We Got a Bleeder!

Monday night was quite the busy time at the ol' shop. We worked through a few problems (opportunities) and came out triumphant and excited. Kate, Tom, Dave, Hedy, Erik & John put in another hard night of work to get The Reckoner on her legs.

First order of business was to solve the steering arm design. Tom suggested we go with a bent tube design. This would cut down on the amount of welds and alignment . We were going to order a metric steel tube to fit the motorcycles steering assembly, but after searching the scrap pile originally for a piece of steel to test the bender with, we ended up finding the perfect fitting piece of rusty old scaffold. Yay for scrap pile finds!

We ground a bit down on one end and it looks like it could fit... Now to test the bender and see if we can get everything parallel.

John workin' the 12 ton bender. Go go harbor freight its great!

knowledge.

This may look like a mangled piece of failure but we learned quite a bit from this test piece. The top two bends were done with a smaller die which ended up pinching the pipe. The bends resulted in both ends nearly parallel to each other, but twisted slightly. The bottom bend was with a larger die and successfully no pinching. The bend radius was unfortunately too large and ended up twisting the pipe further. All in all we realised that there were too many variables using a hand bender with pipe twisting and making sure parallelism is maintained on both arms. If we had a nice set up with proper measuring tools & jigs, a steering arm out of bent tube would be the way to go. So onto plan B which is inserting 2 short tubes into the steering assembly and welding up a square tube steering arm.

Tom gets cutting the tubes...

And grinding ...

Kate cuts all the steering arm square tube...

Meanwhile Dave finishes the steering arm bearing mounts. Curse you dull drill bits and your siren screams!

Victory slam!

Hedy starts crafting the sculpture pieces. Who knew PVC fittings could crack so easily? Does Hedy have super human strength? Its a mystery!

Good old PVC & chicken wire

Kate & Hedy sizing it up... The Reckoner is coming together

Erik saves the day with a late night bike delivery.

We decided it would be best to go with 2 new cheap steel bikes for the drive train instead of sorting thru our scrap pile and sizing components. Building up the hubs & derailleurs from our scrap components would cost more than the new bikes from Toys R Us! New complete drive trains with everything fitted... its the way to go. This means that the 2 bikes we cut & prepped were for nothing, well no we now have prepped bikes for future goofy bike projects!

Taking all the steering arm parts and aligning it for welding.

Magnets are your friend.

John carefully tacks the pieces in place. Can't warp the steering arm!

Tom finished the tubes. Old rusty piece of scaffold vs ground down shiny tube bling. Time to fit into the steering mount!

The butter zone. The tubes fit snuggly, success!

Both tubes fitted, steering column looking a little heavy... time to cut her down.

Slim diet of sawzaw blades & grinder did the trick. Ready to mount to the frame!

It was a great effort today, great job team! In the next few days we will be mounting the bikes & the steering column with arm attached... Then The Reckoner is rolling!