I got the chrome stinger and baffle on the way home from work. It seems almost silly to pay $40 for what is essentially a slightly flared pipe with a flange, but I couldn’t make one anywhere as quickly as I picked one up. It is the swivel type and bolted on nicely, though I didn’t cinch it down permanently. I will need to remove it to drill the stinger and baffle for a retaining bolt. Sadly, this counts as the best picture I took of it. I will take a better one in the daylight and replace it.

I carefully but temporarily placed the bumper to test the clearance with the new O2 sensor bung. It clears nicely!

I dropped the body on to the frame to make sure that it clears the bumper. While it was there, I checked clearance at several other key points, such as the throttle body and air filters, the body mount under the driver seat (which will need about 1/2″ of shimming and the nose. I also looked around for open space for mounting the EFI controller. The jury is still out.

With the fit verified, it was time to make the permanent fitting for the bumper. The first step was to bend the upper mounts to coincide with the angle on the shock towers. With my anvil back in place, that was nearly trivial. I would rather have bent them hot, but I was pretty sure my torch is not big enough to heat as large an area as needed.

Of course, one shock bolt was in “backwards”, at least for my preferred mounting orientation, but it was easy enough to flip. When the bumper comes back from powder coating and is permanently installed, I will need to switch the bolts out for some that are slightly longer to account for the bumper and the washers it needs to be mounted with. I may even set it up such that loosening the bumper nuts won’t affect the shocks. Anyway, I snugged them down tight enough to stay, but loose enough to adjust if needed. I squared and leveled the bumper and made a few measurements to be sure it was as well centered as I could get it and tack welded the bumper to the upper mounts.

The lower mounts will secured with pins so that the bumper can be removed without dropping the transaxle and engine, which I nearly did accidentally with the yellow trike!

I lugged the bumper back to the bench and welded all around the top mounts and dressed the welds in preparation for powder coating. I rounded the corners of the bottom mounts, especially the ends of the tabs that go under the big bolts. I also welded on a license plate mount.

One thing I neglected was to drill a couple of holes in the top tube of the bumper for wiring. They can be drilled after powder coating, but it would probably be a neater job to drill them first.

My plan is to have a 2″ receiver hitch on the bumper. The way the stinger fits, it will be nearly impossible to use right away, but I think I will go ahead and put it in anyway, the long term plan being to have a custom exhaust that will clear the hitch. The biggest trailer it should ever be pulling is a small motorcycle cargo trailer, so it doesn’t need to be rated for 5000 lbs, but I like the flexibility of the 2″ receiver. Besides a tow bar, I can put a cargo tray or a bike rack or even a grill.

As I suggested before, I tried to heat the area around the O2 sensor bung so as to adjust the angle at which the sensor sits, due to it’s interference with the bumper. My little torch can’t heat enough area to make that strategy viable, so I decided to go with plan B, which was to plug that fitting and install a new one on the other side of the collector.

Well…

I suspect that some steel shot from the Wheelabrator must have gotten in the threads of the sparkplug, which was ironically there to protect the threads, from inside the collector. It turned about one quarter turn and seized firmly. Ratchet, breakover, 2 foot cheater and hammer impact wrench couldn’t touch it. I spent nearly an hour struggling with it before I adopted a new plan C and took it to the BTW clubhouse to use the *real* torch to cut the fitting out.

I brought it back home and welded in an actual official O2 sensor bung, as opposed to the chopped off spark plug anti-fouling device used before. Even though the torched out hole was significantly too large, I did a somewhat better job putting this one in. I think I even got the angle right. I did have to use a bit of 3/16 rod as filler around one side of the bung. Oh, and here’s a tip: don’t poke yourself in the neck with red hot metal.

I spent a bit of time chipping  and sanding off sputter and generally cleaning up the joint. I then degreased the header and sprayed on a coat of paint. I will let that dry overnight, then flip it over and paint the other side.

So, basically I spent an entire evening working on one little thing. Ugh.

The HID conversion kit arrived earlier this week and the halogen reflector arrived today. I verified that the parts fit together and assembled them into the existing headlight bucket. It looks pretty good. Looks even better installed.

I probably shouldn’t say anything, but it looks likely that I may get to work on the trike tonight!

The trigger wheel is possibly going to be shipped tomorrow.

My H4 to HID conversion kit arrived yesterday and the H4 headlight arrived today!

While the sealed beam headlight is probably adequate for the Dragon Trike, I decided that I would like to update it. Its a pretty standard 5 3/4″ headlight, probably salvaged from a current model Sportster when the trike was built in the mid-70’s. There are lots of kits to convert sealed beam to halogen, notably using the H4 bulb.

There are also kits to convert halogen lights to HID.

So, I have ordered both. I have a halogen replacement headlight coming and today I received the HID kit to convert the new headlight.

The little 12 volt supply at my desk doesn’t provide enough current to light it effectively, so I’ll have to play with it later….

 I spoke with an upholsterer of some renown. Looks like it will run about $350. He has some cool snake/lizard pattern vinyl that seems appropriate for a dragon trike….

I have been trying to keep subjects that are EFI specific on the EFI page and other work here. For a long time, little was done on the Dragon trike that wasn’t directly related to the EFI project, so posting has been sparse over here. Well, that’s changing. There is still PLENTY to do on the engine, but in order to have something to be riden the engine is running, I need to get crackin’ on the rest of the project.

By far, the biggest must-do is wiring. When I acquired the trike, it had just enough wiring to start and run the engine. It did not even charge the battery. There was a toggle switch and a push button mounted on a little rectangle of wood, secured to a screwhole in the left cooling tin. All the basic engine wiring was there, battery, distributor, ballast resistor, ignition coil, anti-runon solenoid, electric choke and starter. The alternator worked but was not connected to charge the battery. I had, in fact, taken it around the neighborhood where, once killing the engine with bad clutching I had to pull over, make sure it was in neutral but not rolling, get off, run around back, restart the engine, get back on and ride off.

I digress.

I’m picky about the wiring and I want a few nice features, so it will be a fairly extensive project, but it will be reliable and easy to troubleshoot. Easy to troubleshoot is important because I have DIY electronic fuel injection, an electronic gauge that includes speedometer, tachometer, fuel level and several indicator lights, a switch pod with turn signals, hi and low headlights, starter and horn and lighting will include headlights, marker lights, turn signals, driving lights and backup lights, not to mention that some kind of effects lighting will probably be done, too. Phasers and photon torpedoes will be in phase III.

All of this stuff will be wired with an eye toward computer controlling the whole thing someday.

Besides wiring, I need to make a couple of minor adjustments to properly fit the body to the frame (which will probably affect how the shifter mounts), a footrest for the short term and a floorboard for the long term and while the front wheel is kinda serviceable, I don’t really trust it for any kind of long trip.

In Texas, there is some confusion as to whether one needs brakes on all wheels. Texas Transportation Code, Chapter 547, indicates that front brakes are not required if braking performance meets certain criteria, which are pretty accessible to all the rear-brake only trikes I’ve seen. The annual inspection procedure, however, seem to require brakes on all wheels with no allowance for exceptions, at least none that I have found. I am not a lawyer; I do not play one on TV.

It needs upholstery of some sort and I have the baja bumper to mount.

Oh, yeah, the title of this post is “Dragon Trike Bumper and Exhaust Stuff”… betcha thought I forgot about that….

Long story short, I had my exhaust system and while I was waiting for the bumper to arrive, I welded in a bung for the O2 sensor and had the system shot peened to remove the crappy factory paint. While the bumper arrived a few days before, it was Saturday before I got to mock it up to see how it was going to fit. Then I put the exhaust header on and found that  the bumper and the exhaust interfere in two places.

First thing I noticed is that the O2 sensor hits the bumper. There are a couple of ways to get around that. I think I will try heating the area around the bung and bending to make it sit parallel to the ground. If that doesn’t look like it will work, I can just plug that fitting and put in another, probably on the opposite side.

The other thing is that the muffler supplied with the header is made for a sedan and the bumper is not. The easiest solution is to ditch the muffler (probably too quiet, anyway) and bolt on something else, most likely a stinger.

The muffler and O2 sensor placement will also affect the placement of the planned receiver hitch. I have a 2″ receiver hitch tube ready to weld to something, probably the bumper. I thought about putting a ball on a plate, as it often done for trikes, but the 2″ receiver hitch leaves a lot of options. It’s not like I’ll be pulling around an RV, but being able to put on a ball, or a cargo rack or even a bike rack, not to mention more lighting, is appealing. If things go according to my current theories, the hitch tube will go a bit right of center on the bumper.

I have spent most of my trike time working on the engine of the Dragon Trike, specifically the conversion to EFI. You can see details here.

Since the speedometer was installed on and subsequently became usable, the Yellow Trike has accumulated nearly 2000 miles. It has been on a couple of road trips, generally 200 mile per day excursions. It has been pretty reliable, though not without the occasional bobble, just nothing to stop the trike.

Well, except I need to keep a close eye on the fuel level. Not the trike’s fault if I run it dry.

More importantly, the Dragon Trike is well underway, with a deadline to have it driveable by Memorial Day weekend. As of this writing, that is essentially 45 calendar days.

Except for some planning and shopping for the EFI’ing of the Dragon Trike, it’s been a slow holiday for the trikes.

On December 12, my local BTW chapter had a charity run for Safe Haven in which we delivered a gob of donated stuff to their store then went back to the clubhouse for a fundraiser. Gabby was there for the cookout, but stayed home for the ride because of the cold air, so I had an open seat and arranged to give Flip a ride. The official story is that Flip got cold, so we pulled over to let her warm up. While we were pulled over anyway, I borrowed some fuel from Sammy.

Of course, nobody’s buyin’ it. So, I will likely be adding some form of fuel gauge or other low fuel warning to the trike.

Speaking of such, the Dragon Trike speedo supports a 100 ohm fuel sender and the Kawasaki fuel pump has some kind of sender, though I suspect it’s probably just a low fuel light. Finding a 100 ohm sender has thus far been problematic.

The weather over New Year’s weekend was reasonably warm during the daylight hours, so on New Years Day, I removed a lot of boxes that had been kept for one reason or another but that we’d decided to let go. I took the time to break them down as I loaded them in my truck and that turned out to be a good thing.

On Saturday, I did some stuff, but mostly I procured, cut and painted some shelves I’d promised Gabby for a few years now. It was easy, I just had to stop and do them. By her appreciative reaction, you’d think I had remodeled the entire kitchen. 🙂 After drying overnight, it was a pretty simple matter to install the shelves in two of the cabinets because they already have strips for them, but I will need to clear out the remaining one to add the strips for it, probably tonight.

For the rest of Sunday, I tore back into the carport/driveway. Step one seemed to be to assemble my new tool chest (Santa rocks!) because most of the weather beaten boxes I needed to empty and remove were full of stuff that would effectively go in it. I have repurposed my old tool chest (repainted black since this pic), for hardware, connectors and other supplies, except for paint and other such cans, which fit nicely in the base of the new chest. Along the way, I gathered the parts from a couple of ongoing and upcoming projects and sequestered them into their own weather resistant containers, usually plastic storage tubs. This process generated several full trashbags and quite a lot of cardboard to add to the truck bed. I hope to get all that done tonight after work before it gets really chilly. The temp drops pretty quickly after the great burning orb retreats to the western horizon. Ok, maybe it’s not all *that* cold, but it’s cold enough for me.

After a rocky start from sniffles and sneezes and other such symptoms on Friday, we hit the road for Oklahoma, namely the Turner Falls area.

It’s very nice up there, nice riding, yada yada…

Sunday morning, I noticed a bit of oil on the ground under the yellow trike. This oil was in a rather irregular patch, as opposed to a nice round spot. I found some fresh oily wetness near the oil cooler hoses, so I presumed that was where the problem was. It wasn’t a whole lot of oil and the dipstick reported plenty of oil, so I decided we’d just keep an eye on it for now.

We took off down the meandering path to home. Twenty some-odd miles into the trek, we had cause to stop. It was a little chillier than expected when we left, but not quite so chilly once we were underway, so Gabby needed to shed a layer of clothing. Whilst we were stopped, I checked the leak.

Ummm, there was a LOT of oil all over the engine and exhaust and everything back there.

With a little testing and looking and revving the engine, etc, I determined that the lower tubing on the oil cooler was leaking. I first thought it was leaking from the hose, but then I saw that the cooler tubing itself was bent and leaking from a crack in the tubing.

It was a simple enough matter to remove the cooler and bypass it with one of the hoses. The weather was mild and these engines tend to run cooler in trikes than cars anyway. I didn’t even get very dirty doing it.

Fast forward a bit to our late lunch in Ardmore. I noticed as we were approaching Ardmore than there was as strange kind of “flex” feeling to the seat. I knew that it is mounted on 2″ X 1/4″ flat steel rails and thus had some springiness to it, but this sensation was different and had developed recently just during the ride. When we stopped at a restaurant, I discovered that the “body” of the trike, the blocky structure covering the engine and surrounding the rear seat, would bounce independent of the suspension. I started bouncing it gently and observing where the flex was, fearing that some bump in the road had broken a weld or something equally nasty. I also observed that an existing crack in the left fender had worsened and during this bouncing, I could see why. Once I saw what the problem was, I got that sinking feeling, the one you get when you know what’s wrong and that it’s your own fault.

Remember back on October 7th, when I was working on replacing the throwout bearing, I said “Then there was the extraneous piece of metal that used to hold up something long gone by bolting it to the engine, but now served only to keep the engine and transaxle loosely connected to one another once all the bolts were removed”?

It turns out that a sloppy weld on a piece that *looks* like its supported elsewhere doesn’t necessarily mean the piece is unused. Turns out that it was an only slightly extraneous piece of metal supporting much of the weight of the body of the trike. Add to that a full gas tank, fill up the side boxes and strap on some luggage, and the now-known-to-be-cantilevered body puts too much stress on the 3/4″ square tubing frame that is welded here and there somewhat randomly.

Also now apparent was that the bottom of the oil cooler, having been mounted on said bouncy body, was damaged by slamming down on to the relatively immovable engine. Ah, I see said the truly blind man….

So, while munching and playing with Gabby’s new Nuvi, I formed a plan to brace the thing up so that the trip home would not result in any permanent damage. It took less than $8 worth of hardware from Lowes and the borrowing of cordless drill services from a Lowes employee who had been putting on some kind of cabinetry demonstration.

I took two 12″ long perforated angle pieces and braced between the top engine-transaxle bolts and the cross piece in the body. It’s probably more solid now than it’s ever been, and these are removable.

We got home without further incident, at least if you don’t count our headset batteries going dead and timing that took us by Texas Motor Speedway shortly after the races let out. We lost about an hour in that traffic.

I haven’t done an update in a while. Several things to report…

Intermittent rain and other issues kept me from picking up the body until last Thursday. I used a purpose built trailer (the trike itself) to tow the body home. We took some pictures of it before I left Joe’s. Since it was still threatening more rain and possible hail, I took it directly to the BTW clubhouse.

There was a BTW Halloween party Saturday night at the clubhouse and everyone was just gushing over the trike. Not without plenty of suggestions, but nobody hated the paint 🙂

Before I continue with the Dragon Trike, I have a brief Yellow Trike update.

I have mounted (uglyly [… is that a word?]) the VDO speedometer sensor and the speedo works wonderfully now.
It does only one thing that is slightly odd, and I fully understand why it does this. As you are rolling slowly up to a traffic light or other such stop, then suddenly stop, for about a second, it continues to indicate that you’re moving at 3mph or whatever. With only 5 magnets to count at 3mph, it expects 0.32 seconds between pulses and after you stop, it has to make sure you’re not still rolling before it recalculates your speed to zero.

In any case, speed and distance correlate very well with GPS measurements and I pronounce it done. Well, I will probably make a nice bracket for the sensor and the instrument itself has a springy mount that makes it move a lot on the road, but those are minor issues.

Back to the Dragon…. There are basically 3 things that need to happen for it to be on the road by my short term goal of December 12th.

1. The engine, which hasn’t run since I put all the bling on it, needs to run. That includes building and installing the throttle cable. It may also include troubleshooting an air leak, for it had symptoms that I now recognize before I took the engine apart for the afore mentioned blinging.

2. The wiring, which includes all lighting and the new “everything” speedo, needs to be done. Lighting includes finding some way have front signals without drilling the body.

3. The front wheel and especially the front tire are not very safe. The tire is aged and cracked, though it does seem to hold air pretty well. The rim is nearly rusted through in a couple of spots.

4. Yeah, I said three, but I forgot that it needs an inspection, too.

That’s what’s needed to merely get it ON the road. I really want to see if I can get it running EFI by then. Um, that’s 39 days. It’s not impossible. What it changes, however, is that EFI adds more engine and wiring work. See the EFI blog for more details on that.

There is a cubic buttload of stuff that also has to be done, preferably before December 12, but I doubt I can get it all that soon. Stuff like upholstery, fenders, footpegs or floorboard, baja cage and hitch, torpedos, navigational deflectors and other such goodies. A few more decorative bits like paint the inside of the wheel spokes and rechrome the handlebars. I suspect wheelie bars will be more of a requirement than an option at some point in the future.