Holiday Progress!

Holidays are great. You get a couple days off work to visit family and get all those things done you've been putting off. I had this strange idea I was going to get tons of work done on the trike. Yeah, not so much. But, finally, Sunday was my day. Got to spend a good 5 or 6 hours on it, made some decent headway. My goal is to have it on it's own 3 wheels by the end of the Christmas break. I'm happy with the progress so far - today I got the roll-bar tacked made and tacked in place and I cut and layed out the front end chassis. I've updated the drawing somewhat with a new sloped nose front end and have figured out most of the mounting points based on the uprights I'm using. Really need to get some wheels before I finalize it.

Some parts I have acquired: Steering rack and uprights/hubs/rotors from a Chevette. Got those from my dwarf car racing days - they regularly use the Chevette uprights and rotors. The steering rack was in my first beater car - one of the first things I ripped out and replaced because it was way too wide for a dwarf car. Perfect for the Trike though!

Found a rear shock that I think will work perfectly. Had a problem when I flipped the swingarm upside-down because there used to be a 6" wide pivot where I plan to mount the shock. I had to come up with a way to put a sturdy shock mount there - spanning a 6" gap with a 10mm bolt. No way that would work as is. The shock I found though fixed most of that - got it from an '86 Kawasaki GPZ 1000. What's slick is it has a T bottom mount instead of an eye. That will let me distribute a lot of that force for the shock bolt across a much wider area. The lenth was perfect, will let me do a simple mount to the top frame rail. Plus, it's an air shock so I can play with ride height easily!

Got a couple of sprockets from Fastenal and a 1" shaft from Ebay to start building the jackshaft assembly. Have alot of thinking/fabbing for that one, but that comes later. Bearings are my big wonder there - it's easy to go buy a pillow-block bearing but I have a hard time believing a $20 setup will hold up under the speed/force of a jackshaft. Research required...

Don't have them yet but ordered my pedals/master cylinders and a steering wheel from Desert Karts - I have got to build me one of those some day... Anyways, on to the pics!

And the engine goes here!

Inspiration for the front end

I've been hesitating on the front end design.  I don't want a box.  I don't want a wedge.  I want curves.  Problem is, the frame at the firewall is pretty wide - about 42".  Based on the steering rack I have, the front end lower suspsension pivot needs to be about 25".  So from the firewall, I have to come in about 8" per side in a very short length.  I just couldn't think of a pretty way to do the body with an open wheel/bicycle fender look - a-la the Lotus.  Then I saw a pic of an Audi Lemans car:

 and the epiphany.  I have nothing at all in the front end of this car except steering, suspension and brakes.  Why not make it a slant nose, bubble fender enclosed front end?  Searching around for a little more inspiration, I came back to Lotus and really cheesy old-school looks of the XI:

Move the cockpit to the other side, reduce some of the bubbleness of it and that's me.  So once I do get to doing the body, some kind of blend between the old and new is the plan.  What this does for the build is frees me from having to make the frame rails up front look good/proportional when exposed - because they won't be!

The build after 2 weeks

Bought some new tools, got some steel, built a jig and now I'm tinkering.  I've got a pretty good feel for where everything from the firewall back will be so that's what I'm going to work on.  Figuring the front end will be pretty generic so I'll do that part later once I have things like the driver, engine and rear end located.  Here are some pics of the progress so far.  It has gone fairly according to plan with the original skecth - I think the only real dimesion to change so far is the layback of the rear part of the chassis tub.  So far I have the lower frame, part of the cockpit flooring, most of the vertical risers and the back half of the top rail in place.  I have created the mounts for the swingarm and have it bolted in to get a feel for the geometry and where to put the shock, chain, jackshaft, etc.

Yeah, I know, my welds are in need of some work.  But I'm getting better - a few of them I'm actually proud of!