The Spartan trike project by CaptainAmerica

July-August 2019

Time flies, my business has been open over a year and I have not gone broke so that's good news, I hear five years is when I can really start to relax. That said I finally started getting back to work on the new trike this month starting with getting the rear wheel attached. I was tired of the jigged up welded swing arm mounts not sliding easily over the chassis tubes so I decided to go and machine proper pieces with a built in strut bell crank mount. I ended up making both the left and the right mounts twice for different reasons, the first one I learned the hard way that my tube to tube distance for the engine mounts is not 9.4" like the model says but 9.25" as reality dictates. Not sure how this got that far off as I have been using that number since I first started building the first trike but here it is today...corrected. Luckily the 6061 blank is only $35 so whats a little money and hours of my life watching the machine run.

Hopefully I will have the swing arm mounted by the end of the week and then I will be on to moving the steering wheel down, hooray for cutting fully welded in tubes out but the wheel was about two inches higher then it should have been and I still have not come to grips with why, only that when I sit in the seat I feel like its really high. It will eventually make things simpler to have the steering wheel below the dash and not cut through it which caused issues in the bend process. Also now that I have a cnc plasma table I get unlimited tries at cutting out the gsxr gauge cluster mount correctly instead of filing the original one into shape. Then the steering will get hooked up.

In other news I am pretty sure that my high speed compression settings on the QA1 shocks are way to stiff for the light weight trike front end which is why every time I hit a rut in the road the front ends bounces in the air but the rear tire handles it like a champ. New shocks in the future? we shall see, maybe ill just take apart the QA1s and see if I can fix the problem with revalving...which I have no experience doing.

August 4, 2019

Got the swing arm attached with very little issue, the biggest problem was the bolt that holds the strut linkage to the chassis hitting the swing arm mounts. I was able to just remove the cross bar itself to get the bolt through which will be the requirement every time its disassembled. We will see very soon how much of a pain that is when I take this thing apart to final weld everything. The first roll is like watching a baby take its first steps, you can even see the foot prints in the dirty floor

More to come soon on the adjustments to the steering system. I would like to thank the folks on this forum for their input over the years, both through advice and comments and through actual machining help when I did not have my equipment available to me. A certain member from the Midwest is a primary reason the front wheels got attached and he did it as a friend, hopefully I can pass that on to others on here in the future. I thought I would have the second one done in 6 months when I started it, here we are almost 4 years later and its finally rolling, hopefully the second half won't take as long as the first half.

Liteway - The first trike I ever drove was a Scorpion P6 at the factory in Miami, the owner of the company is a super nice guy, I spent the better portion of half a day hanging out with him and the guys who work for him. They have a good design and they are creating vehicles and have put in the leg work to make it a very high quality product. I am definitely considering other options, one nice thing is that I have the Bilstein factory in town and also Fox is creating an East coast headquarters in Charlotte as well so I might be able to get some direct help from one of them and I have a connection with guy they hired as their new head of engineering, conveniently someone they grabbed from Bilstein. I do believe its in the shocks and not the springs as I initially thought as the front and the rear of the car are both quite bouncy to the regular push and pull by hand.

In reference to the seat, I now have the driver sitting in between the main chassis rails so I should be 1.5" lower and I plan to fill that with padding as I currently drive with very little padding and I would like to be more comfy in my new design. I mocked up the seat last night after I got it rolling and the steering wheel and the dash just seem high, the arm position is a little strange, couldn't say exactly, I feel my first trike the proportions were perfect if I only had a little more padding. I am going to drop the steering column mount about 1" at the dash and move the gauge cluster down a similar amount.

-Andrew

Hey guys, Glad to see you are back at it Capt. I'm still struggling with the physical restraints of PD...as well as the mental issues. Hopefully, I'll have the patient numbers back soon so I can reveal my steering column/system and can get this project finished!

Finishing up the engine rebuild now should be in the frame by next weekend...

There is a third (and final) TriPodCars Owner/DIY builder (TJA) in Phoenix, AZ.  TJA really got hosed by the original owner of TPC who was in the final stages of selling TPC at the time that TJA's kit was due to ship out of AU. He (TJA) ended up with two different uprights, one has the external bosses on which the calipers are mounted. The other requires an additional bracket (not included) to mount the caliper. Might be unnoticeable on a car, but on Reverse Trike, it's awful. All of TPC uprights are sourced from Holden Gemini's, very prolific there but none here in the USA, you can't even get replacement bearings here! He has cut ties with TPC AU and is officially going to be the third REV3 owner in the USA!  He has no way to re-engineer anything...sooo...guess I'm gonna sell him my TPC front end parts, and jump on CA's offer to build a new set of a-arms & uprights etc. Once I have the patient applied for notice, he has committed to buying my steering system as well.

My plan all along was to get my rig built (REV3 FZ1 Fusion) and running then re-engineer the front end later...but have to swap it over before the first bearing change.

Call u later this week Capt.

Cheers

Skiff, I know what your trying to do, but you seriously lost me with all the acronyms. Hope it all works out, I'll be around for a chat if you need some help/advice. Your always more then welcome to come by the shop as well if you have time.

Liteway, Your trike has always impressed me for how tight and light you are with your packaging. I did some quick calcs on my new trike and I am sitting at ~140lbs of unsprung weight at the front by my CAD calculations with somewhere between 550 and 600lbs of overall front weight which gives me an impressive 25% number. Something I might try is removing the shocks and mocking up some ends for the springs and seeing if no shocks stops the issue, or just tear into the shocks and remove the fluid. I need lighter tires (19lbs) and wheels (25lbs), those two are most of the weight. I think my outers could handle down to a 15" rim but I couldn't find much if I remember right when I was looking for alternatives that matched the rear wheel.

As for the scorpion, I drove it 5 years ago and went about 1/4" mile, I have put 5k miles on my trike at this point so its hard to say how to compare them. They have a lot of nice features like an integrated reverse built into the steering wheel and its actually a modification that they make to the block running the trans input shaft out the side of the motor under and in front of the output sprocket and then when your in neutral you can engage an idler gear of some sort that runs the system backwards, I didn't take a really close look at it. The ergonomics of the cockpit are pretty good except the pedals, I dont remember exactly what my issue was there but I think the pedal area is really wide and the pedals themselves aren't so you can actually put you foot around the side of them and "miss" them. Again it was quite awhile back. The side pods are bulky for what they are, but I get the look they were going for. Biggest thing I didn't understand was using rod ends on the lower outer A-arm/Knuckle mount, in conjunction with the location that they hit the arm with the push rod its got a huge moment acting on it and I actually had them change the rod ends on the shop trike I drove before I got in it because they were bent in the threads about 15 degrees. I don't know if they have moved to a ball joint in that location since then, but it was a rookie formula SAE mistake to do it that way. That said I did the same thing on my trike...sooooo, only difference was that I thread mine all the way into the arm so that there is no thread showing and minimal possibility of bending to occur. Obviously if your paying attention my new one doesn't share this trait and I will probably update the old one at some point. Hopefully that sort of answers your question, my only other comment is that driving it was so awesome it inspired me to come home and get my shit together to finish my first trike.

Joe, The only issue with making the brackets longer is that it changes the throw of the suspension as everything other point in the system is fixed. That said I did a bunch of playing around in CAD looking at the wheel motion versus the shock travel and making it longer would help. But at that point I had already welded the tube ends to the plates that bolt into the aluminum machined mounts and the brackets are fully looped so they had to be slipped over the tube before I welded it and are unchangeable unless I cut and rebuild or just make a whole new piece which is what I would do...but probably won't. The solution, which annoying is to just pull the six 1/4" bolts that mount that bar between the aluminum mounts and drop the whole thing out and then pull the cross bolt which just barely clears the flanges. Frustrating but I can live with that.

-Andrew