My Recumbent Trike

Elmo

Elmo

New Member
I finally have the Tadpole Trike rolling. No brakes and only two out of four derailleurs functioning. I am going to get it working before paint and so on. The third picture is my mid drive. The last pic is me and my buddy who is one year old and weighs 104 lbs.
 

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Nice Elmo! I really like the proportions, the wheelbase & moments seem well thought out for performance & stability (^)

I do have a question however ifn ya don't mind, why four derailleurs? I can see needing them for routing the chains & two for shifting ofc, but four functioning derailleurs?

Yer buddy seems psyched - "let's go for a ride/run!" written all o'er his fuzzy mug lol
 
If you notice the third picture has a freewheel mounted on a bottom bracket and has five cogs on it. I have two paired together on the front kinda like a front chain wheel with a front derailleur to shift between them. On the outside the other three cogs have a rear derailleur to shift between them. All this is in addition to the regular front and rear Derailleurs. It is a middrive to give more gear multiplication up and down than is possible with a conventional setup. I plan to ride this thing a lot using pedals only and need the extra low gears to climb long steep hills and extra high gears to really haul down the other side. It gives me 126 gears, 3x3x2x7 = 126. There are a lot of duplications and overlaps but you do get some useful higher and lower gears.
I can take no credit for the design because it is built mostly from Greenspeed plans with variations such as using a rear triangle from a old bike and using Fleet Trikes design for the front wheels.
It appears that it is going to take a really small engine to work on this one.
 
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That guy did some nice trikes and has some good ideas. Ricky has great info on his site also. He has a great set of plans for an aluminum tadpole also. He has been into trikes a long time and manufactured trikes over ten years ago. I downloaded most of the Thunderbolt plans about 1999 or so.
 
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