I Don't Know Where You Get Your Delusions From, Laser Brain.

When I work on the Falcon, I try to keep things as simple as possible. I really do. I mean, yes, I want all wheel drive and front wheel steering. But within that...simple. I'm learning and relearning that simple doesn't ever mean easy.

The Hyperdrive

The first test revealed that the drive sprockets were not correctly aligned with the wheel sprockets. Because of this twisted orientation, the beefy motorcycle chain would skip teeth and even fell off at one point. It didn't actually break, it just fell off.😅 It took some effort to fix this.

The "simplest" first step was to align the Hyperdrive frame with the wheel sprockets. I had to disassemble the entire drivetrain to do this. Every chain. Every sprocket. 

First, I centered the frame over its supports. This works to shorten the unintentional lever arms. Shorter lever arms equals less bending force. Then I repositioned all the frame support clamps to align the orientation of the sprockets on the Hyperdrive with the wheel sprockets. I also flipped the sprockets when I remounted them, so the teeth were as close to the frame as possible. 

During the next test, I was able to get further with these upgrades, but only just. See if you can hear where things started going wrong.

The main transmission axle was secured only in one place. Under pedaling force, the free end flexed like a dog's tail during pedaling. I had reduced the bending forces, but they were still large and unrestrained.

The bright side was there was enough force to bend, but not permanently deform, a half-inch thick aluminum plate. That's a lot of power. But I needed that power to go into turning wheels, not bending frames. In order to prevent tail wagging, I designed a simple (there's that word again) gusset to add to the Hyperdrive frame.

This "simple" gusset took an entire weekend to fabricate. I used the force-multiplying Tormach CNC to make the fins while I made the tube piece on a lathe and the cross plate on the knee mill. I would've carved it out of a single block of aluminum, but I didn't have the extra material.

I welded all the pieces together...badly. I really wish I had had that block of aluminum to carve. It would have been so much prettier. 

I then welded the new gusset onto the back of the Hyperdrive frame.

The plan was to secure the new gusset with the "lollipop" truss clamps already being used elsewhere on the Hyperdrive frame. However, I biffed the length of the gusset, and made it too short to use the lollipops. I ended up using the base of one of the lollipop clamps and fabricated another zero-clearance clamp that I had designed last year.

The Hyperdrive is ready for another test, but the Falcon is not quite ready. We've also been trying to finalize steering. The original handlebars idea will not work, so we are working on adding a steering wheel. Yet another example of simple not being easy, but we'll get into that in the next post.

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