Well, maybe this is what I need to get me up in the morning to do something since I started working 2nd shift a year ago.
Was wanting to do something like this anyway, just happened to coincide with bike build-off season.
For your consideration as a starting point is this Rifton mobility trike I paid way too much money for, and has been taking up valuable space ever since. If it's gonna live here, it might as well earn its keep. I saw Skyway mags and figured it was worth the big money the Salvation Army was asking for it. In hindsight, even if I manage to get the solid rubber tires off the mags, I essentially have 3 front wheels, so this purchase may have been ill-advised. At any rate, it got pushed into a corner (several, actually) and has been hanging around for a few years now.
I've been wanting to build a swap meet hauler for some time now. Not sure if this is best suited for that, but it's what I have so I'll work with it. First things first, if I can't get bigger wheels on it I'm not interested, and Baby goes back in the corner, so I thought I'd approach that first. The rear wheels don't seem too difficult, I may just have to cut off the braking mechanism that is positioned to work with 20" wheels. The front is more troubling, requiring a fork change at the least. This will also allow me to replace the goofy "handlebar", so let's see what it will take.
I got this far in about 30 seconds:
If you know what you're doing, or even if you don't, this thing is really easy to work on. The bad news is that the head tube is a strange diameter, so just bolting in a fork isn't gonna happen. Time to bust out the calipers and start wandering around the shop looking for donor victims. Inside diameter on the trike head measured roughly 1.6", so a bike with a head tube of that outside diameter would be awesome, but what are the chances?...
...pretty good, actually! One of the first frames I looked at in the boneyard pile we all have seemed pretty close. I think it was a Giant mountain bike in another life, before it was painted with black latex house paint. It is an aluminum frame, so the head tube is a slightly larger diameter than a steel bike due to the thickness of the aluminum:
Close enough and junk otherwise (unless aluminum prices go back up again), so time to break out the Harbor Freight portable band saw I use once a year (gotta love HF for cheap versions of tools you hardly ever use!)
After cutting it off I knew it was close enough to work, so after half a day of grinding, sanding and clearancing on something I probably could have bought for a couple bucks, I was officially in build-off mode.
Basically a pressure fit, except for two things:
1. There was a tab welded inside the trike head tube to prevent the steering from travelling too far, which proved way more difficult to remove than I would have thought. More grinding, filing and sanding, but it's gone.
2. My "insert" wasn't long enough:
So I decided to make up a spacer and cut it in two:
I guess I forgot to take a picture after I installed it all with bearing cups, but it worked like a champ. I'll get a picture of it the next time I work on it.
It was getting a little late, so I threw on an OCC triple tree and fork with a wheel to see what I thought. Not married to the OCC fork, but it might work ok. Will probably depend on how bars will fit. I know I don't want to use the OCC bars. Fork is a little tweaked and needs some fiddling, but I just wanted to get a picture. As a side note, I am shocked people trust this fork with a motor behind it pushing them to 40 mph. I'm kind of afraid to just sit on it.
That's it for now. Need to rustle up some rear wheels to get the back end up, but I think I have some hanging around.
Was wanting to do something like this anyway, just happened to coincide with bike build-off season.
For your consideration as a starting point is this Rifton mobility trike I paid way too much money for, and has been taking up valuable space ever since. If it's gonna live here, it might as well earn its keep. I saw Skyway mags and figured it was worth the big money the Salvation Army was asking for it. In hindsight, even if I manage to get the solid rubber tires off the mags, I essentially have 3 front wheels, so this purchase may have been ill-advised. At any rate, it got pushed into a corner (several, actually) and has been hanging around for a few years now.
I've been wanting to build a swap meet hauler for some time now. Not sure if this is best suited for that, but it's what I have so I'll work with it. First things first, if I can't get bigger wheels on it I'm not interested, and Baby goes back in the corner, so I thought I'd approach that first. The rear wheels don't seem too difficult, I may just have to cut off the braking mechanism that is positioned to work with 20" wheels. The front is more troubling, requiring a fork change at the least. This will also allow me to replace the goofy "handlebar", so let's see what it will take.
I got this far in about 30 seconds:
If you know what you're doing, or even if you don't, this thing is really easy to work on. The bad news is that the head tube is a strange diameter, so just bolting in a fork isn't gonna happen. Time to bust out the calipers and start wandering around the shop looking for donor victims. Inside diameter on the trike head measured roughly 1.6", so a bike with a head tube of that outside diameter would be awesome, but what are the chances?...
...pretty good, actually! One of the first frames I looked at in the boneyard pile we all have seemed pretty close. I think it was a Giant mountain bike in another life, before it was painted with black latex house paint. It is an aluminum frame, so the head tube is a slightly larger diameter than a steel bike due to the thickness of the aluminum:
Close enough and junk otherwise (unless aluminum prices go back up again), so time to break out the Harbor Freight portable band saw I use once a year (gotta love HF for cheap versions of tools you hardly ever use!)
After cutting it off I knew it was close enough to work, so after half a day of grinding, sanding and clearancing on something I probably could have bought for a couple bucks, I was officially in build-off mode.
Basically a pressure fit, except for two things:
1. There was a tab welded inside the trike head tube to prevent the steering from travelling too far, which proved way more difficult to remove than I would have thought. More grinding, filing and sanding, but it's gone.
2. My "insert" wasn't long enough:
So I decided to make up a spacer and cut it in two:
I guess I forgot to take a picture after I installed it all with bearing cups, but it worked like a champ. I'll get a picture of it the next time I work on it.
It was getting a little late, so I threw on an OCC triple tree and fork with a wheel to see what I thought. Not married to the OCC fork, but it might work ok. Will probably depend on how bars will fit. I know I don't want to use the OCC bars. Fork is a little tweaked and needs some fiddling, but I just wanted to get a picture. As a side note, I am shocked people trust this fork with a motor behind it pushing them to 40 mph. I'm kind of afraid to just sit on it.
That's it for now. Need to rustle up some rear wheels to get the back end up, but I think I have some hanging around.
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