Out of sequence…

I’ve a couple of bits written, but it’s still ‘lead in / whimsy’ stuff, which might work if you are patient, killing time or like a meander…but might be boring as sin if you want to get to the greasy bits…so I’ll ditch some of the run-in stuff this post and add it in next time, flipping between the two genres in subsequent posts, until we are exclusively in garage + welder territory…

My Early FF Attempts

I mentioned that I was into attempt Mk. III at a FF. That’s maybe a bit dramatic. Mk I was a long time ago and would have been a Fiat 600 engine from a car I had from which the body oxidised to transparency...but with a great engine. That saw the Fiat 600 vertical twin (it was good…) mated to a Norton gearbox (it was there…) and all sat in a modified Suzuki frame (it was cheap….) As to where and how I sat…I wanted a better way, but never gave it enough thought, and made it up as I went along…never a great method! Think maybe I started off that project in youthful enthusiasm more than thought and planning…and it ‘died’

That was followed, twenty years on, by Mk II, a notion of designing something which would do 70mpg at a steady 70mph. That felt like a good design brief / challenge to ponder over. Some very rough calculations metered by guesstimating suggested I’d need around 25~30bhp and significant streamlining / reduction in frontal area.

I wanted to use a 2CV engine (as being unburstable, frugal, available, simple and alloy…tho’ ‘of it’s time’, hence low efficiency) and drop the CoG more for reasons of frontal area reduction than handling. The biggest ambition was to build leading link forks…which felt the ‘right thing to do’, but I wasn’t sure why. They worked, and seemed easy to get right, and the bike got to rideable rolling chassis stage…but the arrival of a brace of other projects at the same time, with attendant space pressures, saw this get neglected to the point of disposal

The current and Mk.III attempt, which is maybe about 30% through, is the one I’ll take some time outlining in coming posts.

Does anyone else suffer from this ‘shed-builders’ characteristic? A s**t day at work. Come bedtime, you slither in behind your wife / husband / partner / dog and slumber off to sleep, whilst happily thinking about how you are going to solve the particular nagging garage problem of the moment. I love it…