Hiya, I built the Flapster many moons ago now. At the time Flap, (Darren), & I worked together at Royal Mail. He was into off-roading & had a canvas roofed LandRover, which his kids nicknamed Flap. We shared an interest in mechanical tinkering so he took me to an off-roading event in Oxford. In return, I took him to Poole bike night on my trike. He was instantly hooked & had to have one. We built it in his aunt's garage, with me doing the design, sourcing of parts, ( I already had a spare engine & axle), welding etc & him bending tubes, fabricating brackets n stuff. We had several parts collecting trips -the front end came from the Netley Marsh autojumble & we picked up the rear wheels & tyres at the Beaulieu jumble. We had to roll 'em the whole length of the Beaulieu estate back to his car. He wanted something vaguely 70s muscle car ish while I fancied building it "chubby", with everything deliberately over sized, like a big kid's toy, (which is what it was). I remember he was concerned about the stresses on the headstock, so there's some big chunky welds around it that I always wanted to smooth out.
My trike had a rear mounted radiator with the water running through the frame tubes, which worked fine, but I'd already decided I wanted a very simple little single seater next. So I built his frame more or less the way I envisaged my next one. By the time we'd finished his, I'd taken mine off the road & stripped it down to build the next one though, so we never got to ride together.
I've spent 35 years tinkering with motors, but I'm no mechanic. I took my own trike to a local tuning guy, near Winchester:
http://aireytuning.com/an ex grass track racer with a rolling road in a shed behind his house. In half an hour he transformed the performance of my engine with nothing more than a bit of filing of the carb needle & a few tweaks with a screw driver. In my own very humble opinion though, my first check would be the oil level in the damper, (the large screw cap on the top of the carb).
Darren won a "QuickBob" fuel tank for a quid in a raffle when we went to the NCC Diamond Day show at the Ace Café on my trike, but because it's so wide, we had to make an extended carb inlet. It ran with no problems at all, but occasionally iced up on long runs, so he wrapped it in exhaust bandage, which cured it. If I remember right, he ran it slightly rich to offset any fuel evaporation in the inlet tube. I also agree with the chaps -bung a new oil light switch in first. They don't last forever & it doesn't take a lot to gunge 'em up.
A good service, fresh oil, new plugs & give it a bit of a run -that's probably all it needs.
Great to know it's still out there & being enjoyed, not rotting away in a garden somewhere. Piccies please!
http://www.mankymonkeymotors.co.uk/Trikespageimages/flapster/trike.html
