The
Green Machine: My first attempt at building a
recumbent trike... wow, I need to get better! But a
great build that taught me a lot. First things first.
Most of the credit (nearly all) should go to
Atomiczombie.com where I bought my (very detailed)
plans from. Highly recommend you check them out as they
have many different types of bike plans. Second, thank
you Mike for the patient assistance and much grinding
and welding. The main goal of this build was to learn,
and use as many resources from scrapped bikes, rather
then new parts.
Resources/Materials: - Build manual from
Atomiczombie.com - Two
10 speed bikes - 1 1/2"
steel square tube - 2,
18" BMX wheels (got 5/8" axels which are a little bigger
than the norm 3/8"?, and they also had sealed bearings),
with lots of spokes. IE, very strong. - All the toys... hrmph I mean
'tools' a guy could want. OK let’s be honest most are
toys.
First Things First: - This was my first
recumbent bike EVER! So... I'm sure you will be able to
find plenty of mistakes that I made, or may miss here. This was a
learning build, and any info you think you can add feel
free to do so.
- CHEAT! Unless your good at designing stuff,
and have a good base of knowledge. Look up a good design
to copy, and make simple modifications.
- I'm a
jerk. Yes as hard as that may be to believe. I'm a jerk.
I didnt take enough pics of this build. Wasn't sure if I
was going to start the website up again. And so I had
missed an oppertunity to share a lot of good
material.... "Dear God, I'm sorry, I'll change... if I
have to... I guess" -The Man Prayer, Red Green Show.
Scrapping: It’s not just for women! Now there are a couple of key
pieces that we scrapped off the old frame. Mostly
components, but a few actual frame parts to. On a
regular recumbent or a more home design one may actually
end up using more of the frame then we did. It took
three bike chains to end up with one long enough to
stretch from the front to the rear. Reused nearly all
the cables and tubing but one (the rear shifter cable).
Now the two key frame parts that we went after were the
crank housing on one bike, and the steering tube on two
others (the design called for three but we skipped the
under-seat stearing, which we'll show later)
Frame: The frame is made out of
1 1/2" steel. Not sure on the guage. This was the size
recomended in the Atomic Zombie design for us biggins :)
However it does def add some wieght. I may not be an
engineer but it seems like it could be a size smaller
tubing and still be just fine. The frame is VERY stiff.
Very sturdy. If I was to lighten the frame with out
trying to size it down I would concentrate on using
smaller steel at key points, such as; the boom, and the
forks. The bounce in the ride on rough surfaces actually
made me already start contemplating that the next
recumbent I build will have a rear suspension. Some of
this jolting may be cause by a very crude seat however.
A more padded, form fitting one is already on order as a
modification!
Further the only parts of the frame
that came from the original 10 speeds are the crank
housing and steer tubes. Noted in the pictures below the
crank housing doesnt actually have the crank and pedals
on and is painted blue. The steer tubes were modified
and welded onto the end of each 'arm'.
Frame design changes: One thing
that should be noted is that the Atomic Zombie design
called for a underseat steering sytem that would be
linked to the tie rod to control the wheels. In my
impatients and desire to simplify the design I skipped
this and went for 'direct steer' system if you'd like to
call it that. Meaning the handle came back to the rider
from both wheel hubs. Now this seems to be the prefered
method if your goign to also use rim brakes on the front
as the entire arm can be used for both steering and
brake mounting. I was really hoping that one single
brake in the rear would be enough to slow her down, but
alas no. I didnt want drop the bills on disk brakes and
again was eager to have something to at least ride on
and see what it was like.
The important thing
here though is that the wheel I think were pushed a
little farther forward for a underseat steering, but
this is not optimal for direct steering. So in hind
sight I would bring the front wheel booms back an inch
or two to accomidate this design.
Which brings me
to note a cool CAD program I discovered by Google called
Sketch Up. Very easy to learn and play around with
and there are even a few recumbent designs on it that
you can download and play with.
