Month: August 2016

So, it was a fairly painless experience getting the crate from the UK to the US, including even customs clearance etc, but as you would expect it was literally the last (few) miles that were the most harrowing.

If you ever do such a thing, ship to the “terminal” not “door-to-door”.  See, when you ship door-to-door the shipper can take it as their personal life mission to make sure that crate hits your doorstep.  However, you’d better have a forklift, as they don’t supply one.  Re-directing the delivery from door-to-door to something else causes all kinds of hiccups back up the pipeline.

So after many, many phone calls, delays due to timezone differences and other matters, I was finally able to change the shipment to “will call pickup at terminal”.  At which point, they used their forklift to put the crate on my trailer direct.

And indeed they did.  10′ x 4′ x 3′ (approx), 850lbs.  Yes it’s set too far forward on the trailer, but at that point I was happy to have my crate and head for the hills.

In short, a whole buncha stuff, including more bubble wrap than a UPS Store.  Trike made it safe and sound, only a few scuffs here and there.  Given what the crate has been through, I’m quite impressed.

This kit is extremely well made, and one can tell that many, many years were spent working out the kinks on this one.  Were *I* to do it, bolts wouldn’t clear other bolts, brackets would go every which way – these refinements are already made.  Every bolt, bracket, fastener was included, plus some other items I didn’t expect (cables, clips, etc).

Obligatory “first sit” photos attached below…

Interim update to fill the void, should have quite a bit more this weekend.  But to tide you over, let’s talk tires.

Motorcycle tires are curved as a single-track (front and rear share the same single-path) vehicle must lean to turn, and you need tread out there to keep the black-side down.  This results in a contact patch about the size of a postage stamp, but it works.

A car is a dual-track (front and rear share same path, left and right do not), and the trike is a triple-track (front right, front left, and rear do not share a common path at all).  All that track nonsense is fine, the bottom line is no-lean.

Bikes (and bike tires) are designed for lean, but given we have none, we need to swap tires.  (I will post an article later about sump baffles as well, because we’re doing that too).

Anyway, the moto tire went away, and we went with a Longstone “vintage” tire from http://www.lucasclassictires.com/ .  The cross section difference should be obvious.