@skyman88 Not in the least, my man.

@oneeyedzuma This is good advice, there are def. reports of bad sensors out there. You can test the sensor manually with your hand and the app or by watching the lights/feeling the board engage.

My intent was not to blame the OP, just to point out what sounded likely to me based on my own experience. But you are absolutely right that it COULD be equipment failure.

There's a weird dynamic that happens with OW nosedives - inexperienced riders tend to blame the board (which, again, CAN be at fault; but, they are inexperienced, so they also may have made errors); experienced riders get frustrated at THAT, and tend to blame the rider instead.

I'd really like to see a better balance struck. Anyone who nosedives, be it their error or a board failure, needs help understanding and resolving the issue, whatever it was.

The community should try to help them, without being jerks about it (which you were not, to be clear. Thanks for another valuable perspective and troubleshooting avenue.)

@bryanhayn forgot to add - this guy actually made a good video to demo Fangs, because he's had a couple nosedives going uphill too fast. And he actually couldn't force the nosedive (couldn't get his nose down, even when trying to intentionally) until he ran his board down to about 14% battery. So I'd say you're probably onto the answer, but I do want to note that on my nosedive (Mission/+) I still had plenty of battery (around 40% IIRC), so even if you have plenty of battery left, I still would strive for easy acceleration, esp. if uphill or windy or you are heavier.

https://youtu.be/PHCn-MRfry0

@bryanhayn as far as I know that's the only place to get them. Keep checking back, I guess. There are a couple other nosedive-wheel products (the Glider and Carbonsmith) out there but I have not seen them in person and they are more expensive.

Your nosedive sounds a lot like mine - I had stopped at a crosswalk to let pedestrians cross and was starting back up from there, made it about 20-30 feet and went down. I was very confused because I didn't feel like I was going very fast yet, nor did I notice any pushback (I was riding a + in Mission with about 40% battery left, and I had felt pushback before when traveling at high speed), but the conclusion I reached was overacceleration. I am very careful to always ease into acceleration now, but even being careful doesn't mean I will always remember - a common mistake would be forgetting as I rush to cross a street to beat approaching traffic (don't do this. If you'd have to rush to make it: just wait).

If I ever do this, I hope Fangs will help prevent me laying in that same street in front of oncoming traffic.

@bryanhayn - one of the frustrating things about OneWheel nosedives is it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where it went wrong. If you had witnesses, or did a careful postmortem (assuming you weren't hurt too bad) you can usually nail it down, but if you're alone and in pain, you often can't figure out exactly what happened.

This leads to a lot of theorizing, and in the OW forums, a lot of blaming the rider, or just assuming they must have been at fault. That's frustrating, because sometimes the boards (like any piece of equipment) CAN fail.

But that said, there ARE a lot of errors a rider can make, and the more inexperienced the rider, the more likely they made one of these mistakes. You know to keep weight over the wheel, not leaned forward - that's good. But another thing that can happen (especially as the board's power gets low, and 13% is getting low) is that the rider carelessly accelerated too quickly - you have to ease into acceleration, especially if going uphill or the pavement is uneven in any way or it's windy or your battery's low or you're a heavier rider. Any or all of these conditions can combine to overwhelm the board's capacity to both thrust you forward and keep you upright, and when that happens, it happens FAST. You don't have to be going at or near top speed for this to happen.

Was the board still on after the dive? Or did you have to turn it back on? If you had to turn it back on, I'd say you have an issue with the board and it needs to be looked at.

If the board was still on, sorry to say, I am going to guess you probably overaccelerated for your conditions and overwhelmed the board. This is an error a lot of new riders make. It's the error I am pretty sure I made for the first time, 256 miles in, and I fractured my humeral ball, and a year later still deal with stiffness/soreness/reduced range of motion in that shoulder because I never saw it coming and went straight down to pavement. In a weird way, I wish it had happened to me earlier at 50 miles, when I was more expecting to go down at any second and might have reacted better.

I hope this doesn't come across as blaming you, and the sad truth is, you may never know exactly what went wrong. "Overacceleration from dead stop" is what I've decided happened to me, but it's guesswork - I don't KNOW if my board was still on, because I was alone, collecting my yard sale out of a dark street with a broken arm and trying to figure out how I was going to get home and wondering if I'd throw up or black out.

But as soon as I could move my shoulder again I got back on the horse and I treat my accelerations gently and knock wood it hasn't happened again.

You say you got "a bump on your head" - get a good helmet if you don't have one, please.

Post-nosedive, I also put Fangs on my board, because I believe they would have either allowed me to recover from my nosedive and keep riding, or at least bought me a little more time to react and run it out or roll. While I have not yet had the opportunity to test that theory, anecdotal evidence from the forums, and my buddy who's had Fangs save him 3 times, suggests they are probably a good investment for the pavement rider.

@Jakegreene This is a tangent, but honestly the sure stance is kind of worrying me right now anyway - I just found out a friend had the dreaded bad-sensor runaway board happen to him. Luckily no one got hurt, but there are too many reports of this out there.

Yes, everything fails sometimes, but if I know someone it happened to, and so do you, then that starts to suggest a failure rate that is not acceptable for a product of this type, given how relatively few of them there are out there, its cost, and its ability to injure a bystander if it fails in this way.

I really hope FM is taking a hard look at this system and either re-engineering it, or at minimum clamping down on their manufacturing QC so that failures are far more rare than they seem to be right now.

Hey all, I picked up a Cobra concave back footpad from OWArmor on the Black Friday 50% off sale and I installed it yesterday and I LOVE IT. So much more control, no foot fatigue at all, and the Vicious griptape it comes with is wonderful all on its own. Plus I'm no longer worried about a little water splashing on the stock wood footpad and rotting it under the fender. Fits the Flight Fender and my OW stand no problem.

(It IS slightly harder to stand still on at a Stop sign than the stock flat pad was, but I presume that will come easier with a little practice.)

I know there are multiple concave back footpads on the market (the new TFL soft/flex one came out literally hours after I ordered this one) both from FM and multiple third parties, but now what I really want is a concave front (sensor) pad too.

I'm sure some mad scientist in the community has made one already for themselves, but does anyone know if there are any third-party makers already working on this for purchase?

Or is there a reason that it's a bad idea? I'm guessing the curvature would make it harder to ensure both "halves" of the foot/sensor are engaged each time.

@tomfoolery I still haven't needed mine (hope I never do) but they've saved my buddy a couple times also.

In talking to him, I realized another analogy for what they are and what they are for: anyone who's ever snow-skied or -boarded, knows that skis and boards turn up at the front tip (on a snowboard, the back too, since you frequently switch direction).

And they do this so that if the tip ever comes unexpectedly in contact with surface terrain (a small rise), they keep going, up and over, rather than dig in and stop.

A great rider who sees all and never makes a mistake could, in theory, ride a snowboard or skis without this feature at their tip, assuming that the snow/terrain is nearly always smooth/level.

I don't think it's too difficult to see the multiple assumptions that go into the preceding sentence, where those assumptions can fall short of reality, and what is going to happen to the rider when they do.

I have the full-size Ryobi inflator and it's very useful at home, but IMO even that smaller handheld one is too much to carry - the Ryobi batteries are big/heavy no matter what (since they are the same batteries you can use to run their saws/trimmers/drills/blowers/etc.)

For the OW I have this - works great, small/light enough to throw in yr backpack:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019FIERRO/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

@Stay_in_school Excellent video showing clearly what they're for, why, and how they work - even if you had been thrown, or in the rare event the board had cut out completely due to software or hardware failure, buying the rider any extra time - even additional fractions of a second - in which to react, can only ever help.