Well, final chapter of this build. I'll write it up a little more & re-use the piccies in the Motors section soon. Critch & his mate Stevie travelled down from Liverpool in a hire van yesterday -thanks Doro & Kris for baby-sitting them for the night by the way. Met them at the garage this morning to hand over the frame. Critchy brought me not one, but TWO Birthday cakes, both of which I've already sampled! Thank you Sir.
I really hope he's a happy customer. I think he was. Our one & only customer. I can understand why Chris had a breakdown & ended up closing Desperate Dans trike shop cos we were getting stressed out just building one! I'd have flung the bumper bar across the garage the other night but there ain't enough room in there to fling anything! Gonna rest on our laurels now & just build & ride our own stuff. Maybe.
Total build time was probably about 50 hours, spread over 3 weeks or so of evenings & weekends. We used something like 40 feet of 1" bore grade 3 heavyweight ERW tubing, (4mm wall thickness), & about 6 feet of 1 1/2" bore for the top tube & bumper bar, (which we didn't have time or welding gas to finish). The axle clamps were made from offcuts of 2" bore. The triangular strengthening gussets are 3mm steel plate & the only specially machined parts were the headstock bearing cups.
Total cost to Critch, 500 quid plus 50 for the bumper/number plate thingy & it's LED number plate lights. We also swapped his spare Sportster tank for my disc brake conversion. He got the caliper mounting plates & discs & just needs to get his hubs machined to fit the discs.
We had to guess at Mrs Critchley's seating position but both Doro & Critch's mate, Stevie, (both of whom are a litle vertically challenged
), tried it for size & pronounced it "sound". It wouldn't be a huge job to take the seat mounts off & shift them back a little anyway.
As I said, I really hope he's a happy customer. Nige & I have certainly worked our little socks off on this one & I reckon it's well worth 500 quid of anyone's money. Gonna have a few day's break now -fed up of living in grubby garage clothes & smelling of angle grinder dust, then it's back to my own frame, which I'm going to cut up & re-do in the same style as this one.
Oh yeah, Critch says it's going to be purple by the way.
