Wheelsy, Bagsy & Toolsy….etc.

The slow happenings with my various projects and introducing a new, long term one.

Some readers may remember that Bagsy is my as yet unfinished attempt to make a clay model based on a Hieronymus Bosch painting and that Toolsy is my converted seaman/artificer’s tool chest. Wheelsy is one of my proposed long term projects alongside Chesty, Dutchy and Tearsy.

For reference sake, Chesty is to be one of my first workshop projects, Dutchy is my potential tool chest project as a follow on to Toolsy and Tearsy is my proposal for a summer project to build a Teardrop style camping trailer on top of an pre built boat trailer. Thus far, Bagsy is still waiting on make up as my recent Amazon order came as the wrong shade of pink while Toolsy is almost as complete as I can make it having this month acquired a few new tools and secured in many of the previous ones ; my new best friends are rare earth magnets.

Above – about to close the lid on Toolsy (for now), since the last photograph iv’e now added several new tools all held in place with Neodynium magnets so they are well held in place. The whole thing will become my outside tools storage for when I get around to Benchy (did I even mention Benchy) and is essentially the second stage of preparing to make a start on Tearsy

Tearsy will have to wait until iv’e rebuilt Benchy from boat builders strongback to long outdoor workbench, that in turn has to wait until Bobsy (Steve the builder) has done his stuff with the workshop. Tearsy, the teardrop trailer, should only take a couple of months to get to the stage that it’s weather tight, at which point it can live outside, and only then can I make a working start on Wheelsy.

Alright then, lets talk about Wheelsy.

Wheelsy isn’t a single discrete project but one that includes a failing knee (needs surgery) my recumbent trike (needs modification), a new vehicle for long term and longer distance travel and maybe a completely custom solution for all three. Maybe I should re name the entire project but I have wheelsy in mind and even if naff to the max it works for me.

Today I did two things that are relevant to this post : firstly I went for a ride on my recumbent trike and I didn’t greatly enjoy it, then, when I got home, I wrote out (online) an E consult about the problems I am having with my non operated on knee – weakness and pain. Part of that system allows the patient to say what they think might be needed or what might help them. In my case I suggested that it warrants a simple X ray which could be done locally as the little peripheral hospital still has an X ray machine and an occasional radiographer. That was what was done when my other knee started to fail about 7 or 8 years ago : my smart GP sent me for the X ray first and then called me in to show me what she described as a barn door X ray resulting in a normal referral to an orthopaedic surgeon and surgery a couple of months later – all normal stuff.

Today though I found that i’m like the performing seal that has to jump through several hoops before even getting a referral to have an X ray : the next stage (after a seemingly endless discussion with a receptionist) is that the physiotherapist has to see me first and essentially waste his own time before doing the one thing that any health professional would absolutely need as part of an assessment – yes you got it right – an X ray.

Today’s experience with my recumbent trike I can best describe as shake, rattle & roll – our local lanes are a patchwork quilt of bad repairs. Then when I broke out onto a slightly wider back road it was the usual case of having to slalom my way past the many potholes and divots that litter my normal line like so many anti cycle mines. Making the day a lot worse was the pain I had in my knee after the ride : I don’t like to be overly dramatic but, poor me, I could hardly walk the day after.

Conversations with Jordan and Musky.

Back in the day, when I used to sneak into the back of the lecture room where Jordan Peterson was delivering a psychology lecture to his students, I used to think up the kind of questions that I would ask him should we ever meet : it’s unlikely as I hear that he’s very sick again just as he was after I went to his first lecture. Anyway though, when our man Elon Musk came to the same kind of notoriety over Twatter/X I used to do the same kind of thing : think up the kind of things that I would like to talk about. In those days he was doing high end electric cars and rocket science : the kind of things I wanted to ask him were 1.How would he go about producing clean energy on a large scale and, 2) is there a low cost solution for personal transport that doesn’t need the kind of cost and investment that one of his cars would ?

With Peterson I imagined being able to entertain him with my story about the mistake I made when listening to several of his lectures : while having a brilliant mind he has the voice of Kermit the frog and I was sure that he had spoken a name as Pierre Jay when in fact it was Jean Piaget he was talking about – I spent sessions trying to track down references to this Pierre Jay. With Elon Musk I imagined telling him about personal transport as seen by my parents and grandparents generation : I remember us not having a car until quite late in my childhhood and the story goes that my grandfather used to donk,donk,donk off to work on a simple single cylinder BSA motorbike whatever the weather.

Today, small cheap secondhand mopeds and motorcycles are still a viable reality and the really simple ones can be tweaked and fettled in the shed just as Grandpa did. Iv’e owned quite a few motorcycles and would do so again only i’m a bit unsure about my strength and balance but have you seen the prices of even basic classic British bikes these days ?

I fancied something like this (above) which is a scrambler version of the BSA C15 – just about as simple and manageable as a motorcycle can be. Given that my right knee is now failing even that might be hard to kickstart and I learnt my basic riding and roadcraft with left hand shift/right brake from small Japanese bikes.

I had recently what bikers would call ‘a sudden rush of shit to the brain’ – although luckily it didn’t last for long : i’ll briefly explain…..

So…there was a time recently when I thought that what I want (what I really really want) is the kind of classic British bike that I could enjoy riding and that was simple enough to work on : essentially then the kind of 4 stroke single cylinder model that came out of the 1950’s and 60s : I even thought that it would be quite neat to own a motorcycle of similar age to myself, For a while the BSA single that kept appearing in my Ebay recommendations was a B40 trials/scrambles bike and the B40 bing of 400cc or there about. I was quite keen for a while although I seriously wondered whether I could kick start a 400cc single with high compression : then I remembered an incident from my biker teens when a mate of a mate was spat over the handlebars and into the next garden when his B40 backfired as it was being started – something that it was notorious for.

Defining Wheelsy

SFB moments aside I spent a lot of time defining the form and function of a vehicle that would only be for personal transport : if we have to go somewhere together we’ll do that in my partner’s car. What I came up with is that I want something that has the features of both a motorcycle and my recumbent trike so one thing it would have to be is fully powered and what that means is it being road legal.

Iv’e looked at this from two directions : the first would be to take a basic recumbent trike frame and give it as much power as possible with a larger electric assist capacity plus suspension, mirrors etc. For a while I even considered having to adopt a powerful hub drive, ditch the Rohlof gearing and finish with an all electric trike – once again requiring an MOT and road licence to be legal. My idea for the use of pedals was to have those spinning a DC generator and feeding that to a pair of Lithium batteries. Later on still I wondered about the possibility of building a fully hybrid trike with the generation of electricity being done by a small fuel engine – something like a chainsaw motor.

The second option is also to build a fully powered (and road legal) version, using the back end of one of the modern ‘maxi’ scooters such as the Suzuki Buggerman* (my bad) spliced together with the front end of a quad bike except with narrower road wheels. That would deal with the back end as the motor is in the same place as we used to see with Italian scooters and solves the front end problem of getting full suspension and steering. In a way, quite a neat solution except that it would need a donor bike and a donor quad bike to even start with.

And that’s where I bring the idea (for now) to it’s conclusion : the cost of acquiring a mostly complete Bugman and a donor quad bike is already beyond my means and the skills involved with nailing the whole deal together would require me to be a competent welder/fabricator : both of which I am definitely not.

Instead……I think I would like to put my time, effort and hard cash, into building something that would benefit us both and uses the skills I already have. What I basically have is the ability to work with epoxy, timber and plywood : what that suggests is that I set up my outside bench and just completed tool chest to start building a Teardrop style camping trailer on the base of a boat trailer – the costs of donor trailer and a stack of nice timber and plywood are already less that acquiring some old vehicles and spending years tinkering with them. Where this project also goes is maybe to experiment with motorcycles once more except doing so with all of the modern conveniences such as left foot shifts, electric starts and reliable brakes.

I think I would mess about with the shape quite a bit but here’s the basic idea.