Sancta Rosa...you can talk about anything you want to.Just give us a few words when you leave next time. bob
Well folks, it's taken me a month to get through this thread, following links, studying pictures, scheming and day dreaming. The idea of building a "special" or "cyclecar" has got ahold of me and a couple of weeks ago I put my hot rod up for sale. I’ve been on the lookout for an old motorcycle engine, rear end, small car frame and suspension parts for the build. My rough idea was to modify a Model T chassis and suspension, use mc engine up front, light rear end from an ATV or small car. For the body, I planned to cut up an old aluminum v-hull boat for the back in either boat-tail style or inverted into the look of the “skiff” style I’ve seen here. No disrespect to the three-wheeler lovers, those Morgans are tits, but I want to go with 4 wheels. I want a two seater and plan to stagger the cockpit with the passenger set back a little bit for elbow room. Searching the interwebs, I discovered a 1959 Harley Servi-Car with the original flathead 45 cubic inch motor for sale located in my hometown (population ~6500). I visited the owner and took the bike for a ride around his back pasture. No rear suspension, tank shifter with foot clutch, ape hanger handle bars and an extended springer front end made for a wild ride! The owner is a Graybeard originally from New Jersey and has been living in Southeast Texas for many years. We hit it off. While we talked in the yard he shows me his 1958 Douglass Aluminum boat in near perfect condition also for sale, beautiful. We talk even trade and I mull the deal over and talk it over with folks I trust. I’m still on the fence when I call him to set up a time I can drive the bike on the road and see how it handles at speed. I bring up the boat in conversation and he says he intended on throwing the boat in with the deal. What do y’all think? Harley 45, servi-car rear end, model t frame, aluminum boat body? I understand stock Model T motor put out 20 hp and that’s comparable with the flat head 45.
Servi-cars used to be throw away items, as they are geared so low that to get anywhere, or to keep up with traffic you have to wind the p**s out of the engine. This resulted in vibration you wouldn't believe. I changed the gearing on mine to slow the revs down some at road speed, but even so my feet would slowly vibrate off the rear of the footboards. Ended up "walking" your foot to the front of the board, only to find it back at the rear again. Only bike that I had that you had to walk while riding. Like everything Harley, now they bring stupid money. Go figure--- Herb
George J. Mercer designed cyclecar published in the 'Automobile' magazine; The 'Little Microbe' cyclecar. There you go Chuxx I included an interesting photo of a 1911 West cyclecar chassis as well.
The West looks like it doesn't have a transmission .Rather a sliding drive wheel against a friction disc to vary the speed.
Yes I've always wondered about friction disc transmissions. The notes on the page where I found the chassis picture say that the West system wasn't 'entirely satisfactory' whatever that means. Just an observation about using an ATV rear axle; - living in a farming region like I do it hasn't been difficult to cheaply collect a few different axles from scrap quad bikes that are in varing degrees of distress. Most are too narrow for car use unless the scheme of having the front axle wider than the rear is used. These are the plain axles without a diff I'm talking about by the way; - the more magic ATV axles with all the bells and whistles on them are well out of my price range The one in the picture is a Honda axle with single drive sprocket and a drum brake (I have two of these in rough condition). It's a typical ATV axle, not very wide. the live axle carries the weight of the vehicle and it's mounted onto the vehicle via a central carrier. Even though the axle itself is a thick and heavy piece of steel they do get bent due to not being supported at the hubs in the way that car axle usually is. And this is the problem with using an ATV axle on a cyclecar, - especially if it's a two seater. Just as a by the way I've got a couple of lighter duty ATV axles that are wide enough to fit to a cyclecar, BUT I'm going to have to figure out a way to support them at the hub ends first. Then I'll most probably have the central disc brake sheer the axle shafts off the first time I apply the brakes
Regarding the disc drive: It means that maintaining enough friction to drive the vehicle in wet or dirty conditions wasn't always in the cards.Then when the discs wore,that presented further problems.There was no good way to adjust the pressure of the disc to the other.
Friction-disc drive is most closely associated with GWK, whose system must have been practical enough, within whatever limits, to engender a specific association with GWK (if that makes any sense ...)
I used to have a Raleigh Wisp that had a CVT transmission. You can just see the belt that runs from the variable diameter pulley on the engine to the large pulley that was bolted to the front chain sprocket. Worked well enough but in the wet and uphill pedestrians would walk past me while I was revving the nuts off it in a cloud of steam.
Solid axles, I am embarking on a project to build a recreation of the jappic cyclecar, and I am using go kart parts The axles are about 1 meter wide with a 6 mm keyway to mount spokets and brakes etc . Bearings are nice and self aligning axles come in different diameters from 25 mm to 50 mm
Friction and belt drive, My current cyclecar the chater lea has twin belt drive and that seems to work well in the very limited running so far, Daf had a number of belt drive cars up until about the 70.s with variomatic , and most twist and go scooters are belt drive with adjustable pulleys to drive in France there is a whole after Market range of tuning parts for these with different pulleys and weights etc Friction drive. Hmm a friend of mine had a baby CID cyclecar on loan this had a friction drive the difficulty has finding a material to recoat the parts once worn
Your Jappic project is going to be amazing I had wondered about go kart axles, but being a junkyard raider type of woman I can get an armload of old ATV axles around here for the price of a brand new kart axle. Recycling and all that Speaking of recycling this is what a couple of Kiwis have done with some 50+ year old Villiers Junior engines. They are around 98cc in case you are wondering. I have 4 or 5 of them under the bench myself which has set me to wonder about using them for my cyclecar build. Pity that I've only got just one of the slant finned version though because they're the nicer looking engine
This looks like something that ought to be called "Piglet". I'd like to see the rest of it. Love that political '90s look ...
A good while ago I made a post to request information and comments on an unusual prototype here in this thread. Here it is: http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=5553227&highlight=hinged+frame#post5553227 Since then I've found a couple of links with a smattering of details, but no engineering drawings unfortunately: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrscharroo/6014628651/in/photostream and http://www.isetta-owners-club-gb.com/rare_7.htm Although the Prvenac car is a bit larger than cyclecar dimensions, I thought its clever design might capture someone's imagination, as it has mine.
Like a miniature Gordon Diamond: The central articulation is interesting. I explored a lot of this sort of thing in terms of equivalent interconnected sets, and kept running up against effective equivalent track being less than the actual track, resulting in a condition where under lateral acceleration a vehicle would lift one wheel and flop over onto its bump stops too long before reaching its theoretical tipping point. I think I might have a solution, though.
Thank you for the very interesting comments, Dawie! This effect you mention as limiting lateral acceleration, perhaps severely; would the use of larger diameter side wheels, using tires of low aspect ratio have a greater adverse effect? The vehicle I envision is fairly low-slung, with larger side than fore-and-aft wheels, and very little coachwork.
Zerk, I'm talking specifically of equivalent interconnected sets, i.e. two wheels and an interconnecting mechanism, which, though physically arranged in the conventional way with one at each corner, behave in certain ways like a diamond-plan or three-wheeled arrangement. Because the diamond plan is effectively two "trikes", the stability of each against tipping over will be limited by the effective track of a "trike" being that proportion of the two-wheeled axle's track that corresponds to the location of the centre of gravity relative to the wheelbase. It is modified by the fact that the two "trikes" share the same two-wheeled axle, so the instability of one will in some ways be cancelled by that of the other, to the extent that they are similar in weight (i.e. a very heavy "trike" might tip over simply taking a very light one with it). When this gets translated into equivalent interconnected sets we get the situation where instead of load being distributed between the two wheels of each set according to the geometry of whatever mechanism links them, one wheel gets lifted off the road while the other drops onto its bump stop. If we are talking a literal diamond plan this won't happen. The closest would be the above weight-bias situation, with the vehicle simply tipping over. I don't think your wheel diameter idea should be a problem, except in so far as tall wheels might tend to raise the centre of gravity, especially if they are conventionally driven. Keep everything low - and evenly balanced - and you should be good.
Thanks for the explanation, much clearer now. The front and rear "trike" behavior hadn't occurred to me.
I have strong reservations about the rear wheel location of such devices, having been witness to this "thing" (not what I call a cycle car, BTW) nearly killing its owner. While following it one could see the rear wheel adopting vast - and dangerous - angles of lean when cornering.
Possibly a combination of a high centre of gravity and a too flexible chassis. Point taken though, the rear suspenion on many classic era three wheelers was a somewhat underdone around the pivots and anchor points.
I've been looking over the PRACTICAL MECHANICS cyclecar articles today and I made the decision to use as much recycled and scrapyard material as I can with this build. Things like bolts and the like will all be new of course, but as much as possible will be genuinely old and discarded which should give the car a nice patina so it doesn't look brand new. For the chassis rails I'm considering using Rimu which is a native New Zealand timber and can be found in the local demolition yards easily enough. A suitable rear wheel from an old European motorcycle is already to hand, but at the moment I'm not sure what I will be using for front wheels. I do own a pair of Ford 10 stub axles which I'd like to use, the alternative being a pair of Morris Minor stub axles fitted into a custom made carrier which is a lot more work, but more authentic looking. The magazine articles describe the front suspension as being copied from a Carden, but as shown in the drawings there are quite a few of the bracing rods normally found on a Carden entirely missing from the front suspension. Needless to say I will be fitting these in place when I build my car! Just lately the weather here has been foul with heavy rain. The floodgates around town were put up for the first time in ages because the river was getting close to spilling over the stop banks. In amongst all this the 1970s Datsun I normally drive decided to have itself a flat battery on the way back from the hospital which meant I had to phone for help to get going again. If I still owned my faithful old 1954 Morris Minor I could have taken out the crankhandle and got going again in moments. Silly modern new fangled cars On the same note my also mechanically handy daughter owns a modern Rover which has a maze of incomprehensible objects under the bonnet and sometimes when she's stumped she asks me for advice and wonders why I laugh. Yes, don't be amazed, I have a daughter in her twenties because I came late to Religious life and it's always amusing in Catholic gatherings when I say, 'And this is my daughter.......' There's always someone who looks like they want run off and phone the bishop immediately It's also funny to see folk passing bys' expressions when my daughter has managed to persaude me to help her with her Rover and I'm spanner in hand under the bonnet with my sleeves rolled up. I still think it's a silly car though, not a carburettor in sight anywhere, no pushrods inside the engine and far too much in the way of electronic magic things for my liking. If nothing else building this cyclecar will show my daughter what a car should be like
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