Newbie on my 3rd build...

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Brad! What have you done mate?! I started looking at building a trike earlier this year to help my wife's rehab after a hip replacement... Now, after looking at and buying your (Brad's) plans, I'm on my 3rd build! Started with the Meridian, then started a Deltawolf using round tubing instead of shs. It quickly morphed into a 1-off that actually works well.
Thanks Brad, for your inventive spirit, and for sharing what you have with others!
Can't seem to find how to insert pics... once I work it out, I'll post.
 
Joined
Aug 4, 2020
Messages
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Location
Victoria, Australia
Brad! What have you done mate?! I started looking at building a trike earlier this year to help my wife's rehab after a hip replacement... Now, after looking at and buying your (Brad's) plans, I'm on my 3rd build! Started with the Meridian, then started a Deltawolf using round tubing instead of shs. It quickly morphed into a 1-off that actually works well.
Thanks Brad, for your inventive spirit, and for sharing what you have with others!
Can't seem to find how to insert pics... once I work it out, I'll post.
Ok, hopefully these will work...
...or not!




If these work, I'll post some of the progress pics...
Rob. (Eskymo)
 
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And finally, the morphed deltawolf, made with chs instead of shs. One of the reasons I went this track is wanting to use tubing for the axle housing. 6004 bearings will press-fit nicely into it. (I'm using 20mm 4150 axle rod, hence the bearing size.)







 
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Ahhhh! Can't help myself! This latest trike is for an old friend, all 5'2" of her! Another hybrid, but all inspired by the plans I've bought from Brad. I'm using 24" rear wheels just to keep it in perspective. Next will be another 2 trikes for my wife n myself. These will implement all the things I've learned from past er, mistakes.




 
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Great work! Thanks for sharing. There's a lot of effort and great adaptation going on in those builds.
 
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Love the delta's , very inventive !
 
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This is called "spot the rookie mistake"! I'm looking at making an Aurora, but with 26" rears. Will roughly follow the design, but still using tubing for the axle housing.
Had the ideas on paper, but the actual rear was never gonna work, as the 1st pic shows. In Oz, the only gearset readily available is 14-28 rear with 28-38-48 chain ring. It gives about a 26-89 gear-inch range. I wanted more at each end, so found an 11-32 rear.(22-113 gi)
The bigger cog would hit the bottom bar, hence the modified style.
My concern is, do I have enough support there for the axle housing? I'm trying not to put any more metal in than necessary, but don't want it to fail...
Any input gratefully received!

 
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I reckon that's part of the challenge! Sometimes I need more brain than I was given though... I'll keep on welding, cutting and painting and see what we get as an outcome.😄
 
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I make first a design and check everything. Prevents the problems.
But it was my work, so I am used to do so.
 
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I've tried quite a few and found that all CAD programs have a long learning curve. It'd take me much more time to learn to use one sufficiently well than it costs me to make a mistake then correct it in steel.
 
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I've tried quite a few and found that all CAD programs have a long learning curve. It'd take me much more time to learn to use one sufficiently well than it costs me to make a mistake then correct it in steel.
The current CAD programs aren't that hard any more. The old ones where hard to learn and could take several weeks to learn.
I have the advantage that I have worked with most of them for many years. But I learned some people in how to use them and they got very fast the hang of it. Now you only need to learn the basics and the rest will follow.
 
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The trick is to choose one that you want to persevere with - and stick with it until you can use it. Find instructions/tutorials on the functions that you will need for designing what you want and only use them. The others will come later if you need them and you can sort them out then. The next thing is to use it often enough to remember how to do it.

If you use it as part of your work, you could probably attend training to quickly learn it. As a hobby, it is all piecemeal, takes longer, and reinforcement is not as good. Read: It's going to take longer. Like all software, it is cause and effect. How do I get it to do that? Why did it do that when I expected something different? How do I get back to where I was? Damn, I've mucked it up again.

I think it was Emiel that alerted me to Fusion 360. I wish I had found it years ago. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about part of the Electronics design section. I'm sticking with KiCad.
 
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Yes as a hobby it takes a bit longer because you don't use it all day.

Remembering where things where in the software or how you go back or undo surten thing are a problem I know. 😂😂
I started like that.
Luckily there is a lot of instruction videos online these days. Especially from Fussion 360.
 
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It's a bit like a lathe except there's nothing actually made at the end of it.

I have an old East German lathe. It's the model the Chinese ripped off for their cheap lathes. I needed to turn a spindle for a motocross bike front axle to mount a 15mm hubbed cycle wheel recently. It took me two hours. A competent lathe operator would have done it in 30 minutes or less. This was lathe use at it's most basic. No matter how much use I make of the lathe I'll never consider myself competent. The learning curve is both steep and long. I knew highly competent engineers in their 40's who couldn't hold a candle to a bloke in his 70's on a 10 foot lathe at a previous place of work. The thing is I still made what I needed after 2 hours so persevering with the lathe has a benefit.
With CAD I could spend many hours on the learning curve to have made precisely nothing. A basic sketch and some pondering will usually tell me if I can make what I'm wanting (most times not even that much is needed) so the work needed to learn it just seems wasted. Sure a fancy CAD picture looks very impressive, but we're building quite basic machines, most of which have already been built before by many others with very few unique aspects that need much design thought at all. On the occasions I mess up due to design failure the angle grinder almost always cures the problem quickly - indeed much quicker than the time I'd have spent using CAD even if I was a competent user. Even if I were to learn to use a CAD program competently there seems to be no real world benefit within this hobby. I can see plenty of benefit in learning CAD if making much more complex machinery where one mistake can have a myriad of knock on effects but not on such simple stuff.
 
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