Belt drive electric skateboards are great—except when they’re not!
With belt drive, you can use a huge variety of aftermarket wheels, and fine-tune the performance of your board with different-sized pulleys.
Even today, belt drive is the most versatile drivetrain for electric skateboards.
So what’s the problem?
Well there are multiple problems that make belt drive really annoying to use. And because of those annoyances, some people prefer gear drive. Or even hub motors!
In this video, I’ll explain the problems and show you how every one of them is resolved with the Parsec Aero’s drivetrain, the EPIC-D.
Problem No. 1: Resistance
Just about every electric skateboard brand says that their boards can be pushed like a regular skateboard, which is sort of true.
What they don’t tell you is that with the vast majority of boards, you’ll get tired from pushing really quickly, especially if the board uses belt drive with high belt tension—meaning the belt is tight and has more resistance.
So why not just loosen up the belt tension? Because…
Problem No. 2: Belt Skipping
If the belt is too loose, and you either accelerate hard or brake hard, the teeth on the belts and gears are going to grind. And when that happens, there’s very little power being transferred, not to mention your belts are getting worn out.
Electric skateboards today are so powerful that you can’t just loosen up the belt tension the way you did 5 years ago. It’s easier, and arguably safer, to just run your belts a little bit tight.
You can of course still try to find that perfect balance between too loose and too tight, but that has its own problem.
Problem No. 3: Difficult Adjustment
The difference between a belt tension that’s too tight and too loose is like a millimeter. If you’ve ever tried to optimize your belt tension before, you know what I’m talking about. It’s so difficult to get it right, especially on powerful boards.
And after you do one side, you still have to do the other side and try to make them even.
And then you gotta do a test ride to see if the belt skips.
It’s so tedious that I think most people don’t even bother with optimizing the belt tension anymore. It’s much easier to just make the belts tight.
But if you make them tight, you have more resistance, and also another problem.
Problem No. 4: Belts Break
When your belts are tight, they get worn out more quickly, and small pieces of debris are more likely to get stuck in the system and damage the belt and the pulley.
Every once in a while, you see someone online say that they have to replace their belt multiple times per month, which is crazy!
And finally…
Problem No. 5: Replacement Annoying
In most cases, replacing a belt is not that hard, but things don’t always go the way you expect. Sometimes the pulley doesn’t want to come out. Sometimes you forget your skate tool. And sometimes you have to re-adjust the belt tension.
Belt replacement is just not something that you want to deal with, especially not on a regular basis.
The Solution
Now imagine a drivetrain with all the benefits of belt drive and none of the problems I just mentioned.
That drivetrain is the one on the Parsec Aero.
It’s the Efficient Precision Idler-Controlled Drivetrain. The EPIC Drivetrain. Or EPIC-D.
As the name suggests, the EPIC Drive has an idler pulley.
The idler forces more belt to be in contact with the motor gear so you have lower belt tension without the belt skipping.
The loose belt tension puts less stress on the belt—less tooth wear, less friction, less heat—so you get much longer belt life.
The low resistance, combined with Aero’s double drop deck, allow you to truly push the board for miles like a regular longboard.
And finally, the low tension makes belt replacement really easy. You don’t even need any tools.
Taking off the belts and putting them back on is so easy that there’s actually another benefit.
When you feel like riding without any drivetrain resistance at all, just take off the belts. Your board now rides like a regular longboard. And when you don’t want to push anymore, put the belts back on. No tools necessary.
One more thing…
So far, the idler alone has solved 4 out of the 5 problems. But what about adjusting belt tension?
With the EPIC Drive, you don’t ever have to adjust belt tension. You can if you want, but you don’t have to, because there are already multiple preset tension configurations you can choose from.
On each motor mount, three different positions are available for the idler, and four positions for the motor.
By putting the idler and motor in different positions, you can set different levels of belt tension for different size belts.
So instead of trying to find that perfect motor placement between too loose and too tight and then repeating the process for the other side, you can just use one of the presets.
You don’t have to figure out which configuration goes with which belts because I’ve already done that for you. It’s all in the user manual.