"Backlash" wrote in message
...
Anyone else brave enough to share THEIR first project?
RJ

When I was in sixth grade in 1963, some of the guys in the
neighborhood were trying to build mini-bikes. Standard procedure was
to scrounge some electrical conduit, cut and bend into something
resembling a frame, then find someone to braze it together. Thinking
this was too complicated, I decided to use an old bike frame. I
mounted a 14-inch spoked solid rubber wheel from a tricycle on the
front. On the back was an eight-inch solid rubber utility wheel that I
somehow wedded to a large bike sprocket. For $7 I bought a junk Reo
reel mower whose engine had built-in gear reduction. At my buddy’s
house, we nailed it to his dad’s workbench and removed the carb. After
using some gas to wipe it down, I pulled the starter rope. It roared
to life for a second and scared us to death, but we took it as a good
omen that it didn’t even need a carb to run.

With a pair of high handlebars from Santa, I was ready for action. I
pushed my stuff two miles to the local machine shop (the one with
overhead lineshafts) and begged a busy machinist to braze a couple
pieces of angle iron onto the base of my bike frame to hold the
engine. Years later I realized what a feat of craftsmanship this was.
(Apparently this was before the Age of Liability.) Of course the
engine and rear wheel chain sprockets had to line up, which meant the
engine had to hang way out to one side. No problem, we just leaned the
bike over enough to balance!

I couldn’t afford a centrifugal clutch, so the starting procedure
consisted of raising the back tire off the ground by lifting on the
seat, running forward a few feet, dropping the back tire and hopping
on as the engine roared to life and the machine took off. Very soon I
realized it would be nice to have a way to stop other than pulling off
the spark plug wire. Thus was born the “dead man’s throttle”, as we
called it. I ran a piece of monofilament fishing line along the frame
from the spring-loaded throttle up to the handlebar grip, and adjusted
the idle so slow that the engine would stall unless you kept tension
on the string with your thumb. A wad of duct tape to protect the thumb
was my lone concession to comfort. A cone-shaped plastic nozzle from a
CO2 fire extinguisher made a great exhaust pipe megaphone. “Sounds
more boss than a Honda 50!” claimed my friends.

Our driveway was soon covered with skid marks from drop-starting and I
recall my dad not being outwardly amused when he came home and found
that we had turned the front lawn into a muddy oval track. It had not
taken long for us guys to realize you could do better spin-outs on the
grass when it was wet.

Of the half-dozen home-made mini-bikes in my neighborhood, rarely more
than one would be running at the same time, so our dream of a pack of
us running traffic off the roads never came true. But we did amuse
ourselves greatly by occasionally driving onto the school grounds in
the evening in order to get the janitor to come running out after us.
He never learned we were always a little faster than he could run.

I kept track of my project expenses: the whole thing cost $17,
including the welding. My family moved a few weeks after finishing it
and I couldn’t take it along. I sold it to another kid for $24 and
discovered capitalism.

Carl Joplin