So I’m showing off the skateboard at the Microsoft PDC conference at the end of this month in the lounge area.  I’ll also be doing a session about Coding4Fun with Scott Hanselman, Dan Fernandez, and Brian PeekI really haven’t worked too much on it after Maker Faire due to work and it does have a few issues still.  The chain issue is the biggest and will be solved … now.

After 2 days worth of work and countless hours grinding, testing, refitting, and more grinding, I think I have a solution to my chain issue.

My father asked me to take some shots of the gearbox so we may figure out a possible solution.  After having countless hours of both of us saying our ideas were less than elegant (I think the nicest term used stupid).  The biggest barrier was room to work with.  The chain with the worst effect was also the one with no room.  It has strengthening brackets on the top and bottom, is mounted directly under the frame strengthen bracket.  I think we came up with a happy, while a tad ghetto, solution. 

We drilled a hole, tapped it, and shoved a bolt in it.  Seriously, we did.  This provided enough force against the chain where now it moves about 1/16th of an inch where before it was over a 1/4 of an inch.

We also had to grind down the bolts to so not to interfere with the chain.  Each gearbox acted differently so each bolt was altered differently too.

The other issue I ran into was I shattered my Phidget LCD screen bringing it up to my parent’s house SO I bought a replacement and mounted it like an over protective parent.  I was lucky mounting it too since I forgot to test the orientation before putting it on.