here for hacks, not grammatical tomfoolery! :p
Well I get told a lot that I’m a hack, which is very kind of them to say considering how important it is that every single thing on this site fit within their narrow definition of that word. So I’m just hacking my writing:)
Maybe that’s a language hack.
Spendier is of course the correct term.
I see.. well I learn something every day whether I want to or not!
this seems like something a shopbot might be good at
This is something it sounds is cheaper to CNC out of delrin :-D
My local FabLab uses shopbots in a class they hold for something like 6th or 7th graders. They make skateboards (I think the deck only) each summer. I guess when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
http://fablabtulsa.org/2013/07/summer-camp-skateboard-build/
To give you an idea of how expensive SABIC Ultem 1010 is, just 250g of 1.75mm filament is $50 from 3dxtech.
Stratysis markup on their ultem 1010 is crazy. $600/kg if I remember correctly?
I have been told, that they sell ordinary ABS for €300,-/kg!
Let Fetty on the Braille Skateboarding youtube channel have a go on it. He breaks everything. :)
“First try!”
Definitely would be interesting to see – granted I think this would hold up pretty well in comparison to some of the boards!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCVhiuIx5ms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycy80LvCIyo
From 5 years ago. Printed in plaster then epoxy reinforced.
And in the real world…
TLDR: he printed the wooden bit, the $10 plywood part
Lol, I know right!
Haha, FDM everything. Good job though I guess. If I had a printer I would try printing tools like the ISS does. :)