Wheelbarrow hot rod

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Allracing

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Nice work! I can't remember if you were going to have a roll cage or not. If not, I wouldn't use seatbelts at all

This is interesting. I have been back and forth on a roll cage and haven't decided - but leaning towards not having one. My thoughts are that teh kart will be wide and low and not lend itself to any type off off road driving. Hence the likelyhood of a roll would be very low. A crash on the other hand could happen and hence I am planning seat belts.

Of coursse my kids are gonne be the ones driving this thing so needless to say, safety comes first.

What is your though process regarding not going with seat belts if not going with a roll cage?

Do I need to rethink this and go with a cage?
 

JTSpeedDemon

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Basically, if they're buckled in without a cage, they won't be thrown from it, but the weight of the vehicle on top of the could very well snap their neck.
I posted a pic somewhere on the forum recently(can't find it) of a race kart upside down in mid air, and the driver had been thrown out of the seat and was basically laying down in midair instead of having his scalp pointing towards the ground.
Cage=belts
No cage=no belts
Even if it's a good roll bar with seatbelts, it's better than nothing.
 

landuse

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This is interesting. I have been back and forth on a roll cage and haven't decided - but leaning towards not having one. My thoughts are that teh kart will be wide and low and not lend itself to any type off off road driving. Hence the likelyhood of a roll would be very low. A crash on the other hand could happen and hence I am planning seat belts.

Of coursse my kids are gonne be the ones driving this thing so needless to say, safety comes first.

What is your though process regarding not going with seat belts if not going with a roll cage?

Do I need to rethink this and go with a cage?

Generally, this is how it works:

If you don't have a rollcage, you would rather want to be thrown free from the kart. If it flips, you do not want to be strapped to the kart and crushed underneath. You would rather want to be thrown free. Look at all the gokart racing guys. They don't have any belts......and this is for that exact reason.

If you do have a cage then you will want belts so that you are kept inside the cage if the kart rolls. You do not want to fall out and have the cage pin you down. People often also install arm restraints so that your arms cannot reach out the cage for them to be crushed in case of a crash
 

Allracing

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Thanks for the insight on rollcages and seatbelts guys, I hear you and realise that I will have to revise my plan! To be comfortable I feel that I need to go with at least a roll bar and belts. Need to think about a solution that will be safe and hopefully can blend in with the visual concept :)


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Allracing

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It was time to start looking at a drive shaft :) On the differential side, it needed to connect to this:






And on the engine side it needed to accomodate this 22T sprocket (as per earlier discussions on drive ratios :cheers2:):





In addition, the shaft needed to be supported by bearings on each end.



I started on the differential end and thought about just sticking a round shaft into the pinion splines and welding it solid, but decided to try and make a splined shaft end that would fit.



Ideally this would be done on the lathe, but I have no means of controlling shaft angle on my lathe - so it had to be done on the mill. the mill would make for a less rigid setup and it would severly limit workpiecfe length but I got after it anyway:



I ground a tool mimicking the spline form:






Then sat it up like this (spline tool is in a boring head to control depth of cut):













(Latter couple of pics are with a 2.0 version of the spline tool - first version was flexing too much)

Result:







the result is crude due to set up not really being stiff enough, but it actually fits pretty snug in the pinion. I am confident it will stand up to the limited tork output from the 6.5HP engine :)



More drive shaft stuff to follow :cheers2:
 

Allracing

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More driveshaft fun :welcome2:



I did some work to the engine side of the shaft. As mentioned, I had bought a 22 tooth sprocket for this side that needed to fit. I machined up a short stub axle fo rthe purpose, much like what was done on the diff side:











Next I focused on the shaft supports. I thought about getting some pillow blocks but decided to use some ball bearings I had laying around and machine some blocks myself out of aluminum:












I now had shaft supports and shaft ends and all I needed was a shaft :cheers2: I went with some 1" mild steel tubing. The two ends was welded to the shaft and bearing surfaces including bearings shoulders were machined each end:









Finally I had this:











The bearing blocks will receive some more machining, just have to figure out exactly how to hang this bad boy on the kart :rolleyes:
 

Allracing

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I came up with a plan for how to hang the drive shaft and went after it:











It can be seen how the bearing blocks received some trimming to fit in the notches in the cross beams.

Once the drive shaft was hung, I could install the chain:





And finally button up the TC:



Next up will be a modification of the front end. As much as I hate doing the same job twice, there is no way around it this time :)


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itsid

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jeez tapatalk sucks!
180MB of images served through their cdn @ 450kb/s (700 max)
took ages to load this page :(

Aaanyways..
it looks like you have chained the shaftdrive roughly 1:1 to the Driven pulley;
wouldn't it be easier if you directly mounted the driven to the shaft then to drop the engine down a bit (skipping the backplate entirely)?
or does the pulley cause a ground/steering linkage clearance issue then?

'sid
 

Allracing

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jeez tapatalk sucks!
180MB of images served through their cdn @ 450kb/s (700 max)
took ages to load this page :(

Aaanyways..
it looks like you have chained the shaftdrive roughly 1:1 to the Driven pulley;
wouldn't it be easier if you directly mounted the driven to the shaft then to drop the engine down a bit (skipping the backplate entirely)?
or does the pulley cause a ground/steering linkage clearance issue then?

'sid



Good observation, I did entertain the idea of mounting the driven pulley to the drive shaft for a while. Gear ratio pushed me towards the chain though, the gear on the jack shaft is 12 tooth and the one on the drive shaft is 22 tooth as it sits now :)


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JTSpeedDemon

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It's messing with my laptop! Please try uploading as thumbnails from your file manager! My mom's Android totally hates this thread. ;)
I know you're not trying to, but man, it sure makes it hard for some of us!
 

itsid

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Good observation, I did entertain the idea of mounting the driven pulley to the drive shaft for a while. Gear ratio pushed me towards the chain though, the gear on the jack shaft is 12 tooth and the one on the drive shaft is 22 tooth as it sits now :)


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Ah, so it's closer to 2:1 (1.8something)
yeah nothing one could easily ignore :(

Makes sense..

'sid

PS maybe reducing the images in size (say half the scale)
would make it easier for us to follow along..
(IIRC the tapatalk app has an image scaler embedded) *shrugs*
I love big images so I can zoom in on details..
but it's indeed quite tedious to wait for them to load here on the other half of the planet at times.... just saying ;)
 

J.S.@SMS

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I'm not sure what you guys are using, but my 6 year old computer that crashes at the slightest hind of difficulty (especially ads on webpages) is loading the pics fine. And this thing is coming along nicely.
 

itsid

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this computer is much older tbh... (last reinstallement of windows xp was in 2004)
but it too handles the pictures just nicely.. once they're loaded
bad thing is, it takes ages to do so at times
tapatalk serving speed is terrible; this time it peaked at less than 300kb/s
it took almost fifteen minutes to load this page entirely,
And while I can load this in background and come back to it when it's finished..
it's still a pain..

maybe you're closer to tapatalks cdn servers than me (likely you are)
and it loads at a more reasonable speed...
but around here it's almost inacceptable.
I wouldn't even dare to try that on a mobile device really,
a slightly less than ideal cell reception and it'd take hours.

'sid
 

itsid

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I'm not on taptalk (might be why I'm not having a problem), I'm using chrome, and I have a wifi router about 10 feet away.

you don't understand the problem..
the images Allracing posted are on tapatalk's servers!

I'm not using tapatalk myself I still need to connect to their servers to see the images,
since Allracing uses tapatalk and most of all their image hosting service.

'sid

PS we should stop spoiling this thread with tapatalk babble I guess ;)
 

Kartorbust

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I'll only mention this tidbit with Tapatalk, if you're on the app, you cannot click on the pictures anymore unless you get VIP which AllRacing has. I dumped the app and been using chrome on my phone for the last week or longer (lost track). They also changed what size pictures you can upload for free. It's not worth having and the cost of admission sucks. I have 200 down 20 up so picture sizing doesn't matter, but for those on slower than molasses speeds (might as well be dialup), pic sizing does matter.

Now this Wagon-Rod, I love what I see. Cannot wait until its finished with some videos of it running around. I'm curious to see how well the driveshaft and differential do.
 

Allracing

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I hear you on the pics, I will drop the size from now on in :) I mentioned that I needed to do some mods to the front end. The background is that I moved the rear axle, seat position and steering wheel backwards to gain leg room. The larger wheelbase just didn’t look right so I wanted to move the front axle a bit back too, or more specifically relocate the spring from being in front of the frame to under the frame. I also needed to move the tie bar as it was hitting the engine (sorry no pics of this). I chose an intricate solution:










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Allracing

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Getting close to a test drive now! Save a few minor loose ends, the only thing missing was the seating arrangement. Now the whole kart was built around using the wheelbarrow tub as body, but at this point I realize that this may have to change! The tub is kinda small and the back angle is not right for a comfortable seat. I am undecided as of now and will mock up a plywood seat for the test drive.

I started with modifying what was meant to be a support brace for the wheelbarrow tub. It will now be the seat back and I wanted it to be adjustable:





Then clad it with some plywood and also made a seat (looking at it I want to do it differently hence it is safe to say it is temporary :)):







Only the minor loose ends left now :)
 
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