New guy in MI with questions

Dymaxion

New Member
Local time
8:45 AM
Joined
Dec 7, 2009
Messages
3
Hello everyone.
This is my first post, but I expect there will be many more to come, since I am starting my first motor bike project! Here is how it all happened...

My father-in-law has a hobby of restoring old bicycles. Personaly I haven't ridden a bike more than a handful of times since my BMX days as a teen. When visiting him over Thanksgiving I got a look at a beautiful old Schwinn Phantom that he had stuck a motor on. Away I went down the road - what a blast!

The next day I find a website with motor kits on sale for the thanskgiving weekend, so I impulsively order up a Skyhawk GT5 setup. Kit arrived last week and in searching for bike ideas I stumbled across motoredbikes.com and it has turned out to be a great resource for me. I wanted a simple black cruiser and bought a Schwinn Delmar last night. Between cheap chinese motors and cheap chinese bikes, this could turn out to be my least expensive hobby yet...

I have some very busy weeks ahead of me for work so this will likely only get a few minutes here and there, but I've got all winter ahead of me. Here is my plan / thoughts as of now:

- Once I get the bike running, I want to add a front brake in addition to the coaster
- I want to keep the front fender but will be replacing all brackets to sure that thing up.
- I understand I will need to enlarge the kit's sprocket to accomodate the coaster brake's dust cover, correct?
- I also understand clearance can be an issue with the sprocket bolts and the coaster brake's arm. I saw suggestions to either bend the arm or to put both pieces of rubber inside the spokes instead of one on each side. I picked up some rubber conveyor belt material that is a very dense, reinforced rubber like that provided in the kit except half the width (or less). I am going to replace the outter rubber ring with one from this material and see if that gives me enough clearance. Thoughts?
- I dont like the plastic idler. I saw an awesome looking alternative on this site - a spring loaded tensioner with a hard rubber idler wheel and bearings. I bought one and plan on using that for a quieter setup.
- Motor mount. I am either going to drill through the steel frame or fabricate something out of u-bolts or muffler clamps and a cut up hockey puck (awesome idea I saw here or on another board).
- One question on motor mount philosophy - insulate with rubber or metal-on-metal? My thought was to use a thin piece of rubber gasket material to wrap the bike tubes before clamping the motor mounts on. I have also heard this can cause even more vibration as the motor's mass alone must resist the vibration; and a solid mount to the bike can actually reduce the vibration by giving more mass to resist the vibration. Thoughts?

All feedback and suggestions are welcome. I hope to start putting this thing together later this week.

Jason
 
Welcome aboard.

I would not put both pieces of rubber on the inside of the spokes. Maybe your best bet would be to install that per instructions and see if you have clearance issues. If so, then you can make modifications.

I would not drill through the frame; too many stories of frame failure. It seems that was a poor idea from the start and the vendors ought to do away with that altogether.

As for vibration dampeners in the motor mounts, it's probably a good idea unless you have a particularly strong frame. I used leather. Cut a few strips out of a cheap leather belt. Seems to be working, or at least not causing any harm, and will likely last a lot longer than rubber.

You'll have fun. Keep us posted.
 
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