Thursday, November 11, 2004

 

Trike Update

As some of you know I'm plannig to build a trike this winter. My dad knows a fellow who owns a machine shop. Hopefully that will work out fine. I have all the tubes I need to build the frame.

It wiil be made from 4130 steel aircraft tubing most commonly called chromoly. It's a very dark colored steel. It has approx. 3 times the yield strength of mild steel. For instance, tubing with .o35 inch (0.9mm) wall thickness is stronger than .065 inch (1.6mm) wall thickness. Thus making lighter and stronger frame.

My goal is to have the frame built by Christmas 2004. To complete the trike I still need to build wheels, buy steering linkages, build a custom front chainring. The trike will have drum brakes on the front 2 wheels. There is no need for a brake on the back wheel because most of the wieght is transfered to the front wheel while braking. Therefore, a brake on the back would have a tendency to lock up and increase the possibility of losing control of the trike.

Gearing will be difficult since I will use 20 inch BMX style wheels. Mountain bikes (MTB), for instance, have 26 inch wheel whereby smaller gear/spockets can be used. Using the gears off a MTB would mean the gear inches would be far too small. Remember your old 10 speed! The "easy" make it easy to pedal, giving you more leverage to get uphill or easy starts. The "hard" gears give you more distance per pedal stroke, thus attaining higher speeds. Well, because of the 20 inch wheel gear would be too easy and I would be able to pedal more than about 14mph or so.

Greenspeeds has great way of dealing to that problem. They come with a triple chainring, 8/9 speed cassette cog, and a 3 speed interal geared hub in the rear wheel. In effect it's like having 6 chainrings. This makes 72 or 81 speeed machine! The draw back is that I can't afford the rear hub. However, I found a guy that makes custom front chainring that use quad or quint chainrings as opposed to the standard triple. I plan to use a Quad chainring with a 8 speed cassette cog, which would yield 32 speed. Gear inches are from 14 to 94 inches. Plenty of gear.

I will post pictures once I get some work done on the frame. Any of you want to suggest a name and color for the trike? I was thinking of a silver frame color with blue seat fabric and calling it PrimeOne.

Comments:
How 'bout "Trike of Doom" or "Bride of Frankenstein"? Oh, yeah! I've got it! You could name it "Jar-Jar Binks"
 
Actually, Trike of Doom may work. If I paint it black that could work
 
Come to think of it. DoomSled would be even better!
 
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