Summer III: 2004

Post July 4. The July 4th weekend is typically my kick-off date for summer projects. Granted summer is well underway by July -- this of course helps explain why I think summer is so short. This year, I think it was the weekend following July the 4th that construction began with the help of Bobby.

As you can see, we managed to fit the leaf springs into the design.

What you are seeing is the original frame from Summer I with the front end cut off. In the back is the new daughter frame which was designed to hold the engine and made this summer. My orginal design ideas was to have the leading edge of this so called 'daugther frame' to be bolted to the main frame and then have the back resting on leaf springs - either a single 'butt' spring or two side springs. The engine would mount to this daughter frame which would create a triangle with the main frame. However, we ended up deciding to go with the echelon configuration you see here.

Another view of the same thing. Here the mounting angle iron for the engine is featured. The engine itself is bolted to two pieces of angle iron that have slots milled in them. This allows us a lot of flexibility for drilling holes to attach the frame angle iron to the engine mount angle iron for chain tensioning and sizing.

This and the above photo do not show the angle iron welded to the daughter frame with which the bike was attached.

Here you can sort of see how the angle iron was welded and drilled for bike attachment. Also note the turn-buckles for adjusting the relative height of the bike. At the moment, I think this is way to much of a spacing given how we are going to attach the front of the bike to the frame.

Now we've got the bike bolted onto the frame. However there will be a bar placed through the little support deal in the middle bottom of the bike and the frame will be brought up to right next to it... This brings the bike up a bit too high. Replacing the turnbuckles with smaller spacers or turnbuckes should fix this problem. Our long turn goal is to have the driver sit where the biker would have sat and the gunner to sit on top of the engine. I hope that with one more weekend of work on this project the MA will move and stop. However a free weekend has eluded me... and this weekend is GenCON! The date is August the 17th and I don't think we've worked on the MA this month.

The saftey and engineering soundness of this device has yet to be proven in a high speed turn. Will the frame self destruct? Many think so.

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