Clunkerbike

The main frame is cut and ready to be welded, if Melbourne will only give me some decent freakin' weather to get outside with power tools. The crossmember needed a rethink. It's all well and good to make a sensible "engineering" decision (I'm a sound engineer by trade, which isn't a field of actual engineering) and use 35x1.6 SHS for all the main parts, but the decision then leads to using 50x5 SHS for making the lean steering wheel tilt brackets and slightly less than 600g of steel for each. Making the same brackets out of 40x3 reduces the weight to nearer 200g each, but requires the crossmember to be made from 30x1.6, also lighter but for no appreciable loss of strength. For my next trick, I might build a version of it out of 31.8x16x1.6 EHS for AeroAdvantage™. Meanwhile, as an exercise in learning FreeCAD, the design is being refined for a later version. A friend is considering an eTrike as a mobility aid and, if mine works, I'll probably start assem...

The steel arrived on Thursday, thanks Moorrabbin Steel . I haven't started working on it because I spent 2 and a half days in hospital with a repprise of the ticker problems that got me started on this project. I'm OK, more sleep deprived, than crook, but the angiogram showed nothing, despite feeling like an elephant had sat on my chest on Tuesday afternoon. I have 2.5m of 35x35x1.6 SHS, a half metre piece of 50x50x5 SHS for cutting the tilt brackets from, some 30x30x1.6 SHS for the arm of the pedal bracket (and an old bottom bracket shell from a bike frame), some 38x2 EHS for a head tube and a 190x inch 1/8 steerer from the donor bike that provided the bottom bracket. The rear triangle is also from a donor dual suspension MTB. Triceratops Two.1 will get its own rear tri. Racks will be integrated steel racks, built from 12x1.2 EHS, once I've done a billy cart test. Meanwhile, the disk brake hubs have arrived and fit the wheelchair axle bolts pefectly and run beautifully. ...

I am more than a little over indexed shifting. In the days of 3x7 (ah, the 90s) you could setup chainrings that would give you near 500% gear range, while never having to change more than one step at a time - eg: righthand 1, 2, 3, lefthand 1 to 2, righthand 3, 4, 5, lefthand 2 to 3, righthand 5, 6, 7 and back down. Indexed gearing really helped with this at the end of a really long day. Now we do the same thing over 10 gears on a single chainring and only the righthand shifter for no better ratio, but the indices are finer, trickier to set up, bump your derailleur, and you're tweaking for the rest of the day's ride. Ugh. On the other hand, in the days of friction shift, the setup only needed to be right on the derailleur stops, the shifting was tuned with every gear change, and it wasn't a hard knack to master. My first adult bike was a Roadmaster Grand Tourer 12, 2x6 friction shift on the downtubes, the best bike money could buy for under $200 Aussie in 1982. That bike t...

This is the beast I'll be building as the weather in Melbourne begins to improve with the impending spring, the Triceratops Two. For now, T-One is DOA because I think there will be less tweaking involved to get the tracking aligned on T-Two and the cornering will be as tight as a road bike under Cadel Evans' captaincy. The preliminary OpenSCAD code for the design resides on my GitHub.

I'm wondering if building a conventional tadpole trike, with "sports car" steering geometry is the right way to go. For the last few days I've been trying to reverse engineer the lean steering of an AR-3 trike, yeah, maybe for shits and giggles, but seeing the basic frame parts "move!" Wow! Update: I'm now seriously considering this steering pattern for my trike build. A decision that pretty much throws out everything but the parts list. Update 2: I'm sold! This is it. Not shown is how to lean the front wheels, but that's just horizontal kingpins at the end of the transverse beam and tie rods from the chassis to an upright wheel boss at each end of the transverse beam that pivots on the horizontal kingpins. In theory. Still some work to do, but I've cracked it! This is parametric, too. I enter a turning angle and it calculates the pitch of the transverse beam in order for it to stay horizontal. I might be making some design changes before ...

I bought one of these and love it. Great welder for steel. Really pleased with my purchase, but I bought it to weld steel, so it really is a great little unit for THAT job. (Building my first trike, which will be steel.) I bought it from Bunnings online, Linda did the collect and when it got home, on the box it says it can weld steel or aluminium. You can imagine a maker like me would be pretty stoked by that, so I checked out the manual before looking at any other part in the box. The manual has this to say.. The problem is, flux cored aluminium wire, at 0.8 or 0.9 millimetre, is actually unobtanium. There is no such thing because it can't be made stiff enough to not jam or crush in the wire feed pinch roller. Ye cannae change the laws o'd pysics, Jim. To claim this welder could weld aluminium with aluminium cored wire is not only a misleading statement, it's possibly quite dangerous. What you can buy is 0.9mm aluminium "solder"/brazing wire, which is only suit...

I bought a welding machine, a handyman grade, solid state, gasless MIG welder, to be precise. I already have a mini oxy-acetylene rig, too, but I've never managed to get it alight. I think the bottles may have been empty from the start. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah, I could spend 2 grand on a KMX Kolt and get a fully functioning 1x8 speed recumbent trike with a warranty, but I think I can spend a grand all up building something similar and get 2 items crossed off the bucket list - own a trike and build some sort of bike/trike thing. Maybe it won't be as good as the KMX, maybe it'll be better. It'll be better in one way, at the very least, "I built this." Enter "Triceratops One." (That's it, up top, sitting on the baseboard for the jig I'll be building it on.) "Expense" is my main motivation. AU$2k isn't expensive as bikes and trikes go, but I'm a retiree on a "super" pension and I'd rather try and keep a bit of that cash i...

The Tradewinds concept! While not strictly to scale , it is kind of the scale I'm aiming for, a 3x20" tadpole trike for a 182cm tall guy, onroad and offroad, with a collapsable mast and bow-boomed, loose footed rig of recycled coffee bean bag reflective mylar. Gunna defs build the trike part first, though. No point hitching a horse when their's no cart. (Trike image credit: KMX Karts, with mods by Crunchy.) The primary design consideration here is "wind assist", not monstrously wind propelled to the point of dangerous. The Whike ( whike.com ) , for instance, has a "storm rig" option for higher winds. I figure I'll start with a storm rig first, and see what the thrust and tipping forces are like. Also, my primary concern for adding a sail is as much urban visibility, as it is for transport. Might cause some bailful looks from "Mr Plod", though, so even that may not be a common use for it. For offroad exploring, through the bike sections o...

Hmm, the test hub I bought is a 130mm. However, I may be able to reduce the spacing on the non drive side to shrink it enough to fit. And probably relax the bearings a little, which are way too tight! It's not QR, so that won't be a problem, it's bolt one, so there'll be a tad more protrusion, is all, and that'll be handy for mounting the derailler hanger. Will need to dish the wheel a tad more, though, as a result.

This is Rosie and yes, she is riding me. She's my fixie. Rose gold, chromed, chromoly frame, manipulated seatpost, tight geometry Potential of Hydrogen PH01 Sulphuric Acid. A discontinued brand and, by extension, model. She was a bit of an impulse buy. She's riding me because this is the 2012 Melburn Roobaix and riding a fixie up that year's "Koperberg" was a fool's errand. (Some did, many of them fell, some hard.) And no, the fixed cog hasn't had any wear, I run her "flipped" - freewheelin'. (Photo credit: Creux Cycling.) Right now, she needs tyres, new bar tape and, if I can find an affordable solution, 2x5 derailleur gears. Melbourne doesn't have many really steep hills, but when you hit one of the ones that passes for a minor Tasmanian or Blue Mountains grade, an 80 inch gear breaks the spirit. If it's pavé, and cat 3, you'll suffer more than groin omlette, you'll suffer defeat, especially if you're a commuter hack, l...