Small stirrings and progress. I was able to buy an 18inch Honda drum brake front wheel which I intend to use at the front of my delta trike cyclecar. I already have rims, spokes and hubs which I'll will be using on the rear axle. Bicycle wheels are all very well, but when it comes to finding wheels with drum brakes, wheels from lightweight motorcycles are cheaper and easier to find.
A pair of Villiers carbs in slightly down on their luck condition have come my way at a cheap price which is something I never say no to. Once upon a time Villiers engines could be had for $NZ10.00 a wheelbarrow full, but not anymore. Seems they've become 'collectors items' as opposed to being cool wee engines that are great fun to mess about with.
Time spent in bed while I was ill has been useful in that I've been able to puzzle out some design ideas for building the front suspension. Trying to completely replicate the Colombe type drive system has to be a non-starter because I don't much fancy trying to piece together the necessary U- joints and hub centre steering that such a system requires. When I was a younger woman I didn't mind climbing over mounds of scrap steel in order to look for an elusive part. And of course because the parts were for a simpler breed of vehicles from the 1950s and older they were much easier to build a design around and they were also cheap to buy because they were old and nobody wanted them.
Now though scrap steel prices have soared here in NZ which means that nothing gets to lie around for long anymore. And being parts from the 1990s onwards they are incomprehensibly difficult to work with even if something halfway useful can be found. The lovely old motor parts I cut my engineering teeth on are now scarce and collectable and folk are asking silly prices for them even when they are in distressed condition.
Sooooo what I'm going to do is mount the engine on or about the front wheel and use a belt drive to obtain forward motion. The old and somewhat grainy illustration is of a Blake Sociable which is a truly obscure make from the 1920s. What I particularly like about it is that the Blake is a front wheel drive delta trike type cyclecar with the engine ahead of the wheel and it is belt driven. This should work very nicely for my Intrepid Cyclecar semi-replica and to my mind has the advantage of having all the 'works' in one place. The other advantage is that the cyclecar body shell now is clear of all motorising gubbins which means that I can lay out the pedal drive mechanism with plenty of room for my feet.
