Skateboarding in the UK

The biggest downside of commuting on an electric longboard in the UK is the rain and resulting puddles. My board manufacturer not only states that it is dangerous to skate in the rain but also that the electronics are at risk of being damaged.

Typically, I wake up and look out of the window to see if the roads are wet and if they are I forget about any idea of travelling on my long-board.  However, I've been caught out a couple of times  travelling to work on my board. For those occasions there hadn't been any rain on the day but it had been raining in the very early hours of the morning. The streets from my house would look pretty dry.  I would then elect to travel on my trusty long-board and  beeline to the park which forms the majority of my long-board commute to the train station.  But upon entering the park I would discover the path had not dried off due to the wind shield from the numerous surrounding trees. The result: when I got  to the train station, my trousers from ankle to knees would be covered in brown speckled mud. Goodness knows what my fellow passengers would have been thinking.

As a result my board has mostly been hibernating because of the  weather this winter. Instead of road surfing I am forced to surf on the internet to get my long-board fix. As such, a recent discovery for me is that you can get mud guards for skateboards!

The supplier/manufacturer called Wheelshields (no longer online) is an American company and you can buy them for under 100USD (around £80 pounds at the time of writing). Interestingly, the shields are mounted on the outside of the wheel using the wheel nut to secure them.
The shields are reported as definitely working with boards that have wheels of 76 mm in diameter and under. But also wheels as large as 80 mm can also be accommodated depending on the board.

The manufacturer reports additional advantages of using their wheel shields other than just for splash protection. This includes eliminating wheel bite and increasing bearing life. A review of the wheel sheilds by 14Degrees (no longer online)  claims these are a positive game changer.

Alas, the manufacturer will not get my immediate request for purchase as my wheels are 90mm in diameter. I have sent them an email to enquire if they make a solution for bigger wheels. In the mean time it's given me an idea to try and make my own guards. Watch this space :)

Comparing top speeds (in a fair way)

Thinking about electric skateboard manufacturers and their claims for maximum speed it seems that unlike the car industry there is no standard used for measuring speed. How do we know what conditions the skate-board manufacturers are using to determine top speed? There can be any number of factors affecting top speed:- smoothness of ground, board weight, tyre hardness etc. Some manufacturers are reporting a top speed for a given tested weight of the rider but the weights differ across manufacture so you can't make a useful/fair comparison.

What is needed is an industry standard dynamometer for electric skateboards. Ideally this would be done by a  (certified) test house, and electric board manufactures would send in their boards there for testing.

Interestingly, there is a chap on the Facebook electric board Users who has very recently shown his dynamo-meter for electric skateboards (pictures below). Lets hope something like this can be adopted into the electric skateboard industry.

Testing for speed

Hooray at last! Due to a sunny period this afternoon I was able to steal some time to test my electric long-board top speed.

Readers of  my recent posts will know  that I have completed the re-purposing and fitting of a bike computer in order to measure distance covered and speed of my electric board. I wanted a permanent device mounted onto my board so it behaved like an odometer in a car. If I ever sold the board there would be a permanent log of the miles covered. But also the intention is that  I can use the real time  speed and distance display to help assess how much more distance I have available before the battery goes flat.

Previously, when initially measuring the board speed through the bike computer I had measured a top speed on the day of 11mph. I have always been curious about how accurate this was, given that the claim from Volo-E for this board is a top speed of 14mph. In the back of my mind I was questioning if  I had calibrated the bike computer correctly and/or if might my weight (85 kg) was significant enough to reduce the total max speed.

The bike computer counts the number of times the wheel rotates by counting the presence of a magnet each time it passes the sensor  in a period of time. I wanted to see if the speed could be measured in an alternative way to verify the bike computer results.

Well today I downloaded the first free iOS app I found  (called WalkFree) to measure my top speed. This app uses GPS to give a much more accurate result then counting wheel rotations. By sampling the GPS positions and taking two of the GPS locations,  the app calculates the distance covered. As with the bike computer, the speed is calculated by distance covered by the time taken (S = d /t).

Well that app recorded a top speed of 11.14 mph! I wasn't able to do exhaustive testing as there were cars interrupting my path. But the good news is both methods report the near same results and it is confirmed that my re-purposed bike computer is doing its job. The bad news is that my electric long-board is slower than I thought :(

Dang, I had a high suspicion that  the only other guy I have seen electric skateboarding in my city had a better performing board than me.....



Don't believe that Vert Drop reading. That remained the same throughout the testing.

Man! When is it going to stop raining!

Have been waiting a long while now in order to test the bike computer with my long-board. But so far only rain :(  Hence the following little experiment (for curiosity):