What If You Made Skateboard Wheels Out Of Really Strong Magnets?

Neodymium is basically the strongest magnet you can get without your own metallurgical laboratory. Just one piece the size of a skateboard wheel could have 80 pounds of pulling force. That doesn't exactly get you a hoverboard, but maybe a gravity-resistant one?

The Braille Skateboarding channel on YouTube has tricks, crashes, and lots of flat-brimmed hats. Like any other stack of skating vids, I assume. But these dudes also ride the strange and wonderful home-built "skateboards" that viewers mail them. Providing a new opportunity for unique deaths I mean extreme awesomeness in pretty much every episode!

Skateboards are actually a good testbed for weird mobility experiments because they're cheap, small and modular. What happens if you make one out of glass? Or an iPad? Or a TV?

I can't really explain why I'm hooked on watching these bizarre exercises in skateboarding since I've never stepped on one in my life, but now I'm wondering what else you could put magnetic wheels on and what would happen if you scale this prototype up in size.

What would really elevate this particular project would be a repelling-magnet road or rail to try and skate over. Still probably wouldn't be strong enough to make you float. But would you be super-light? Able to jump easily?

Comment(s)

Recommended