Stair-Navigating Skateboard

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By John Baichtal
Posted 2012/06/27 @ 7:00 am
Category Energy

Po-Chih Lai’s Stair Rover is designed to traverse stairs as easily as flat surfaces.

The piece aims to expanding the capability and possibility of extreme sports as we understand them. Inherited from our natural instincts, sliding as children and snowboarding as adults, the focus is on one of the most influential and stimulating sports – skateboading, aiming to push the boundaries further. The piece creates a groundbreaking form of sport which previously never existed and utilises the hidden energy of our cities – stairs.

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8 Responses to Stair-Navigating Skateboard

mpilchfamily on June 27th, 2012 at 7:59 am said:

Why ride down the stairs when you can grind the rail?

Also why did they invert the trucks? Sure the lower the board is the more stable it is but then you have no clearance on larger steps.

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miroslava von schlochbaum on June 27th, 2012 at 9:34 am said:

Interesting design, very artsy vid, but i wanted to know what purpose the tubing (one going to each wheel) served and failed to discover that. some sort of pneumatic shock absorber or just gratuitous ornament?

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- chartle on June 27th, 2012 at 1:52 pm said:
  
  I first though it was a some sort of pneumatic system but now I think the tubing just acts like a mild spring.
  
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  miroslava von schlochbaum on June 27th, 2012 at 2:39 pm said:
  
  …have to be really really “mild”. (spring constant of 2.718 cooked macaroni)
  
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  cliff on June 27th, 2012 at 5:13 pm said:
  
  maybe call it a dampener
  
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0xfred on June 28th, 2012 at 3:31 am said:

A long video with hardly any footage of it actually going down any stairs, which makes me suspect it doesn’t actually do it very well. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

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- Goli Mohammadi on June 28th, 2012 at 11:13 am said:
  
  The part that starts at 0:58 looks pretty convincing to me. And it looks like a much smoother ride down the stairs than I would’ve suspected. But I do agree that they could’ve shown more.
  
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