As electric skateboards kits and components become more commonly available, you really need to do something different to make your custom board stand out. [Emiel] [The Practical Engineer] has managed to do this by building a half-track skateboard. (Video, embedded below.)
Except for the front trucks, fasteners and bearings, all the mechanical components on the board were custom-made. The sturdy rear chassis and the track sections were machined from aluminum plate, and the wheels and track linkages were machined from POM/Delrin. The large carbon fiber deck and the polyurethane pads on the tracks were custom molded, which [Emiel] covered in detail in separate videos, also below. Two beefy brushless motors drive the tracks and are powered by LiPos in enclosed in the sheet metal electronics box. The final product looks very well-built and refined, especially considering most of the work happened in a tiny 2 m x 3 m workshop.
It looks like the board handles gravel paths well, but we would really like to see how it performs on soft surfaces like sand, where even off-road skateboards can struggle. It struggled a bit with low RPM torque, so a slight gearing change is in this board’s future.
Everything is cooler with tank tracks. If you’re willing to live with plastic tracks, 3D printing is a viable option, as demonstrated by [rctestflight]’s tracked rover and [Ivan Miranda]’s tank skateboard.
The half track lives!
That is the butchest thing I have ever seen.
shut ur ass up
Didn’t work out so well for the hamster in Madagascar.
(The Grand Tour)
As somebody from the same country, i just cant figure out a reason to do this? we have no hills, hardly any ‘raw’ nature (the parks, ‘forests’ etc we have are all manmade, perfectly flat and smooth with predefined paths etc) and in general this just seems like a bad idea for a skateboard?
And what are you going to do with only half of the board having tank tracks? and (with all due respect) tank tracks that dont flex or have suspension? and are not wide enough to offer any benefits? near the end of the video you see him trying to ride the basic grass and you can just hear the thing lock up?
Dont get me wrong, im not hating, im just legit VERY confused, why would you do this other then for social media attention? we dont have any landscape to justify this sort of thing and its subpar to a board with 4 beefy offroad wheels in every possible way?…
Probably doing it for the same reason as most other posts here, because he can. More often than not for me, I make things because I can, not for some specific need. Who else has a half track skateboard? It’s awesome
“i just cant figure out a reason to do this?”
Because tank tracks are cool!
B^)
A tank track snowboard. That would be cool.