Home Made Quad

Hello good people, it is now time to leave the introduce yourself and try and put together a build thread on this quad. Even though I did not build this I will be redoing the whole quad and improving where it needs improving and I do hope all of you will chime in with comments and ideas. so here are the beginning pictures
Jim
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[professor]

Yikes! If it were me, I would get rid of all those chains and shafts- run the engine belt drive- direct to a wheel via a wheel rim attached to the wheel- like the old cycles did a hundred years ago, and like a member here (Lowracer) does. You can use an idler/ clutch to engage it, like he, and I do with my bikes.
All that rotating gear sucks up a surprising amount of power too.

 

[wisconsinjimmy]

Yup sure is a lot of drive gears, what I really like about it is that someone having nothing better to do put this together and this was built before a computer was even a word, some of the sprockets have every other tooth ground off and I got to give the guy kudos to figuring out the ratio just to get it to roll. I am going to get this pig running and then build another a little more modern.

 

[professor]

Those sprockets are called "Skip tooth" - they predate what is used now. I have no idea why they skipped teeth either.

 

[wisconsinjimmy]

Skip tooth ?? These sure look like they were ground off but what ever it took to make it work, I just think it is neat to see all the jack shafts lots of moving parts I like that.

 

[butterbean]

From the early days of bicycling up to the mid 1950's, bicycles used sprockets with every other tooth missing. They were made that way at the factory, and were called skiptooth. I suppose its possible that the sprockets on your homemade quad were not originally skiptooth and instead were ground off, but fwiw it wouldn't have effected the gear ratios at all. If any of the chains are still intact, you can tell if they were skiptooth chains by looking at the rollers. Every other roller would be closer together, and every other would be farther apart. The teeth can only catch on the ones that are farther apart, if I'm not mistaken. The reason that skiptooth is no longer an industry standard is because the asymmetrical roller spacing placed uneven wear on the rollers and caused worse wear on the sprockets than the now standard symmetrical roller spacing.

 

[wisconsinjimmy]

Interesting, thank you