front axle starting to take shape and more parts slowly starting to arrive.

Some slight design changes, there's a plethora of Austin based karts already, so have decided to base my design on the ERA Type-B. I will most likely model mine off chassis no.10, ERA R10B of Peter Whitehead who won the 9th Australian Grand Prix in this car at Bathurst in 1938.

Original plan for driving the trike was with a rear mounted engine and a swing arm. (Simple)
In order to fit it into the available space, I was planning to extend the motor drive past the front of the wheel and put the Torque Converter on the other side of the wheel. This was not going to be a problem as one of my 'donor' engines is from a portable generator. These have a tapered drive into the alternator rotor, press the rotor apart and away we go, extended shaft, (Simple). Next step was a short swing-arm pivoting in-line with the output sprocket of the TC. (Simple... sketch attached). For proper alignment with the wheel sprocket, I would need to place the drive sprocket on the inside end of the TC. (Simple) Apparently, this is possible with a genuine Comet TC. My Chinese clone, TAV20, on the other hand, has a 5/8" shaft through the rear pulley and drive sprocket, expanding to 17mm through the alloy bearing support. (Not so simple??) New Plan in development.

Unfortunately yesterday was raining pretty hard so we spent some time drafting up the adaptors for the wheel hubs and cutting out some parts on the CNC plasma cutter, which kept us in the workshop. Two new skills unlocked lol. Unfortunately there just wasn't enough room to lay the chassis out inside so we decided to put that off until today.

The rain held off today so spent some time today getting the chassis welded up. We decided on the chassis width based on the width of the rear axle, my CK and the width of the front spring. It is 50mm wider than my CK. After we levelled up the trestles, Locke checked the chassis for square and tacked it up. We added some gussets to the front corners to help improve the strength, as there will be a lot of twisting force from the transverse front spring.

Also took some measurements for the front spring hanger ready for a trip to the steel shop tomorrow for supplies. We also need to procure the parts to make up the front beam and vertical links.