Roll of The Dice

This week has been spent putting finishing touches on the vehicle. Mounting and tightening the shifter knobs, speakers, power source for all the electronics, shaft collars to beef up the axles a bit, ect ect.

Sculpture is in its final stages, waiting for a sunny day to bring the pieces outside for painting.

The cassettes decided to take a crap all of the sudden and stop free spinning. You would expect dirt cheap Walmart bikes to last a little longer right? I guess we got what we paid for... both failed the same way. Maybe there was lead based castings or something in the freewheel casing... problem solved though, Erik bought American made quality (after being to be subject to a lecture on how buying china parts is crap from the bike store guy) and now they freespin smooth as butter silk pancakes.

So we have .75'' axles supporting this thing, more than enough steel to hold this baby up in its current configuration. The wheels flex slightly when loaded, not terrible but certain sections more than others. John decided to add some shaft collars to beef up those certain sections and cut down on the flexing. A 1.25'' OD x .75'' ID aluminum tube was magically ordered. Now the ID had a tolerance of .020'', you basically have a 50% chance of it being oversized which is what we want in this case to slide over the shaft easily. Tube arrived, John broke out the calipers to see where it fell in, .735'' ... =*(

John didn't have access to a .75'' reamer at the shop, luckily he found a dull .75'' drill bit that happened to cut just undersized enough to be a pain in the ass. Multiple passes were made on each collar to make sure the max amount of material was cut from each. The final bore was somewhere around .748''. Taking into consideration the axles have around a .005'' tolerance this would definitely cause a headache somewhere during the fitting process. Well nothing beats oil, mallets and some good old old elbow grease. After about an hour of wailing on the 3 axles John and Dave got them snug and in place.

Beefy, look at those guns

Tom went to town with the angle grinder cutting mesh sections for equipment mounts and foot rests. Those cutting wheels really got chewed up by the mesh material. Cut, cut cut, sparks, sparks, sparks ::: break::: replaces wheel, cut, cut cut, sparks, sparks, sparks ::: break::: replaces wheel, cut, cut cut, sparks, sparks, sparks ::: break::: replaces wheel. If only we had our oxy/acetylene tanks filled... More pics coming soon. Only 2 weeks away!