Part 3: Assembly and Mock-up

Every thing’s dried up now and I’ve put it all back together. And boy does it look great! Aluminum as awesome in every way !! I’m glad I picked that gloss red. It really gets along with the Al.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice I flipped the configuration of the pieces from the first picture to the fourth to get the desired angles and wheel placement. I have it adjusted here at it’s lowest extreme just to make sure it can go low enough and BOY does it. If it were that low in the cockpit, it would be resting on my legs. It’s good to have room to work!

Also I first mounted the back-most aluminum cylinder directly to the cross-member, but found that to be incredibly wobbly. The plastic spacer that I cut and used to distribute the force of the nut was giving way and needed to go and round doesn’t play well with flat. The right way to do it is to drill a hole large enough to fit the nut and a washer partly through the cylinder so it has somewhere to perch. Flattening the cylinder on one side also proved very important. Measure very carefully when doing jobs like this. The cylinders needed to be within a half a millimeter of each other to fit properly. Sanding and filing can  help greatly to work that out and make it perfect.  ALWAYS measure twice, cut once. Especially if you’re working with custom parts like this that can’t be reproduced.

For the record, this is being built in my parents backyard (they’re very understanding) as my apartment can’t handle a project of this scale. I took this piece back home (30mi) with me just so i could look at it and handle it every now and then. It’s a really trick lookin’ thing

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