Creating an Overpowered Battery Pack and Off-road tires for an electric longboard! (Experiment)

Electric Longboard Experiment: 3D Printing Off-Road Tires and a Boost Converter Battery Pack

Hi there, as you might know almost one year ago I created this simple yet powerful electric longboard. During the video I demonstrated that it drives without any problems and while doing so it reached a speed of 30km/h and achieved a range of around 7km. So all in all this electric longboard is not bad, not bad at all but that does not mean that you cannot improve it.

For example the wheels of the board are made up of pretty stiff plastic which is also rather smooth. The consequence is that the wheels do not offer lots of springiness against bumpy roads and they also do not feature lots of grip for off-road tours. Another example is the rather low capacity battery pack with 108Wh that can power the board with me on top for only around 7km.

A solution to the latter problem could be those 4 big lithium iron phosphate cells that I originally ordered for my garage Powerwall project but never used. Those could theoretically power the longboard for a distance of whopping 80km. A solution for the wheel problem could be this flexible TPU filament whose shore hardness is similar to that of rubber tires.

So in this video let’s find out whether I can use 3D printed off-road tires and whether I can use my lithium iron phosphate batteries as a longboard battery pack. Let’s get started!

This video is sponsored by [Insert Sponsor Here].

I even wired it up in a pretty heavy duty way by using thick wire, wire ferrules and cable lugs but just as I was getting closest to finishing the wiring I realized something. Such a boost converter cannot feed current back to the battery when the regenerative breaking function of the longboard is being used which means I would have to disable it.

But by doing that I obviously have no way of breaking which is something I did not want to risk so I pretty much abandoned the plan of boosting the voltage. Nevertheless we can still test the battery pack for which I firstly covered it in strips of duct tape for stability and insulation reasons and then I shoved it into my backpack before heading out for a proper test, here is what happened.

So sadly my battery pack didn’t work for this application but if you want to do something similar crazy then I would recommend getting 8 smaller still huge battery cells in order to increase the voltage in a safe way. But anyway I hope you still enjoyed watching my electric longboard experiment and learned something new.

If so don’t forget to like, share, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Stay creative and I will see you next time.