First Frame Assembly

This is an exciting post, the first frame is alive and it is really nice!
I will follow the steps for assembly with lots of pictures.

The tubes were received and the end pieces printed. The tubes were pre cut to size for 690 mm frame assembly, this means 740 mm for the two side tubes. Next I roughened the areas for adhesion both on the tubes and the end pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used the center tube, uncut for now, as the alignment jig and glued the side tubes first. Used standard 5min epoxy.

Then the center piece was cut and glued in.

Waiting overnight for the epoxy to cure, meanwhile weighting the frame:

Then adding the hardware, 180mm trucks and 78mm wheels:

Now for the validation. I did a less than scientific test, here are the results:

Now, remember we’ve got around 13 mm deflection for this frame with 120 kg load.
I weight only 90 kg, but the static deflection is 13 mm, which makes the fully loaded deflection of around 17.3 mm.
How can we explain this? I think that the major difference are the actual wheels in real life, they move and allow for larger sinking, this will not be the case with ideal simple support. In addition the measurement instruments are this video… None the less, we are very close to our expected values and I’m really happy 🙂

Now just couple of poses with my kid’s traffic light:

I’m really excited of this. The actual riding was not that weird as might seem in advance. The main outcome is the ability to design, calculate and close the loop with the actual results, which is what I wanted to achieve here.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Enjoy,
Dani