shinyhappyrainbows

I'm a coward. That trike, above, is cut, has most of the parts ready, complex joint jigs have been 3D printed AND I STILL HAVEN"T ATTEMPTED EVEN A PRACTICE WELD ON SOME SCRAP! Like a I say, I am a cowardly custard. The welder scares the shit out of me. Yeah, pissweak, I know. So, tips and encouragement, please. It's coming on to Aussie summer again and I need to finish this beast. Good grief!

I am also here... @crunchysteve Anyway, haven't had a lot to say lately, not since the steerer brace was printed, because I cannot rely on the weather to stay dry enough to take the welder outside and practice on some scraps. More news of the build when this freak, months long weather event fucks off.

I was wondering how true a wooden jig would be for building my steering crossmember. This part has to be as accurate as I can get it or the steering will pull to one side. Then I managed to again breathe life back into my cheapest, nastiest 3D printer, a Sinus T1 clone. Steering head jig completed. Perfect!

In Australia, our equivalent to the USA's Home Depot is Bunnings Hardware. Tradies use them, handyfolk use them, they carry nearly every imaginable item. One item I've used a LOT of is the Carinya Make-A-Bracket line . About 7 or 8 pieces of the 200x200 (shown) should be enough to make the metal tray for the play mat foam padding. Just add some heavy duty grommet strip to protect flesh from the metal edges and you have a light, strong seat.

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. ...

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 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...