Friction Drive question

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DavidCP

Member
So I ended up going with a 4-stroke friction drive and the engine works amazing. It's a 49cc engine.
To my surprise, it's not a total eyesore like I expected. It looks like it belongs. :-D

I only had a little bit of time to play with it today. Mostly letting it run on idle for about 30 minutes with a bit of playing with the throttle. I only played with it on my back porch but I noticed something curious.

When I got on the bike and carefully eased the throttle, it made a terrible high pitched squeal and moved quite slowly despite high RPM's. This was trying to move from a standstill though. I sadly ran out of time to take it to the road to test this theory out but...

Are these engines meant to be engaged at speed? It sounded like the clutch was slipping from a standstill.
 
OMG that was the best thing ever. :-D

Got to test run the contraption. That was amazing. It's not super fast but it's super convenient when going long distances. I covered a good eight'ish miles today with three rest stops for myself before I ran out of gas. Didn't put much gas into it as it was a test. Thankfully I ran out of gas two blocks from my home.

I think the max I got out of it was 20MPH on flat land judging by the speed of other cars and the speed limit. Not particularly fast but a very nice cruise speed.
 
No it's a centrifugal clutch for a 4-stroke engine. I think it just doesn't have enough low end torque to handle takeoff from a standstill.
At least not during the break-in period anyway. It was fine when I manually peddle from a standstill and then gave it some gas.

I went with a 49cc Huashengtaishan engine on this contraption. Definitely fits the description of a engine-assisted bicycle. It would be nice if it had some more torque but it fits my needs. :-)
 
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