VACATION

I have spent a great holiday by working on my shorty trike. The pleasure of making things and being creative is quite enjoyable.

I took a couple pictures to show what I am doing just in case someone out there wonders how new products get developed.

The shorty trike is approximately ten inches shorter than a stock Sprint or Sport. I gained the height by moving the engine to the rear with a gearbox

This allowed lowering the entire plane down the ten inches without having the engine hit your head. The mechanics of it is that I used a straight tube for the tribar crosstube rather than the bent one. This allows the use of stock wires, wings, etc from other single place quicks.

I also incorporated two aframes rather than the single aframe of the stock plane. This provides much better stiffness and also eliminates the bending of the root tube as the wing wires are tensioned.

To test the overall dimensions of the shorty trike, I made a temporary set of Srpint/Sport wing wires, including the diagonal wire.

Installation of these wires proves that the tribar attach point I have chosen is the proper distance from the root tube and also the proper distance front to back.

The strainght tribar cross tube will certainly not have the problems associated with the stock unit, ie, bending and not tightening the wires properly.

I have two pictures of interest showing the trike setup with the Sport/Sprint wires. The first shows how much blocking I needed to get the rootube level, almost ten inches.

The second shows the amount of washout designed into the Sport/Sprint wires. The nearest tube is the root tube and the farthest is the outer wire compression strut. The washout measured 4 degrees. The dihedral per side measured 4 degrees also, for a total for the plane of 8 degrees.

My plan is to make a new set of wires which will have 4 degrees total dihedral and 1 degree washout.

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