shinyhappyrainbows

This is the beast I'll be building as the weather in Melbourne begins to improve with the impending spring, the Triceratops Two. For now, T-One is DOA because I think there will be less tweaking involved to get the tracking aligned on T-Two and the cornering will be as tight as a road bike under Cadel Evans' captaincy. The preliminary OpenSCAD code for the design resides on my GitHub.

I'm wondering if building a conventional tadpole trike, with "sports car" steering geometry is the right way to go. For the last few days I've been trying to reverse engineer the lean steering of an AR-3 trike, yeah, maybe for shits and giggles, but seeing the basic frame parts "move!" Wow! Update: I'm now seriously considering this steering pattern for my trike build. A decision that pretty much throws out everything but the parts list. Update 2: I'm sold! This is it. Not shown is how to lean the front wheels, but that's just horizontal kingpins at the end of the transverse beam and tie rods from the chassis to an upright wheel boss at each end of the transverse beam that pivots on the horizontal kingpins. In theory. Still some work to do, but I've cracked it! This is parametric, too. I enter a turning angle and it calculates the pitch of the transverse beam in order for it to stay horizontal. I might be making some design changes before ...

Oh my ghod! I can't believe this old "cobweb" is still hanging about on Web 1.0! lol

This is not a project as yet! It's an idea, something of a whitepaper, what a social network should be. I've been watching Facebook's and Twitter's declines into trading human connection and reaction like commodities and only staying on Web 2 socials to bear witness. Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, et al, are no better. So, I've had this idea, somewhat nebulous, and the skills to design a user interface, but I'm a hobbyist Arduino coder at best, Javascript breaks my brain. (Don't ask me why, I really don't know. Some speak C/C++, some speak both, some speak many, OK.) But, I do have this idea of what the app should look like. It should be, in no particular order... Open-source and free to use, fork or otherwise edit, audit or co-develop. It should not require cryptocurrency commitments and should use the existing internet in a peer-to-peer way. The app should work in browsers and the project covers its costs by selling mobile versions at a one-of...

I bought one of these and love it. Great welder for steel. Really pleased with my purchase, but I bought it to weld steel, so it really is a great little unit for THAT job. (Building my first trike, which will be steel.) I bought it from Bunnings online, Linda did the collect and when it got home, on the box it says it can weld steel or aluminium. You can imagine a maker like me would be pretty stoked by that, so I checked out the manual before looking at any other part in the box. The manual has this to say.. The problem is, flux cored aluminium wire, at 0.8 or 0.9 millimetre, is actually unobtanium. There is no such thing because it can't be made stiff enough to not jam or crush in the wire feed pinch roller. Ye cannae change the laws o'd pysics, Jim. To claim this welder could weld aluminium with aluminium cored wire is not only a misleading statement, it's possibly quite dangerous. What you can buy is 0.9mm aluminium "solder"/brazing wire, which is only suit...

I've committed to two bucket-list items in a single project, building a recumbent tadpole trike, thereby owning a trike. Read more here . Design is art, it's the law. So this trike is an artistic act, as well as an artisinal one.

What it says in the title, Have to say it's scarey. I have no more stomach for 'bots. I already miss friends, But they know that I'm here, As well as over on Clunkerbike Ruling of people, for what it's worth, is a hard, nuanced and difficult process, and machines are not adequate, if ever they will be. bandmassa@gmail.com Photo credit Henri Cartier Bresson.

I bought a welding machine, a handyman grade, solid state, gasless MIG welder, to be precise. I already have a mini oxy-acetylene rig, too, but I've never managed to get it alight. I think the bottles may have been empty from the start. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah, I could spend 2 grand on a KMX Kolt and get a fully functioning 1x8 speed recumbent trike with a warranty, but I think I can spend a grand all up building something similar and get 2 items crossed off the bucket list - own a trike and build some sort of bike/trike thing. Maybe it won't be as good as the KMX, maybe it'll be better. It'll be better in one way, at the very least, "I built this." Enter "Triceratops One." (That's it, up top, sitting on the baseboard for the jig I'll be building it on.) "Expense" is my main motivation. AU$2k isn't expensive as bikes and trikes go, but I'm a retiree on a "super" pension and I'd rather try and keep a bit of that cash i...