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There is a subset of the personal electric vehicle world that goes well beyond riding and enters full-blown fabrication obsession territory. Dan Mangieri, the resident mad scientist of Denver's Fast Bois crew, lives there permanently. The Freshly Charged team paid him a visit, and what they found was a collection of handbuilt Onewheel-powered machines that should not work as well as they do and are far more fun than anything with this little budget has any right to be.
The Builds
It started (as these things often do) with a simple question: what if we rode Onewheels on ice? The answer was studded tires, pan head screws sourced from Amazon, and a plowed lake course. That was the beginning. What followed was a full creative spiral that produced several distinct machines, each more unhinged than the last.
The Rip Saw is the one that demands attention first. It is an ice chariot built around a Onewheel's self-balancing system, with a Chevy flywheel salvaged from a local stream cleanup bolted on top. The flywheel alone runs somewhere around 30 to 35 pounds. The whole assembly wants to pull your arms off, and Dan describes it as his favorite thing to ride (which says a lot about Dan and means it might be too wild for Jimmy). A fuse system controls engagement — the footpad circuit only activates once it is inserted — and then the thing balances itself and hauls you across the ice like a very aggressive sled. It has since been upgraded to bigger rails, a bigger tire, and a heavier flywheel after the original version was deemed underperforming.
Then there is the GTS cart, a vintage 1970s go-kart purchased off Facebook Marketplace for $150, rebuilt around a Onewheel GT as the drivetrain. Dan welded custom brackets, sourced wheel bearings from 2000 to 2005 Nissan Sentras, and fitted it with repurposed chainsaw bars as ice blades after growing up watching sailboats use them on the Hudson River. The blades work well enough that he wants to sharpen them properly to find out just how well. On ice, it is an absolute donut machine (in Dan's words).
To round out the chaotic fun, there is also an ice-studded Onewheel variation called the Vector. What started out on rollerblades became even more awesome with the addition of a tug boat picked up for $200 off Facebook Marketplace.
Why This Is Worth Your Attention
The best part is that none of this comes from a professional workshop. Dan operates out of a single-bay garage with basic tools, a welder, and the self balancing technology already present in Onewheels. The builds start as caveman level drawings and end up as rideable machines that the broader Onewheel community rallies around. His build partner, Sam, puts in 8 to 12 hour work days and still shows up when Dan says they need to get in the garage. That dynamic — two people who take the ideas seriously enough to actually finish them — is a big part of why the machines exist at all. XLaserLab recently sent Dan their X1 Pro 3-in-1 laser welding system, which means whatever comes next is going to be sharper in every sense. Freshly Charged is actively pushing to get more of these build videos made, which is a great thing for anyone who enjoys watching human creativity blossom into clever, reidiculous things and then ride them somewhere they were likely never designed to go.
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