I was tail-dragging on my metal protection plates when I remembered the spark accessories from skateboarding. I wanted that bright trail behind a Onewheel.

A Onewheel is a different shape to work around. The accessory needed a way to attach and stay in place while dragging, and I had to think about what would happen if it snagged.

The accessory rides on a board carrying a person. If it catches on something, holding on harder may be exactly the wrong response. I wanted that considered from the start.

So I designed Draggin Tail to hold together in use, with a deliberate ability to break away if it caught, to reduce the force passed into the board and the rider. Balancing those two requirements took more work than the sparks did.

The breakaway was a design goal. It is not a guarantee against a fall.

I designed and engineered Draggin Tail. Southern Manufacturing in Miami, the same fabricator I had used for the protection plates, cut and welded the metal components to my specifications. When the metal came back, I did the final manufacturing on each one by hand.

I was demonstrating Draggin Tail by January 2020. That March I went on The Voice of Onewheel to talk about it; the show titled the episode Cory Boehne and the Dragon Tail, though the product is Draggin Tail. Riders were getting their own by that spring.

Also in March 2020, I photographed Chris Richardson on the Venetian Islands for a promo shoot. The board is tipped up beneath him, the water is behind him and the sparks spread across the pavement.

The demonstration video shows two boards crossing the pavement with bright trails behind them. It is the quickest way to see what I had in mind.