Stopped in to start working on the build at Colin's. "Haulin Colin" makes a lot of custom trailers and cargo bikes. Frankly he has a lot nicer shop than I do and a lot of it came in handy tonight.
Put the frame in the stand and did a rough fit of the trike frame and rear wheel/tire.
The rear tires are norco 21x12-8 slicks mounted on kite buggy wheels. We had to drill out the 15mm bearing adapters to fit the 5/8 axle and Colin will be fabricating a driving plate to weld on the axle flange tomorrow. They were pretty close to a perfect fit and are lightweight compared to some of the other options. The Wheeleez are probably lighter, but after calling them 4 times and not getting an answer I decided to go this route. The Norco's run at 4psi and this wheel configuration is very popular and sees a lot of abuse from the kite guys.
This is a little better picture showing how the wheel fits along with SA 5 sp transmission. The adapter is simply going to get welded to the driver and bolted to the wheel with one bolt for each of the 8 spokes.
Once both rears were mounted we started working on the front. The headset wasn't quite right so we had to press out the tube and turn down the race support, one of the bearing shells cracked so we replaced it and that meant the dust seal need to be trimmed. The front rim is a "Large Marge" and laced with heavy duty spokes to s surley hub with an endemporph 3.7 on it. Initially it just cleared after the build it just touches. We'll dimple the chopper forks a hair. I was really able to save a lot of money by recycling abandoned snow bike parts I found on CL.
At this point it seemed like it was time to see what happened when we put the roller on the ground. It was pretty obvious that the 30" forks were a bit too long so we adjusted them down a little to give it a flat rake with plenty of ground clearance.
From there we trimmed up the fork tubes and dropped in the stem and mounted the handle bars all pretty uneventfully.
This last picture shows how the trike kit fits on. It's pretty simple really.
With that we called it a night. Colin is going to work on finishing up the rest of the human powered part of the driveline tomorrow. After work I'll stop by and we'll plan out the electric drive and rear carrier for the articulated trailer. I feel even more confident than when I started that this will have enough floatation to get across the sand and isn't going to be too heavy to pedal doing it.
I'm still at a loss related to seat and grips. I would like to put a suicide shifter on, but so far I have had no luck finding the SA 5 speed stick for it. BUT despite that, I should be able to ride it tomorrow and have it powered up not long after that.
FUN!
