I bought a complete front end off a CBX 750 which comes with handlebars, light switches and ignition etc and the front forks but best of all a 16inch front wheel with twin disc brakes. I will be eventually removing the forks and making up a leading link front end with extended forks but for now i have it sitting in place on approximately a 45 degree angle so i can geta visual of things
It looks exceptionally long from this angle with no seats, backbone, downtubes etc and certainly longer than i first wanted the trike but thats the price i have to pay for using a FWD motor and fitting two seats. In actual fact once you get the other bits and pieces in there it doesn’t look as bad.
From my research and also common sense i figure that the higher your sitting from centre of gravity the more likely you are to be pushed around by the various forces when turning, therefore my aim is to make a low rider as far as seating positions go. I also don’t care much for the look of alot of trikes i see where the passenger is sitting like a sky scraper at the rear of the trike, they not only look out of place but surley its hard work for them when cornering at speed.
The word on the street is that a trike that has a wheel base ( center of front wheel to center of rear wheel) of 8 foot (2.4 meters) or less is likely to pull wheelies easily and be more “twitchy” in the back end and as cool as wheelies might be to some, apparently the novelty wears off after a week if you don’t bend the front forks first. A wheel base of 9 foot ( 2.7meters) or more is a more comfortable and stable handling trike and also more differcult to pull wheelies, by more good luck than skill it turns out that the wheel base of my trike currently sits at 2.8 meters which is in fact approximately the same wheel base as the donar car the motor come from so it can’t be all bad i guess 🙂
At first i was hoping for a fairly stretched chopper looking front end but to get that look means you need to either go more than 45degree rake which i don’t want to do or raise the height of the steering neck which i don’t want to do either cause that will mean that the seating position would also need to be raised so that i can still look over the bars, so…. i got out with the grinder whilst my wife wasn’t looking and cut the legs of some stools that we had so that i could judge seating heights and my seat sits approx 300mm from the floor and my wife sits roughly 350mm which in turn means that a comfortable viewing position over the bars at a 45 degree rake means the top of the steering neck is approximately 700mm from the top of the frame jig. None of those measurements are final yet but thats currently where it is prior to me making a steering neck up and mounting everything properly
It’s just too hot to be working unsheltered so i moved the gazebo over the trike and it fits quite good with the front forks and wheels not on it, at least now i can hopefully work on it with out getting constamtly burn’t.
I’ve currently waiting on the steering neck to be made and in the meantime i started to to make up the seat framing. Based on the pictures i see over the net most people recline the seat framing rather than make a seat in the recilined position so thats what i’ve done here. As mentioned previously i shortened the legs off a couple of stools we had lying around which gave me the chance to sit on the stools and judge what reclining position is comfortable.
