Sprokets and holes

been a tough and dishartening week, hoped to have the jack sahaft done and made a start on the SA by now as it is ive finaly maged to drill the 16 holes in the 2 sprockets! still that is progress can assemble the jack shaft at last, whilst waiting for parts ive been building the above recumbent trike for my nephews, but need to sort out some brakes before i let them lose as thers lots of hills here and this thing is fast!

English Wheels from farm yard scrap

couple of bits of esentialy scrap laying around out side top photo is an old center shaft belt drive i think, and above is the transmisson of a potters wheel, thourght the cast iron wheel would make a good anvil, and the frame of the potters wheel is cast iron and the perfect U shape, as a point of intreast the 2 drive cones the right hand one is steel but the left hand is paper!

Sprocket Carrier Casting

Not to bad, but thers some sand inclusions and porosity, and im not happy about the undercuts were i glued on the drive dogs, What i realy need is some kind of fairing compound to smooth out the transitons but will burn out cleanly with the foam.

ELF Upright

Lost Foam Casting Sprocket Carrier

Had a different day than planed, after boring the jack shaft tube i relised (you would think id of messured before starting!?) that it just wasnt wide enough to fit the sprocket bolts through, so i decided to quickly cast a couple of blanks.
But since i was casting i should also make the new sprocket carrier i need (to fit the smaller sprocket and run 10mm closer to the wheel) so i spent the day trying to cave pink foam into very complicated shapes. The stock item seen in the photo below is very light 660g with the 6 8mm studs. and as ive just worked out how to fit a R1 spindel to the wheel saveing 350g, and fiting the smaler alloy sprockt savein 1kg! i dont want to add it all back with a great big lump of alloy.

Brooklyn machine works Jack shaft

Thanks to them for esnding me this pic of a concentric SA jack shaft its like a inside out version of what im building
cheak out ther site for somw pedal powered beautys the Gangster is my kind of Pushy
http://www.brooklynmachineworks.com/site/bikesindex.html

Jack Shaft

Here is my rough arsed "engineering " drawing of the jack shaft along with the bearings and sprockets, since im haveing the jack shaft i decided to make it do 2 jobs and have 2 stage gearing which means i can drop the rear sprocket from 46t to 36t with a saveing in unsprung weight and lowering the chain line, im also useing a 28mm R1 rear spindel saveing a further 400g of unsprung mass.

Here im useing a dial gauge to center the block of alluminum this is esential since i will have to turn it round to machine the other side, with out the dial gauge the bearings wouldnt line up.

And finaly ive bored it out to 35mm to fit the needle rollers im then going to bore both ends out to 42mm for the ballrace and then drill it for the sprocket drives then cut it in half and turn down sholders for the sprockets.

Recumbent Bicycle

RedShift Recumbent Bicycle i made many years ago.

Rough Frame Sketches

Roughing out tube designs, the only production bike that needs a frame like this is the Bimota tesi

My Fathers (alleged) Rudge Ulster

just a picture of my dads old Rudge he always claimed it was an Ulster, but truth was it was a 'bitza' made up from about 5 different bikes (it did have 'ulster' writen on the rear mud gaurd though.

17" wheel is go!

My thanks to Swiss for telling me about Honda Hawk racers fitting 110/70 radials to 2.5" rims to good effect. So i stripped down the comstar tonight in prep for designing and casting a offset spider for the Elf front end.

Tooling

Spent last nite makeing tooling never the most exciting of jobs, but always worth the effort.
In the picture is a extended argon sheild for the TIG torch and an argon backing plate, both of these made so i can weld the titanium exhaust, the torch sheild will also be used fot the pipes, but the backing plate is just for the 2 clamps which is why it has the rather spacific hole patten.
Also in the picture is a guided center punch marking out the rivits in the 17" comstar wheel, so i can acurately drill them out.

Scrappy Weekend

Was realy wanting to make the jack shaft this w/e but only one of the 2 sprockets arived , so instead i did some more work on the wheel casting, and then started to have doubts about the sizes again, so started playing around with bits of wood to visulize the bike, this helped.
And i then went and brought loads more bits and bobs on Ebay hopefully at least some of them will actualy be usefull unlike the gold wing debacle.
So i forgot about wheels and got on with the titanium exhaust hopefully will weld up the clamps tonight.

Tube clamp MK2 and first joint

heres the mk2 clamp with the V so it can hold various sizes the casting is a bit scrapy as a fan fell on the mold, but it works, thats a 3/4" tube miterd to a 1" and my first attempt at tig brazeing tubes, im absolutly delighted with the clamp and cutter SO much easier than doing it by hand with a file and a perfect fit. Need a bit more practice with the brazing, will do some distruction testing and comparisons with welded joints.

Recast Tube Clamp

On a happier note i recast the tube clamp with the V design, and did a bit of branding to. This all went well.

Lack of Reserch costs me £40

As priviously mentioned i have been considering switching to a ELF style front end with a 17" wheel, the plan being to make up a new spider for a comstar rim , this is a good plan as it means i dont have to get the rim diameter perfect with a casting . I had a 16" comstar i investigated and liked the look of accept it was only 2.5" wide which is not wide enough for modern front tires (it was a rear wheel to!) so i did some reaserch and found that GL1100 goldwings had 17" rer Comstars and the mounted 130 tires so i wrongly!! asumed the would be 3.5" wide, it turns out ther also 2.5" see photo.
You will notice that both the original (dented) ER6 rim and the 14" piaggio are 3.5".
So this rather spoils this plan one of the advantages of the ELF and a 17" was the widest choice of rubber, and also i could fit the ABS. So i did some proper reaserch and found that modern sports touring tires are availble to fit 2.5" rims but ther taller than 3.5 rubber, this matters for the ABS that the wheel is the right diameter, and the closete match to the stock ER6 is a 16" avon azario tire!! so if i want to go down this route i already had the 16" rim the 17" comstar is not usable so £40 down the pan, could f been worse but a bit more reserch would of been cheaper.

Titanium Exhaust Fabrication

Makeing up a kit of parts useing titanium from a set of R1 downpipes.

16" Seat height

Showing that even with a 16" seat height and reclined back the height of the engine is not an issue.

Supercharged JAP V Twin

Lost Foam Casting Tube mitre clamp

Here iam machineing a piece of polystyrene to shape.

Now it has been sprued and given a coat of ceramic , sprinkled with builders sand and left out to dry in the sun.

This is the casting fresh out of the sand.

And here is the finished miter clamp. All easily done in a day.

Crude castings

Had a grand day out at the local hill climb , everything from bikes to bugattis, but mainly it was Formula 500 cars from the 1950,s tiny little rceing cars with JAPs and Manx nortons in the back all running on methanol the heady scent of castrol R in the air!
But one thing that struck me was the shockng quality of some of the casting on these cars, but also on some real high performance exotics
Take alook at these wheels sand cast on the beach i think!
But also this diff caseing a magnisum hewland i think it was on Maclaren formula 5000.

But alos the important thing to note is some of these cars are 60 years old and still going strong!

Dog Leg Swing Arm

This is a sketch of my proposed Dog leg SA to alow me to use the SA pivot as a jack shaft.
The 2 sprockets are joined together, idealy stock sprockets on a splined sleve running on needle rollers, But in realty proberbly welded together and running on ball races.

Further Pruning

Ive trimmed away most of the frame now so i can see exactly were everything is so can design the new space frame.

Comstar 'nerver' rim

stripped down a comstar rim, surprisingly its held on with just 10 small aluminum rivits.
Weighs 2.8kg
its a potentialy good option for makeing a larger diameter wheel (pictured is a 16x2.5) by casting my own hub and spider, Thanks to Julian for the idea.

ELF single sided FFe

Three different incarnations of the ELF bike with its single sided FFE (funny front end)

Striped Bike on the Jig

Its Alive!

Test firing , just so i know that the bike runs before i strip it down for the build
A good Moment!