just came back from my first nightly 20km maidens ride on the vanguard. cant even say what makes me more happy - the great carving and playing with the really perfect flex, the strong SK6374 168KV with the 16/36T gearing or that I ran the board in FOC mode and it felt just awesome!
lets start with the ride itself: the vanguard is just a trampoline really, you push it out when you carve and it will just hit you back with your own energy when you come out of the turn. feels really cool, certainly less precise but very lively and fun. I knew flexy boards from pushing and pumping, but I still wasnt sure how it would feel at 30-40kph. well, now I know: it feels great and its a pretty stable ride too. 42" helps with going fast I guess, even though Im using 50° caliber IIs.
a nice sideeffect of the enormous flex: the board just eats up ANY pavement - it felt like I was in one of those old american movie cars with the supersoft suspension, just flexing away over everything and if that wasnt enough, Im still riding on my beloved 90mm 75A abecs. I currently lent the drive gear from my tesseract, since noone has a 15mm drive gear axcept for alienpowersystem and they are on holidays. might swap to my kegels tomorrow because I still have an ADS 15mm pulley for those!
on the SK3 6374 168KV motor: the KV is perfect for my kind of cruising - in combination with 16/36T gearing and 90mm wheels it should in theory reach 45kph, in praxis it felt less (didnt have gps with me), but I was also on my new battery which was yet uncharged at 36V and and Im running FOC which is known to lack some top end. the only thing I didnt like about the motor are the stiff wires - will eventually replace them with silicone wires someday, because I doubt these wires will last forever. still, for the money you cant really complain - apart from the wires I wouldnt be able to tell a difference to my r-specc from a finish, balance and sound POV. its hard to compare the torque of rspecc 6355 and 6374 sk directly, since rspec is still running bldc and SK3 is running in FOC mode. the 6374 definitely had a lot of grunt and headed straight to topspeed without hesitating ... but it was also extremely smooth in foc mode. think in bldc it would feel a lot stronger compared to my small 6355 rspec!
FOC mode: omg, finally I dont feel like waking up the whole neighborhood when I cruise through our streets at nights. its much smoother than BLDC and the sound is just amazing. its extremely silent at low speed and still quite a bit more silent also at max speed. best thing is, that it really worked stable for me for the whole 20km tour. next thing Ill do is also change my tesseract to FOC. it gives the board a whole new level of stealth. in combination with the very natural feeling vanguard and barely any motorsound, the longboard experience is much closer to a naked board right now. really love it
I kinda screwed up with the enclosure dimension. initially I planned to have room for 2 vescs, then midway I decided to go with just one and also made just one phase wire channel. in the end that was the perfectly right thing to do, as it turns out that the enclosure has only room for one vesc really.
I added torqueboards 120A switch to the build - just need to add a proper switch to the enclosure - the original stainless steel switch is simply too large of a diameter for the really slim enclosure. note how I just soldered everything directly and made the shortest possible connections to help the vesc FOC mode.
sk6374 and enertion motor mount - for calibers its the best mount really in my opinion.
whole board with limping tesseract in background, missing its drive wheel + gear . 8) it got vicious grip tape for extreme carving and really looks super slim - the enclosures are barely visible really, very stealthy looks!