Skate Mac 1st Test

Just a quick vid to show the skater in action, but it was dusk so its hard to see anything on the phone camera. Time for some serious downhill practice and big speed before we film some more tests in the daytime and we're scoping out the local skateparks to find a suitable ramp to get some air on the old mirror-door, maybe do a tabletop or something who knows.

Skate Mac Redesign

The iBoard looked the part, but it was a nightmare to ride. I'm no skater, so I put the trucks on to maximize the wheelbase and an informed friend told me I had them on back to front. I'd never have though it would make a difference, but you had to tilt opposite ways to steer. Leaning away from the corner means you just fly off, not that this would matter as the wheelbase was still too short to get any speed up without toppling forward or back anyway.

The real problem, however, was the severe lean to one side. It turns out that the steel-case isn't central to the overall Mac. The plastic sticks out half an inch on oneside for the door mechanism, but naturally when I made the holes for the trucks I measured dead-centre to the metal-case so even if you could get rolling for a moment you just veered to the left. In other words the thing plain didn't work.

To rectify things we had to measure to the centre of the entire case and move the trucks over. They also needed to be mounted the other way round, but this meant the wheels would be even closer together. They were already at the edges of the steel-case, so we were forced to have the trucks overhang at each end and put the four bolts less than an inch apart, making it not the strongest of designs, so we threw in a couple of strips of 5-ply wood on the inside of the caseand bolted the trucks through them. This should take a bit of stress off the case-bottom and may even soften the ride up a bit.

All in all the wheelbase in 2" longer and its a completely different animal to ride now. Much easier to ride straight, no jerky turning and you can steer now, although the centre of gravity is still so high that it'll take a bit of practice to not need a bit of feet down correction, so I'll post some test vids soon.

iBoard / Skat-E-Mac

Old 'Project Buran' Super-Macbike Pics

After a disasterous firstattempt at building a Pro-Stock skate Mac from the case of our trusty late 90's G4 'Sawtooth' Powermac we decided to step-up our efforts and debut the MOTO G4 series! This involved completely gutting the case and building it onto a mini-motorbike frame. We named the project 'Buran' after a space-shuttle the Russians spent billions constructing, but ran out of money before it ever flew. (NB: The bike has ridden once though so maybe 'Spruce Goose' would have been better.)

The pics below catalogue the ongoing conversion process of this astonishing machine from retro-Snapple to superbike.

This was the original concept on which we based the Mac-Moto - bicycle steering and the engine inside the Mac case. Turned out we were using an air-cooled engine so we ended up mounting the engine just in front of the case even though it would have fit inside. I would not advise fitting the engine completely inside the case unless you have a good duct system or a water-cooled motor.

First we removed all the plastic panels and cut apart the Mac case to fit the bike frame. This involved stripping everything inside the case, including the metal drive-tray and the Airport, down to a bare metal box. To make the hinged side-panel lift up instead of down we had to turn the case upside-down to fit onto the bike. This makes the plastic panel-fit not exact, but close enough to screw back on. Rather than have the back of the Mac-case on display at the back of the bike, with all it's sockets and fan holes, we also decided to turn the Mac round so that the smooth case-front would be on show.

Welcome!

Welcome to the MOTO G4 blog covering our Apple-Mac based motorbikes and skatesports!

This blog is part of ScoobyLab.co.cc - Impreza knowledge-base and '98 WRX STi project car blog. http://scoobylab.co.cc