G'day all

coln72

New Member
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Dec 5, 2010
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I've been playing with pedal/petrol and electric/petrol trikes for a couple of years with the plan to have a team of students enter a 24hour race that is help every year down here in Australia.

I have never had any luck getting an electric motor to work properly, keep killing electronics, but for the last two years I have entered a pedal/petrol trike powered by either a GX31 last year and a GX 35 this year. The event we enter runs for 24 hours as I said earlier and we only get 3 litres of petrol for the event. Our tanks are sealed to stop anyone from adding fuel during the event.

Last year I ended up breaking a flywheel and bending the crank in the GX31 due to a students stuff up in assembly - a spacer was left out during reassembly :mad: causing a four hour delay while I had to race around modifying another motor to suit our drive system.......

This year was totally different. Apart from a carby isssue that sprung up before the race, and which I failed to fix properly :geek:, the mix of GX35 and GX31 carbs didnt work out to well in the end - had to change to a proper 35cc carb, the trike ran like a dream. We ended up 4th outright and won our class by 53 laps! The best bit of all was that we still had around a litre of fuel left :) It works out that we were covering approx. 400km/litre
 
Thought I'd better throw in a few pics and a bit of a description of the beast. As I said before it is a pedal/petrol hybrid powered by a GX35 Honda.

It has a CrMo frame and roll cage covered in what we call coreflute (plastic cardboard used in signs). Got no idea of the weight but it is too heavy for my liking (my background is in human powered trikes where 23kg ready to race was heavyish).

The pedal drive train is pure bike, 73 tooth chain ring and a 9 speed cluster along with a bloody long chain and a couple of rollers. The motor drive is via a friction drive onto the rear tyre. The motor is mounted on a hinge and is spring loaded. The rider engages the motor via a lever. Nothing fancy, but the system is foolproof and reliable enought that a group of 16 to 18 year olds could not break it :D
 

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