Clunkerbike

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...