Have you guys seen the price of gas
lately? I mean, at this point, it's
a stupid question. Of course you have. And I'm sure many of you are feeling
the pinch of higher gas prices. No matter what
vehicle it is that you drive. But I drive a big, massive truck
that is especially bad on gas. But here's the thing. I don't actually need to drive this truck
most of the time. I mean, sure, when I'm hauling materials
and going on long road trips, it's really hard to beat. But what about my most common commute
going from my home to the shop? It's about ten and a half kilometers away. What if I could do that trip with an electric vehicle
that was a lot cheaper to run? One that I built myself? In order to call this project a success
and to have it replace my truck, I needed to satisfy
two main criteria was range and speed. And in order to properly evaluate
speed, first, I needed a baseline. So I grabbed my keys, a stopwatch and had
headed from my place over to the shop. So here we are at the shop. That trip door to door
took 26 minutes and 35 seconds. So that is our time to be. Can we do it? I don't know. But there's only one way to find out.
So let's get started. Let's build. Step number one on
this build is going to be building the deck on the board
and just like in my previous video, I'm going to be using a DIY longboard kit
from my friends over at Warrior Rocket. Their DIY skateboard and longboard kits
make making your own board ridiculously easy. And there are a local Toronto based company,
so I always enjoy working with them. But, you know, if I have one complaint
about Raw Rocket, it's that they almost make it too easy
to make your own skateboard. So for this build, I decided to make
things a little trickier for myself. You see, normally you would laminate the different layers
of your skateboard using this stuff woodland. But I've decided to use epoxy instead. Specifically, eco parks is Firefox 36,
which is a laminating epoxy, although it's not really meant
for would use. You see, this stuff
is more of an industrial product. Normally I would use this for laminating
things like carbon fiber and fiberglass. However, I did have a conversation with
a member of the R&D team over at Eco Poxy and they told me they didn't see
any reason why I couldn't use it for wood. They just didn't really guarantee
that it would work either. So why use epoxy to make a skateboard
deck? Well, it all comes down to durability. An epoxy board is going to be a lot
stronger and a lot more resistant water. Unfortunately, that durability comes
at the cost of a more complicated lamination process. So complicated, in fact,
that I'm actually going to break out the details of this step
as a separate video. The Cliff Notes are that you only get like
30 minutes or so of working time and you need to cover
both sides of each layer. It was definitely a crunch
to get it all done within that time frame, but thankfully I made it
and then it was time to do some vacuum for my shot
that got most of the air out. But for that last little bit,
there is no real substitute for some good old fashioned
manual pumping technologies. Now there's something that I'm
a little worried about at this. So a lot of you
probably already know this. But as epoxy cures, it's an exothermic
reaction, meaning that it generates heat. Now, one thing
eco epoxy told me to watch out for is along the sides
where there's all the squeeze out. This make it so hot
that it melts through the bag. I can already feel that there's quite a bit of heat coming
through the midsection of the board. The sides are actually too bad. So we're just going to have to kind of
watch this and see a little thing that you might want to watch out for,
which is that this webbing here that allows the air
to escape from bag also sucked up some of the excess squeeze out epoxy
and then into the little valve up here. So at the very least,
this valve is going to be toast after this project
and potentially even this whole bag. And if that wasn't bad enough,
some of the epoxy also got sucked up onto the top of my rocket lampshade here,
which will potentially discolor it. So if you're doing this at home, one thing
you might consider doing is putting some sort of protective film on your last layer
so that you don't get any epoxy on it. And then we just wait and see
if this thing melts down. So it's been a couple hours at this point. Most of the heat is gone from the core
and the outside edges are starting to get really hard. So I think our epoxy is most of the way
set at this point. I think we can rule out the bag melting. However, we are going to leave it
overnight to continue curing because you don't get full care
on this epoxy until 72 hours. While we wait for that to happen. We're going to get started on assembling some of the electronic
skateboard components for this build. I honestly went a little bit overboard. I opted for a set of dual
electric Edward Motors that are capable of putting a downright
ridiculous 3500 watts of power each. This should provide me with a nice balance
between top speed hill climbing
ability and face melting acceleration. And then because I've never been
one for the road. Well traveled, I added these pneumatic
all-terrain wheels and tires so that I can go
stupid fast over whatever terrain I want. Once I was done
setting up the front and rear axles, I left for the night and gave the epoxy
some much needed time to cure. All right. It's been a little bit more than 24 hours. This is all feeling nice and cold. So I think we can start our D
molding process or d bag and process, whatever you want to call it. Let's just let's see how did. So this is proving to be a little bit
more difficult than I thought it would be. I mean, I'll put this in the minus
category for working with Toxie. It's definitely a lot harder
to get out of the bag than just normal wood glue,
but not long enough to reach down there most of the way free. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There we go. Victory. It took me 15 minutes. Who so? Came off of the mold pretty easily. So you can just get rid of that. But now I'm worried about this. So I want to get it off of there
without doing damage. But I don't know how I can do that. So I think I'm just going to try and grip
it, rip it. Thankfully, the bottom of my board is a sheet of rocket lamb
and this stuff is crazy durable. So my grip and rip technique
didn't do any damage and I was able to get pretty aggressive
while chipping off the rest of the baked on epoxy. Seriously, it didn't even market. That is looking a lot better. Still not perfect mind you,
but it's good enough now to the point where we can cut it down
to a more reasonable size and we can worry about finishing
the bottom of it and making it look nice. Little later in the process,
I'm pretty sure that legally I'm compelled to tell you that a fan saw is the best way
to cut out a skateboard. Jack But I don't have one of those,
so we're just going to muddle our way through it
with these thoughts that I do have. I was actually really excited
for this stuff because it gave me my first good, clean look at a cross-section
of the epoxy laminated wood. So right off the bat,
I can already tell based on these offcuts that it's going to be quite a bit stiffer
than your average board, which I think from
my application is going to be great. However,
if I was going to make like a street jack or just a regular longboard
and do it with epoxy, I might think about removing a couple layers, maybe doing it with six layers
as opposed to seven or eight, just to preserve
a little bit of flexibility while still getting
the same amount of durability. This next step is a little bit weird,
but just try to stay with me. I really like the shape of the last sport
I made, but it was a little bit too small for me, so I took that exact
same template, cut it up into quarters, and then laid it on top of my new deck,
effectively giving me the same shape. But longer and wider, which is perfect
for my long and lanky body. Time to cut the template. I went and grabbed my new cordless jigsaw and let me just tell you guys,
if you've still got a corded jigsaw, go ahead and throw that thing in the trash
and go get yourself a cordless one. They are just so much more maneuverable. Without that stupid cord
getting in your way. And honestly, it's
just as powerful as my quarter. This next little bit is basically
identical to my last skateboard build, so we're going to power through it
pretty quickly. I use my belt sander to clean up my jigsaw cuts and then round out
all of the interior corners. And then I use my trim rider
to give the outside edge of the deck a nice comfortable to hold round over. From there it was time to start drilling
all the mounting points for the trucks. I just disassembled them
and use them as their own template. It's always a good idea to drill
these holes from the bottom of your deck. That way, if you accidentally happened
to drill at a slight angle, your holes will still be in the right
location, but those are out of the way. I then moved on
to the battery compartment, which apparently needs a lot of screws
to hold it in place. Lucky for me, though, I had this
foam gasket that made for a pretty great impromptu template. I just taped it down into position
and then drilled right through it. There we go. Now that we have all of the hardware holes
drilled, we can talk about how we're going to finish this thing
and fix the glossiness on the bottom. So hear me out on this one. I figured that since it was epoxy,
that got me into this mess, maybe a epoxy can get me out of this mess. Here's the nice thing about epoxy itself. Levels and blends really well. So I just decided to roll on
another full coat. Once it dries,
it'll look like a single consistent layer and it will give me a great weatherproof
finish. Nobody outside of you and me
will ever know that I screwed up earlier. I don't really care
too much about the top layer, since that's going to end up
getting covered with grip tape later. But on the bottom and outside edges,
I did take my time and I also used a heat gun
to pop any little bubbles. All right, well,
we wait for the epoxy to dry. We're going to do some electronics. Now we're going to talk about what
each one of these individual pieces is. But before we do that, I just wanted to give a quick shout out
to Mike Beard over at M boards. He helped me put together this whole kit,
and he's been really helpful throughout this whole process. So I will include some links
to his channel and store in the video description. This simple black plastic
box is the battery enclosure, but really it houses all the electronics which get secured in place
with some heavy duty, double sided tape. The biggest component is obviously
this monster battery capable of outputting 135
amps at 43.2 volts. This is what's going to give me the range
and power that I need to hopefully retire my truck. Next came the battery management system,
which handles all of the charging and making sure
that the battery doesn't self-immolated, which you know, is kind of important. This just plugged right in
and then I use some heat shrink tubing to add a little bit of protection
to all the connections. Then it was time to install the brain or the x. I chose the storm core 60 plus. This is responsible for receiving inputs from me
and then putting power to the motors. The nice thing about this one
is that it's fully programable and runs on open source software which as a PC
and Android user is kind of my jam. Oh, and how could I almost
forget this cute little remote module that lets my handheld controller
communicate directly with the S? As a final step,
I plug the motor leads into the easy heat, shrink those connectors to
and then I was ready to test something. Okay. I have hooked up the rear axle
with the motors to it. I've connected my computer to the VCR
in here and uploaded the latest firmware. So now it's time to do a test
spin of the motors for the first time. This should detect how big the motors are and how much
they're capable of outputting. So this is the first time they will spin. Theoretically, if I hit this button here. Oh, I hear noise going so scary. Oh, my God. This thing is going to absolutely rip. So for the most part,
this was all plug and play. However, there was one little thing
that I got caught up on that I actually got Mike from Edwards
to help me out with that. I think I should know for you guys. So this connector right here is the one that connects the receiver
from the remote to the EMC. And what I had to do was remove
this green wire and this orange wire and swap them in order to make them
communicate with each other properly. All right. Now that we got all of that sorted out,
I think we are ready to finally assemble this thing
and then maybe take it for testing. And, you know, when I say assemble,
what I really mean to say is install the grip tape. I kind of forgot that I had to do that
before installing all the other components. On a positive note,
since the last time I did this, I've actually learned a new trick. You can use a little tiny off
cut of your grip tape to burnish the outside
edge of your board. This makes it really clear
where the edges and makes cutting off all the excess grip tape a lot easier. After that was done,
then it was time to assemble everything. I started with the front trucks
and included these half inch riser pads, which should give me some additional clearance
so that my tires don't rub like a stanced out honda civic
