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.