Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 1

A vehicle from scratch

My interest in building a human-powered road vehicle goes back a long way – but with a gap of many years. When I
worked as a teacher, I helped a school team design and build a machine for the annual Australian Pedal Prix (see
From the Editor for more on this event). While many of the vehicles (including the one I was involved with) were
pretty simple, at the event itself some very professional vehicles could be seen. Full aerodynamics, carbon fibre, and
ultra lightweight frames. With these vehicles you simply can’t fit a bigger motor, and so excellence in design and
construction becomes paramount. (It’s a race class with a semi-fixed engine power but almost complete freedom of
design!)

However, I didn’t do anything further about these vehicles until I recently stumbled across the Greenspeed recumbent
three-wheelers. For me these trikes have revolutionised the whole concept of human-powered vehicles – making them
viable for a huge range of people and activities (like commuting to work, for example) in a way that a traditional
bicycle simply can’t emulate. In fact, I was so blown away by the machines, I bought one second-hand. It’s called a
GTR and I’ve ridden it extensively. (See Driving Emotion.)

However, the Greenspeed GTR has some downsides – the primary negative being that it has no suspension. The
suspension is supposed to be provided by the hammock-like seat and flex in the chrome-moly tubular frame but the
reality is that nearly all of it comes from the tyres. To get a comfortable ride on the poor bitumen roads on which I
mostly ride, I had to drop tyre pressures from a recommended 80+ psi to just 20 psi, resulting in an increase in
rolling drag, a handling trade-off and a much greater likelihood of punctures.

However, the Greenspeed has some brilliant design characteristics, optimised in the long period over which the
machines have been constructed. The relationship between the seats, forward-mounted pedals and the side-mounted
steering arms is perfect. The weight distribution (a third on each corner) is the optimal compromise between rear
wheel traction up steep hills (more weight wanted on back wheel), lateral cornering performance (more weight located
between front wheels), and braking performance (weight wanted on the back to stop the trike lifting its rear wheel).
Also, completely unlike a bicycle that leans into corners, on a trike the wheels and hubs have to accept very high
lateral cornering loads - and the wheel and stub-axle designs used on the Greenspeed have proved to be well up to
the forces involved.

Other Greenspeed design positives include zero scrub radius (ie centre-point) steering, modified Ackermann steering
geometry and 63 gears.

So the Greenspeed GTR could be used as the design basis of a new HPV, but there were aspects of that machine that
I thought could clearly be improved. And making the project something that could really happen was the fact that
Greenspeed is happy to sell separately any of components that they either make in-house or buy in. Yep, you can buy
their kingpins, their steering arms, the wheels, any parts of the tubular frame – as much or as little in the way of
componentry as you want.

But before I could jump on the phone and order any parts, some major decisions had to be made.

Frame
 Material

Nearly all recumbent HPVs use chrome-moly steel tube to form the frame. That’s also the same with bicycles, karts
and space-framed low volume cars. The chrome-moly tube is:

 strong for its diameter and wall thickness (and both are usually kept small on HPVs)
 able to be welded by brazing, MIG or TIG techniques
 cheap
 readily available

However, volume for volume, steel is heavier than aluminium, and much heavier than exotic composites like carbon
fibre. In short, I thought I could achieve a lighter, stronger frame by using aluminium – without needing to have the
huge skill level that’s required to work in carbon fibre.

 Construction

Vehicles can be built using two fundamentally different techniques – space frames and monocoques (or unitary
bodies).

In a space frame, the structure is made up of lots of relatively small diameter tubes, positioned to take the stresses
that try to bend and twist the vehicle. In a monocoque, thin sheet material is shaped and positioned to provide a stiff
structure. The vast majority of current mass production cars use monocoque designs, while one-off cars (eg most kit
cars and home-built race cars) use space frames. (Of course, in many cases space frames are stiffened with some thin
panelling!)

A monocoque vehicle constructed from aluminium needs to have the design finalised before a tool is picked up – you
must know where all the stresses are going and cater for them from the very beginning. In other words, you can’t just
add a bracing tube or extra triangulation late in the build. Also, without the presses and dies needed to shape the
sheet, a sheet aluminium monocoque can comprise only flat surfaces, so the stiffness and strength that can be gained
from compound curves will be absent. (Or you can learn to panel-beat compound curves into aluminium sheet...
which would be even more difficult than getting adept with carbon fibre!)

Weighing-up these pros and cons, I decided to make the frame a simple tubular structure that would be TIG welded
together. However, there were three further points:

 Most of the aluminium tube would be square in section

 The tube would be considerably lightened by having lots of holes cut in it
 Sheet aluminium gussets (stiffening panels) would be used wherever possible

Further influencing my decision was that I already had lots of aluminium that I’d bought as scrap – primarily square
tube 40 x 40 and 50 x 50mm (both with 3mm walls) and also a heap of 3mm sheet.

Aluminium Fatigue?

One reason that most manufacturers of HPVs use chrome-moly steel in preference to aluminium
tube is the steel’s resistance to fatigue. For example, the Greenspeed design uses two butt-
welded cantilevers to form the front wheel supports. The steel tube flexes at these joints (not
much, but it does flex) and if these tubes were made of aluminium, they would fatigue and break.
However, if the frame design avoids obvious weak points like these, there shouldn’t be a problem
using aluminium.

Suspension Design
 Travel
Few road HPVs use suspension and even fewer use suspension on the front and the back. Of those that do use
suspension all-round, invariably the front has almost no suspension travel and the rear little. For example, a rear
suspension travel of 50mm and a front suspension travel of 25mm seem common. To me, these seem ludicrously
small – after all, a 1-inch diameter pebble on the road uses up all the front suspension travel!

The reason that the rear travel is greater than the front (or, on HPVs with suspension at only one end of the machine,
it’s the rear that’s suspended) is because the rider feels the behaviour of the back wheel more strongly than the
fronts. If a single front wheel passes over a bump, the trike will roll and lift at the same time, decreasing the vertical
acceleration. However, the rear wheel passing over the same sized bump will cause an acceleration that’s only vertical
– so the rider feels it more.

But the logic of all this seems a bit odd to me. Think instead of keeping the tyres in contact with the ground so that
cornering, braking and acceleration can occur (major reasons for suspension on cars) and it’s then immediately
obvious that suspension is needed on all three wheels. (On the Greenspeed the front wheels steer and brake and the
rear wheel is powered by the pedals.)

Furthermore, for maximum comfort, soft springing is wanted and if the suspension is not to then bottom-out on large
bumps, a long travel is needed. In fact, surely what’s required is the very longest suspension travel that can be
designed into the machine?

 Rear Design

Once a long travel design on all wheels was accepted as a requirement, the next step was deciding on its design. After
looking primarily at motorcycles, I decided on a rear longitudinal swing-arm. This has both pros and cons. On the
good side, the basic layout of the Greenspeed GTR showed that there was plenty of room under the seat for a spring
and damper – and a swing-arm could position both of these in that location.

Another good point of this approach is that a single pivot axis is used for the rear suspension. So why would this
matter? Because the rear wheel is chain driven and the chain has a cyclic varying tension on it as the pedals are
pushed, it’s easy to have a design where the rear suspension is compressed or extended with each pedal power
stroke. This results in ‘pogo-ing’ which not only is uncomfortable but also wastes energy. Running the tension side of
the chain near the rear swing-arm pivot axis prevents this happening and if there’s only one pivot axis, this becomes
easier to organise.

The main downsides of a swing-arm are that the wheelbase changes slightly on bump and rebound, resulting in a
varying chain length. However, a derailleur easily copes with this variation in chain length in the same way it does
with the varying length of chain caused by selecting a different diameter gear.

 Front Design

For the front suspension there was really only one choice – unequal length double wishbones with an anti-roll bar. For
the same reasons as on a car (or a quad bike like the one shown here), unequal length double wishbones simply
provide too many advantages over alternative designs like swing-arms or struts. These advantages include:

 Wide-based frame attachments resulting in a strong assembly

 Ability to easily control effective front-view swing-arm length and roll centre height
 Dynamic camber control in bump
 With appropriately positioned inner and outer steering joints, control of bump steer
 Zero scrub radius steering easily possible
 Spring and damper able to be positioned in a wide range of locations
 Ant-dive geometry able to be built in
 Dynamic castor control in bump

As the rear wheel has zero roll stiffness, an anti-roll bar is very much needed on a trike. In fact, on the Greenspeed
GTR, in very hard cornering it’s possible to lift the inner front wheel off the ground. If the rider and machine weigh
100kg total, about 30kg is normally being borne by each wheel. However, with a front wheel lifted in cornering, the
other front wheel has its substantially increased. If the wheel suspension wheel rate is (say) 15kg an inch, the
suspension would normally be compressed by 2 inches. But if the load on that wheel is (say) doubled, the
compression will increase to 4 inches, resulting in a helluva lot of body roll and the using-up of suspension travel. So
an anti-roll bar would certainly be necessary....
Ground Clearance

Long suspension travel – especially when a majority of that is in bump – requires greater ground
clearance. If the static ground clearance is (say) 120mm and 90mm of bump is provided, under
full bump there will be a ground clearance of only 30mm.

So what’s a decent amount of full bump ground clearance to provide? Full bump should occur
quite rarely and to bottom-out the frame requires both full bump and either a hump midway
between the front and rear wheels or a rock that the front wheels straddle and the rear wheel
misses. On this basis I figured full bump ground clearance could be made pretty small – say
50mm. Any more than this and the static ride height was going to be way high.

Other

For nearly all the other design details, I looked towards the Greenspeed GTR. That meant 20 inch wheels front and
back (the Greenspeed models I have ridden with 16 inch wheels had a clearly inferior ride), derailleur gears front and
rear together with a 3-speed internal rear hub, slung hammock-like recumbent seat, similar track and wheelbase
dimensions – in fact anything I was unsure of, I copied straight from the HPV I already had.

However, changes were likely in two other key areas – brakes and steering.

The GTR runs cable-operated drum brakes working independently on the two front wheels. And the brakes aren’t
great. In normal day-to-day use I am sure they’d be adequate but when plunging downhill at 80 km/h, stopping
distances are too long and the need to evenly apply the brakes a bit tricky. I thought perhaps hydraulic disc brakes
operated from a single lever would be much better – and since Greenspeed sell these, I put them on my wish-list.

Less easy to potentially solve was the other concern – steering. The GTR uses rods to directly control the movement
of the steering arms. The rods are operated through small Heim (rose) joints by the steering levers which pivot
around a central, vertical axis. However, the steering – while ultra-sharp at low speed – retains all its sharpness at
high speed, resulting in quite a lot of nervousness (of both the steering and the rider!). I wanted slower steering at
high speed without losing to much directness in normal manoeuvring.

Conclusion

So the proposed spec list reads something like this:

 Square tube frame made from aluminium with lots of holes cut in it
  Rear swing-arm and front double wishbone suspension with lots of travel
 20 inch wheels in a ‘tadpole’ configuration (two front steering, one rear driven)
 Recumbent hammock seat
 Hydraulic front disc brakes
 63+ gears comprising front and rear derailleurs and a 3-speed internal rear hub
 ...and steering mechanism yet to be decided upon

Next week: designing and building the rear swing-arm suspension

Other Front Suspension Designs

When trying to do something new, the first step is to have a look around at what others have
done. So what does a web search under ‘recumbent trike suspension’ come up with? Well, in
short, some pretty horrible front suspension designs.

Of course, as I write this, I have no idea if my front suspension design will turn out woeful on the
road, but at least on the basis of a comparison made on basic suspension principles, some of
these designs look downright bad.

At web.uct.ac.za you’ll find an interesting leading link design – but one which apparently has just
20mm of travel! I am hoping to achieve at least 100mm of travel (from full droop to full bump).

www.hellbentcycles.com at least has double wishbones but both are very short, the rose joints
are not protected from dust or rain, there is no anti-roll mechanism and the suspension travel is
listed at only 38mm.
Then there’s mrrecumbenttrikes.com which unless my eyes deceive me, uses a swing-arm front
suspension without any anti-roll facility! That will give problems in jacking, roll, and - one would
assume - bump steer.

Then, if you want to see a suspension that is as crude-as, check out www.hotmover.com. Just
look at that suspension travel... and the [lack of] damping!

As I said, maybe I’ll fall completely on my face when I first roll down the road, but surely even a
badly sorted double wishbone system with plenty of travel and a sway bar will be better than
these?!

Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 2

The rear suspension

Last week in Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 1 we covered the basics of the proposed design:

 Square tube frame made from aluminium with lots of holes cut in it
 Rear swing-arm and front double wishbone suspension, each with lots of travel
 20 inch wheels in a ‘tadpole’ configuration (two front steering, one rear driven)
 Recumbent hammock seat
 Hydraulic front disc brakes
 63+ gears comprising front and rear derailleurs and a 3-speed internal rear hub
 A steering mechanism yet to be decided upon
...and with the basic layout of the wheelbase, track, seat shape and so on based around the pictured Greenspeed
GTR.

But now it’s time to forget the theory and start the practice, beginning with the rear suspension.

The Design

As mentioned last week, the rear suspension design is a longitudinal swing-arm. Two interconnected parallel arms
support the rear axle, being pivoted near their opposite ends. As the wheel moves upward, the part of the arm
forward of the pivot moves downwards, in this case compressing a coil spring and at the same time, extending the
damper.

Oddly enough, the first important decision that had to be taken about the rear suspension was the nature of the pivot.
Pivots

In automotive applications, suspension pivots almost always comprise rubber bushes. An inner crush tube is bonded
to a rubber cylinder that in turn is bonded within another metal tube. The rubber twists torsionally when the inner and
outers move relative to one another. In racing machines, pictured Heim (or rose) joints are often used, taking out the
flex associated with rubber. Car manufacturers use rubber bushes for these reasons: they’re cheap, absorb vibration,
and allow suspension rotations that are not perfectly axial. (A Holden engineer once told me their trailing-arm-with-
an-extra-link rear suspension would bind solid if rubber bushes weren’t used.)

On the other hand, most makers of HPVs use Heim joints, while high performance mountain bikes use ball bearings or
small diameter graphite tubes.

My preference was for conventional car-type bushes, but using polyurethane instead of rubber. (The use of the plastic
necessitates that the bush rotates on the crush tube.) The benefits are extremely good durability (the loads are far
less than on a car but the bushes are similarly sized), some vibration absorption, and custom sizing easily catered for.

I wanted to use as the outer bush housing aluminium tube with an ID of 25.4mm (ie 1 inch), an outer diameter of
32.4mm, and a through-bolt diameter of 8mm. Polyurethane bush manufacturer Super Pro were able to offer off the
shelf bushes to suit this – the SPF0107K which are normally used as replacements in the front spring shackles of a ‘85
Jeep (or the rear shackles in a ‘57-‘65 Gordon Keeble or Tempest!).
These bushes are 25.4mm outside diameter and have a total length - including a single end flange - of 30mm. The
end flange is chamfered and including the chamfer, is 7.7mm thick. The diameter of the flange is 34mm. The bushes
are designed to be inserted from each end of the tube that holds them. The flange gives lateral location and the
chamfer reduces the amount of polyurethane which is in contact with the bracket, reducing stiction and potential
squeaks.

In the rear suspension application the bushes in use have a small (~7mm) gap between them within the sleeve. But
this is of no consequence as there’s still plenty of polyurethane to take the forces.

The crush tube used through the middle of the bush (on which the bush rotates) was made from 12.5mm (just under
1/2 inch) shock absorber shafting. Using a lathe, the shaft was shortened and then drilled and tapped to take an 8mm
bolt at each end. The huge advantage of using this material for the crush tube is that the shock absorber shaft is hard
chrome plated (for wear resistance) and is strong with a very smooth surface finish. The downside of the whole
assembly is weight – but IMHO it is a weight penalty well spent.

Pivot Location

If you think of a swing-arm as being like a see-saw, the wheel is at one end, the pivot somewhere along the length,
and the spring at the opposite end to the wheel. The closer to the far end that the pivot is placed,

 the greater the leverage on the spring – and so the stiffer the spring has to be for a given wheel rate
 the smaller the compression of the spring for a given wheel movement
 the less the ends of the spring will become angled during compression and extension
 the less the spring intrudes on the space available within the wheelbase

That’s quite a list to consider and in the end I made the decision to place the pivot point about one-third way along
the swing-arm. (The detailed geometry of the front and ear suspension is covered later in this series.) However,
unlike every other HPV with a rear swing arm that I’ve seen, I decided to use two pivot points widely spaced but
located along the same axis. Widely spaced? How?
Looking straight down on the rear wheel, the swing-arm comprises two parallel arms, one that goes to each end of
the wheel’s axle. In the case of a recumbent trike, the rear axle is quite long as it needs to accommodate the wide
hub and gear cluster. Widely-spaced arms give greater strength and if the forward pivot points are equally widely-
spaced, the rear wheel will be well supported in side-load, such as generated when cornering. (Contrast this with if
the widely-spaced arms join at one forward point, with a single bush used to pivot it.) It’s an interesting fact that
when people make HPVs using the suspension rear forks from a mountain bike, the lateral loadings of the trike usually
end up breaking the rear suspension arms...

And there’s another reason for widely-spaced pivots. As mentioned last week, if the tension side of the chain pulls
along a line which is greatly above or below the pivot axis, with each pedal stroke the swing-arm will be either
extended (if chain pulls below the axis) or compressed (if chain pulls above the pivot axis). Either effect will cause
suspension ‘pogo-ing’.

Most mountain bikes and suspended recumbents place the chain axis a little above or below the suspension pivot,
because the physical presence of the pivot prevents the designers doing anything else. However, if two in-line widely-
spaced pivots are used, the chain can pass through this axis, running between the two pivots. (Or, as was later
actually done, an adjustable height guide pulley can be used in development, with the chain location able to be moved
over a wide range without it fouling anything.)

Spring Location

Looking at the shape of the Greenspeed GTR (on which the basic dimensions of the new machine were being based),
it could be seen that there’s plenty of room under the inclined hammock-like seat for the spring and damper. This
allowed the spring to mounted vertically, bearing at its lower end on the main frame longitudinal (or in fact on the
adjustable lower spring platform, but we’ll get to that later), and the upper end bearing against an extension of the
swing-arm.

But to achieve this, the swing-arm had to be an unusual shape – so maybe I’d better cover the swing-arm design
now!

Oops – the First Swing-Arm

The first swing-arm looked like this. In operation, the arm was going to be subjected primarily to the upwards push of
the wheel (red arrow), the downwards pull of the suspension bush (blue arrow), and the upwards push of the spring
(green arrow). I was pretty happy with this design, which during bump placed all but the gusset (tension) and the
spring-arm (bending) in compression.

However, at 4am I suddenly awoke with a start. The design was wrong! If roughly one-third of the total weight of HPV
and rider is borne by the back wheel, the vertical load would be only about 30kg – say 60 or even 90kg, the latter if
the vertical acceleration over a bump reached 2G. But the pull by the chain could be substantially more than that.

A recumbent allows the rider to push against the seat, not against just their weight. As a result, the pull on the chain
could be expected to be way more than the upwards force of a bump. And my grand design failed miserably when the
forward pull of the chain was considered. In fact, in that case, the gusset would be subjected to compression – exactly
what it was never meant to do...

I started the rear suspension again...

Better – the Second Swing-Arm

Starting on the basis that the greatest force on the rear swing-arm would be the pull of the chain required that a
member be positioned to take this in compression. This was made from 40 x 40mm x 3mm square aluminium tube,
located largely horizontally. This tube connected at an acute angle to a larger 50 x 50 x 3mm tube positioned at its
forward end.

Next, the upwards forces of bumps had to be taken. A 3mm sheet gusset was positioned beneath the horizontal
member to take this bending force and turn it into a tension – ie the upwards force was trying to stretch the gusset.
That was fine in bump, but in rebound (where the damper resists the downwards movement of the wheel) there was
little strength in the assembly. To absorb this force, a second gusset was positioned above the horizontal. This gave a
rigid assembly with the tube extremely strong in compression (caused by chain tension), and very strong in upwards
bending (caused by bumps) and downwards bending (caused by the damper extension in rebound).

To operate the spring, an extra piece of rectangular tube was placed parallel to the horizontal part of the arm,
extending forwards from the top of the larger upright-angled tube. (This small extension piece was the only bit I could
re-use from the first design!)

The round aluminium tube to take the polyurethane bushes was positioned in a hole drilled right through the 50 x
50mm tube. But this wasn’t the only hole drilled – numerous holes were strategically made to lighten the whole
assembly. (Incidentally, when the first arm proved a flop, I decided to test part of it to destruction. As can be seen at
Making Things, Part 2 , bending it proved very difficult – even when supporting the back-end weight of a car!)
So far I’ve only described one half of the swing-arm. But of course there are two mirror-image halves – and they
needed to be joined together. Two tubes are used to make this connection. The first is in 40 x 40mm tube and joins
the two ‘spring operating’ extensions. In fact, it is this tube that bears down on the spring. The second connector
piece is in larger 50 x 50mm tube and is positioned as close as possible to the wheel axle. This piece also carries one
of the rear wheel mudguard mounts.

Welding

The rear swing-arm was the first part of the HPV that I built. As a result, it was also the first part that I needed to
have welded.

Welding of aluminium can be by MIG or TIG, with MIG the most commonly used welding technique. However, while it
is faster, it is also less suited to small components and gives a less pleasing visual result that is potentially weaker.
TIG needs a very steady hand, a good welding machine and takes much longer. Good TIG tradespeople are also much
harder to find than good MIG welders.

However, after chasing around on the phone (in this sort of search, being passed by word of mouth from one welder
to the next is best) I managed to locate a brilliant TIG welder who was close, cheap and flexible in working hours.

Welding the rear swing-arm took about four hours of careful work but the results were stunning – superb welding and
a very rigid, relatively light weight (2.2kg) assembly.
Damper and Spring

The details of the springs and dampers will be covered later in this series but – in brief – what do they consist of?

In fact, the very first components bought in the build of the HPV were the dampers. After looking at mountain bike
spring/damper combinations, I decided to steer well clear of any of them. Why? Because of their ridiculous cost. Many
are just air springs (which should cost next to nothing) while others are oil/gas with external concentric coil springs
and adjustable damping.

But as far as I could see, all the rear bike dampers were way overpriced - AUD$500 seemed common. Also, there
didn’t seem to be the professionalism of support that I thought I’d need – at minimum, I expected to have to rebuild
the damper to achieve the front and rear damping behaviour I desired. And when I mentioned damper rebuilding,
bicycle shop staff backed away in terror... Perhaps I just went to the wrong shops, but these dampers do seem
incredibly overpriced for what they are.

Instead I bought three second-hand motorcycle steering dampers. This design uses a large diameter steel shaft which
passes right through the body of the damper (so reducing their required size by avoiding the need for a twin tube
design), aluminium bodies, and are rebuildable and so can have their damping behaviour altered. They’re also cheap –
I paid AUD$75 each for them second-hand. The downside is that their overall mass is high (500g each) and the
damping behaviour is symmetrical (ie when used unmodified in a suspension application, bump and rebound damping
will be the same).

Spring Seat

As already mentioned, the spring is a conventional coil spring mounted vertically. It needs to be adjustable for
preload, primarily so that the same ride height can be achieved with different weights on the rear carrier. I used my
lathe to turn-up a cup that formed the lower spring seat. This sits on the shoulder of a long externally threaded
upright that rotates within an internally threaded tube welded vertically within the main longitudinal frame tube. A
large knurled aluminium knob allows easy adjustment. While I am happy with the end result, a quick check with the
scales showed the assembly adds about 200g over the weight of the bare lower spring cup. I was starting to find that
every feature added mass...

Pivot Adjustment

So that the rear wheel could be aligned, adjustment was built into the rear pivot points. This took the form of castor
adjusters used in karts which incorporate an eccentric able to be adjusted by rotating the collar.

Next week: the nightmare of designing and building the front suspension

Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 3

The front suspension

Last week I covered the rear suspension of the Human Powered Vehicle HPV). However, while there were some
complexities involved in its development, they pale into total insignificance when compared with the front
suspension... I absolutely take my hat off to anyone who has developed from scratch the front suspension for any
vehicle while getting good results in camber change, castor change, anti-dive, roll centre height, end-view swing arm
length, rigidity and lightness.

It is an unbelievably difficult exercise!

But first, there were some basic design decisions to make. To achieve a decent outcome in terms of camber change,
bump steer, anti-dive and so on, double unequal length wishbones seemed to be by far the best design choice. (See
Front Suspension Designs for the alternatives.) And of course there is plenty of design material around for double
wishbone suspension systems – in fact, more than for any other sort of suspension.

However, I found it incredibly hard to gain any useful information from these design resources.

Firstly, I figured I’d use one of the suspension design software programs - Susprog 3D and Suspension Analyzer being
the best known. But at this beginning stage both were near useless. For starters, before you can gain any useful
design information at all, you need to know:

 Position of front upper wishbone mount

 Position of rear upper wishbone mount
 Position of front lower wishbone mount
 Position of rear lower wishbone mount
 Position of upper ball-joint
 Position of lower ball-joint

Considering that each mount is defined in its position in three planes, that’s immediately 18 dimensions. The add to
that wheel offset and diameter, and inner and outer steering tie rod positions, and you’re looking at 26 or more
accurate dimensions needed before you can even start. (Robert Small, the author of Susprog 3D, told me that in fact
the steering data didn’t need to be input for the program to work. But despite being given a free copy of the program,
spending hours on it and exchanging many emails with Robert, I couldn’t make it work.)

These suspension design programs are nothing like using (say) subwoofer enclosure design software or camshaft
design software where although a similar number of criteria may be needed, the specs are readily available. In the
case of a suspension design, all the specs need to be measured. And what if you’re starting with literally a blank
screen – you don’t have any measurements because nothing has yet been decided? In that case you just go round
and round, punching in figures that become increasingly meaningless. I’m very much a fan of computer aided design
but in the case of the suspension programs, I found the process extremely frustrating. (It would be far better if a
program allowed you to sketch the suspension on screen and then give you an indication of how global changes
affected things eg how changing the inclination of the upper wishbone influences camber gained during bump.)

Having at least temporarily given up on the software approach, I looked at lots of books. These were much better in
giving general guidelines but when it came to actually laying out the suspension, again were not very helpful.

But What Was Wanted?

Of course, part of the problem in designing the suspension was not knowing what was actually wanted! A car tyre
works best if it is kept as vertical as possible during cornering. (Negative camber – whether static, dynamic through
castor, or dynamic through bump – is used so that the more heavily loaded outside wheel becomes vertical during
cornering.) But a bicycle tyre – effectively what an HPV tyre is – is designed to work well through a range of cambers.
That’s because in a bicycle application, during cornering the tyre is always at an angle to the road.

I talked to Paul Sims – chief designer of the Greenspeed trikes and a very helpful man to boot – and he suggested
that a static camber angle of about 5 degrees would give the best results. However, the actual (ie dynamic) camber
angle also depends on the castor, with more castor giving more neg camber as lock is applied. Furthermore, in my
application, I could add even more negative camber during bump – easily achieved by making the upper wishbone
shorter. So the final suspension-induced camber achieved during cornering depended on:

 Static negative camber

 Castor
 Dynamic negative camber through bump (and therefore in roll)

But each of these also has an associated minus – too much static neg camber will cause uneven tyre wear and
instability under braking; too much castor will make the steering heavy; and too much dynamic neg camber in bump
will cause a jacking effect as the suspension starts acting like a short lateral swing-arm. But the big potential benefit
of lots of cornering camber is heaps of camber thrust (a sideways force generated by the camber of the wheels that
helps resist cornering forces) and less tyre tuck-under.

And there’s another thing. Any body roll results in a reduced actual camber angle between the tyre and the road. For
example, a 5 degree body roll will result in 5 degrees less negative camber of the outside (loaded) wheel – so you
also need to know how much body roll there will be. Which depends on the roll centre, the height of the centre of
gravity, the stiffness of the springs and swaybar.... Aaagh!

Chalk and Concrete

It was all rapidly growing too hard, so I went back to chalk and a piece of bare concrete. Literally. As mentioned last
week, the dampers for all three wheels comprise ex-motorcycle steering dampers - the stroke of these could be used
as a starting point in determining some of the suspension geometry. The other factor that could be used was the
length of the lower wishbone. To help minimise track change during suspension movement, the lower wishbone should
be as long as possible. In the case of the HPV, that meant approaching half the track dimension, or about 400mm. So
with the damper stroke and lower wishbone length determined, some full-size chalk marks could be made on the
concrete.

The stroke of the dampers is about 70mm but I wanted a front suspension travel of at least 100mm. To achieve this,
the damper needed to be installed at an angle from vertical, and/or the damper had to be located with one pick-up
point well in from the end of the wishbone. Obviously, the damper body also needed to connect to the HPV frame.
With these aspects defined, the form of the suspension began to take shape.

The spacing between the wishbones was the next decision. Wide-spaced wishbones are good for:

 Strength
  Suspension travel
 The length of spring that can be fitted
 Creating space to allow larger diameter tubes to form the arms

But unfortunately in my application, if the spacing was too great, the suspension would intrude into the area of leg
and foot movement that occurs during pedalling. Too wide a vertical spacing between the wishbones would also
require odd, long mounts for the damper or alternatively, would require that the damper be mounted more vertically,
reducing suspension travel. These points set the vertical distance between the wishbone inner mounts at about
160mm centre-to-centre.

Next, where was the spring to go? As with the rear suspension, it was intended that separately-mounted coil springs
be used, rather than having them wound concentrically with the damper. The advantages of separate spring mounting
were:

 No need to provide spring seats on the dampers

 The spring:damper stroke relationship could be varied from1:1 – that is, it would be possible to use a different
motion ratio for the spring and damper
 Tight clearances around the damper meant the diameter and length of the spring would be less constrained

So instead of mounting the spring around the damper shaft, it was mounted inboard of the upper wishbone mount.
The base of the spring acts against the lower wishbone while its top pushes against the frame extension that is used
to support the upper, inner wishbone mount.

(This spring location places a high bending load on the lower wishbone – something I hadn’t thought through
sufficiently at this stage. Additionally, as the spring location is moved further inboard, the spring rate goes up very
fast to maintain a given wheel rate. If I was starting again from scratch, I would place the spring as far outboard as
possible, saving a lot of weight in the spring as a much lighter spring could be then used. More on this in the next part
of this series.)

About this time, two further decisions were made. The lower wishbone had always been intended to be an A-arm with
a broad base. The upper wishbone had also been intended to be an A-arm, shorter but otherwise of much the same
shape as the lower arm. However, when I started laying things out accurately, I soon realised that if it remained the
proposed shape, the upper A-arm would foul the damper. Instead this arm became a pair of linkages which were then
integrated into one arm.

And the other decision? The frame extension providing both the upper spring seat and the mount of the upper
wishbone inner pivot had been intended to be a simple cantilever side extension of the main fore/aft frame tube.
However, using the Greenspeed GTR as the guide, I realised that this extension would foul the tension side of the
chain. (The tension side of the chain should be kept parallel to the long axis of the boom that supports the front chain
rings and pedals. This causes the boom to be subjected primarily to compression rather than bending forces.) Instead,
a more complex frame arrangement was put into place that allowed the chain to pass without hindrance.
Anti-Dive

It’s possible to build anti-dive into the front suspension. If, when viewed from the side, the upper and lower wishbone
frame pivot axes are not parallel but instead converge towards the centre of the vehicle wheelbase, under braking an
element of anti-dive will be introduced. Since dive uses up part of the suspension travel (leaving less to cope with
bumps experienced when braking), anti-dive sounds a good thing to have.

But how much should the axes be inclined? Again, this can be calculated by suspension design programs but again, a
helluva lot of unknown information – including the centre of gravity height – needs to be input. So why not simply
configure the system to have a heap of anti-dive? The problem is that too much anti-dive results in very harsh
behaviour under bump. This is because with anti-dive, the wheel moves forward as well as upwards when the bump is
met, so hitting the bump harder.

The upper inner wishbone pivots naturally have a 5 degree inclination towards the rear of the HPV - this is the case
because the main frame longitudinal slopes upwards by this angle. However, how much angle should be provided in
the bottom wishbone pivot axis? I didn’t know and so I made this angle easily adjustable by providing multiple inner
wishbone mounting heights for both the front and rear bushes, with the default being the 5 degrees.

Ball-joints

As mentioned last week in Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 2, the front and rear frame suspension pivots
comprised polyurethane bushes rotating on ex-shock absorber chrome-plated steel shafts. These were chosen in
preference to Heim (rose) joints primarily for reasons of durability but also because they have some vibration and
shock absorption capability. For durability reasons I was also reluctant to use Heim joints for the wheel upright’s
steering pivots. This HPV will be used in wet and dusty conditions and Heim joints normally have no protection from
either contaminant.

I looked at the smallest tie-rod ends I could find for cars but they were too large and heavy. I also looked at the front
ball-joints from quad motorbikes and while they looked close to what was needed, most were of the design where
they are pressed into the suspension arm. That requires accurate clearances and is best suited to steel arms rather
than those made from aluminium.
I finally settled on miniature female aluminium-bodied ball-joints obtained from a bearing supplier. These come in a
variety of sizes and for the lower, more heavily loaded ball-joint I used the pictured 12mm and for the upper ball-
joint, 10mm. These ball-joints are able to be greased and have a rubber protective cover. In the application I would
expect them to have a very long life but in any case, they are easy to replace and available off the shelf as a standard
part.

Castor

Vehicles run castor in order that the steering self-centres. Castor (the angle the steering axis leans back from the
vertical when the vehicle is viewed from the side) causes the vehicle to be lifted as lock is applied. This applies a self-
straightening action – the wheel automatically returns to a position where no body lift is occurring. In addition, as
mentioned above, the greater the amount of castor, the greater the amount of neg camber that occurs during
cornering. (On cars with lots of castor this affect can be seen when the vehicle has been parked with the wheels on
full lock. The resulting camber can easily be seen by eye.)

HPVs use what in car design would be regarded as a radical amount of castor. This is because the weight of an HPV is
so much less than a car that the self-correcting torque is also much lower. Paul Sims suggested at least 16 degrees,
while my Greenspeed GTR runs about 10 degrees.

But providing any castor at all caused me some suspension design difficulties – and it’s all my fault. As mentioned,
when I was laying out the upper and lower wishbones, I used much the same A-arm shape, just with the lower A-arm
shorter. To clear the damper the upper arm had become a pair of parallel links, but the centrelines of the upper and
lower arms had remained the same – that is, the upper pair of links were directly above the centreline of the lower
links. That put the two steering ball-joints one above the other...which would naturally result in zero castor! Not what
was wanted!

To gain anything like 16 degrees of castor, the lower ball-joint would have to be 50mm further forward than the upper
ball-joint. If the lower ball-joint was to remain mounted at the apex of the lower A-arm, and the upper ball-joint was
to continue to be mounted mid-way between the upper parallel arms, the apex of the lower A-arm would need to be
moved well forward. The whole lower arm couldn’t be moved forward because that would have meant the spring
rested asymmetrically on the lower arm and the damper no longer fitting properly. Instead, just the lower ball-joint
mount was moved forward, courtesy of an angle bracket. This also allowed the bracket to be drilled for multiple ball-
joint positions, allowing castor to be adjustable. (However, major changes subsequently needed to be made to this
approach: see the ‘Failure!’ breakout box.)
Wheel Upright

The wheel upright supports the stub axle, disc brake calliper, steering arm and upper and lower ball-joints. It needs to
be very stiff and, as its mass is entirely unsprung, light. It was made from 10mm thick aluminium plate and
incorporates the lower and upper ball-joint mounts and the steering arms. Plenty of holes were drilled to lighten it and
so despite appearances, the assembly remains quite light at about 600g each. (This pic shows an early version: some
changes were later made as seen below.)

The 12mm steel stub axle (supplied by Greenspeed) is supported by the upright by being placed through a drilled
boss (machined on the lathe) that in turn was placed through a hole drilled thought the plate, being welded to the
plate both sides. A shoulder machined on the tube determined the wheel offset – this was set to precisely centre the
disc within the hydraulic caliper.

Scrub Radius

I’ve already described how the lower ball-joint needed to be placed well forward of the upper ball-joint (or vice versa)
to get the desired castor. Well, to get the desired scrub radius, the upper ball joint had to be positioned much further
inboard than the lower ball-joint.
So what’s this about scrub radius? The term refers to where an imaginary line drawn through the upper and lower
ball-joint would impinge on the road. When viewed from ahead, if this steering axis line touches the road on the
outside of the tyre’s centreline, the result is called negative scrub radius. If the line touches the road on the inside of
the tyre’s centreline, it is called positive scrub radius. Both positive and negative scrub radii will cause steering
reactions when longitudinal loads are suddenly applied to one tyre but not the other. In other words, braking say one
wheel will cause the vehicle to steer – if the scrub radius is positive, steer in the direction of that slowed wheel. If the
scrub radius is negative, steer in the direction of the opposite wheel.

The Greenspeed trikes uses zero scrub radius steering, sometimes called centre-point steering. However, some HPVs
use negative scrub radius steering, so that braking one wheel applies a self-correcting torque to the vehicle. What
happens is this: say, the right-hand tyre is braked. This causes the steering to pull to the left, offsetting the natural
reaction for the vehicle to rotate clockwise as it attempts to pivot around the slowing wheel. It sounds good in theory
- and many cars use negative scrub radius steering for similar reasons - but Greenspeed’s Paul Sims suggested to me
that the actual behaviour of an HPV with negative scrub radius steering depends a lot on the frictional characteristics
of the road surface – which also seems to make sense.

As a result, I decided to set the scrub radius to zero – centre-point steering.

Agggh, Steering Axis Inclination!

The decision might have been made to run zero scrub radius – but what were the implications of that for the steering
axis inclination (sometimes still called kingpin inclination)? Making a simple drawing and applying some trigonometry
showed that to achieve zero scrub radius steering, the line passing through both ball-joints needed to have an angle
to the vertical of 27 degrees. And that’s a bloody lot of steering axis inclination!

A bloody lot!

So what does having a lot of steering axis inclination matter?

The easiest way to see the affects of all these angles is to make a simple model and twirl it in your fingers. I grabbed
a rubber door stopper and stuck a thin wire through the centre hole. I then bent the wire up to 27 degrees from the
vertical and held it so that it had zero castor. (That is, when viewed as if from the end of the car, it had an angle of 27
degrees, but when viewed from side-on, the axis was vertical.) Held in this way it can be clearly see that as the wheel
is steered, it tends to move downwards as lock is applied in either direction. Normally, the tyre would be in contact
with the road so the vehicle would be pushed upwards as lock is applied. (This is why increasing steering axis
inclination causes greater self-centring.) At the same time as the wheel moved downwards, it could also be seen that
its camber went positive – not what you want when cornering!

But it gets worse. Throw in some castor (ie the steering axis inclined backwards when the ‘car’ is viewed from the
side) and the wheel geometry looked pretty ugly. When the wheel was turned so that it was the outside wheel in
cornering, it gained neg camber (fine!), rose into the air (steering lighter) before then starting to head back
downwards (steering heavier). When it was turned the other way it immediately assumed a lot of positive camber and
moved downwards rapidly (ie fast making the steering heavy).

No wonder the textbooks say that you shouldn’t go overboard on steering axle inclination but plenty of castor is fine!

Ball-Joint Locations

But how could I achieve a steering axis inclination of way less than 27 degrees? That angle had come about from
using as the wheel upright a flat, vertical aluminium plate positioned just inboard of the disc, with the lower ball-joint
as close to the upright as possible. Now it looked like the lower ball joint had to be on the other side of the disc –
impossible. Of course the bicycle-style spoked wheels used on HPVs don’t have a ‘dish’ like car wheels, so there’s no
room for the ball-joint within the wheel. Or is there? After pondering for a long time I figured the lower ball-joint could
go directly below the disc and on the same plane as the disc, rather than about 45mm inside it where the original
location placed it.

This meant redesigning (although thankfully not remaking!) the wheel uprights and more seriously, a loss in ground
clearance as the ride height then also needed to decrease.
This pic shows how hard it was to achieve zero scrub radius without making the steering axis inclination too great.
Note the position of the lower ball-joint further outboard than the disc brake!
Failure!

With just the two lower wishbones and the wheel uprights complete, it was possible to load them
up – that is, to install these parts and the wheels and put some weight on the front of the frame
to see what happened. And the results were not encouraging.

Firstly, the extended angle bracket (the one that moved the bottom ball-joint forward to obtain
the correct castor) bent like a bloody banana! Yep, despite being made of 5mm aluminium plate,
it was simply way too weak.

I then moved the lower ball-joint locating bolt to the hole centred at the top of the ‘A’, only to find
that again that the camber of the wheel permanently changed when load was applied! But what
was happening this time? – there was no apparent bending of the bracket.

This failure was even more interesting. The 12mm bolt connecting the wishbone to the ball-joint
passed through the 5mm thick aluminium plate; the loads were high enough that the plate was
being crushed – ie the hole was elongated vertically!

To overcome these problems I decided that the lower ball-joint had to be mounted at the top of
the ‘A’. (The required castor could be gained by moving the top ball-joint backwards, something
that should have always been done.) The end of the wishbone was then substantially modified in
order that it better support the ball-joint bolt. The very top of the ‘A’ was cut off and a cylinder of
aluminium turned-up. A hole was drilled through the cylinder. This hole size matched the ball-
joint bolt, while its outside diameter of the cylinder allowed it to be a press-fit in the centre tube
of the top of the wishbone. The aluminium cylinder was welded into position and had a
strengthening plate added at its outermost end. An 80mm long Allen-key high tensile steel bolt
was then inserted through the aluminium cylinder - being supported along 50mm of its length –
before screwing into the ball-joint. (This photo shows the modified and original wishbones, before
the modified one was welded.)

This achieved two things: (1) the ball-joint was mounted at the strongest part of the wishbone;
(2) the ball-joint mounting bolt was extremely well supported.

But the ball-joint mounting wasn’t the only problem. Applying load to the front of the frame
showed that the lower wishbones themselves had quite a lot of deflection. How much then? Well,
the static load on the wishbones works out to 40kg per side, so with sudden vertical accelerations
over bumps it seems reasonable to at least double this to 80kg, or a total of 160kg on the front of
the frame. And with this mass (two people!) bearing down on the frame, the 300mm long
wishbones deflected by a total of 3mm! They didn’t take a permanent ‘set’ (ie stay bent) but this
much deflection was too much for me to be comfortable with.

(Why so much bending? Two reasons: firstly, small diameter tubes are required to fit everything
into the tight available space, and secondly, the fact that the spring location places the wishbone
in bending rather than in compression. On the other hand, the instantaneous damper loads –
arguably much larger than the spring loads but not able to be tested – place the wishbone in
compression.)

To reduce deflection, I added two tension braces to the underside of each wishbone. Using 5 x
5mm solid aluminium bar, the weight gain was minimal and the ground clearance change (5mm)
also very small. However, the change in deflection was massive – total deflection halved!

But the whole episode had been rather sobering: despite just being a pedal-powered machine,
the expected loads require strength as well as lightness. In some places, lots of strength! I went
back to the design of the wheel upright and added three small stiffening gussets...

Roll Centres and Camber Gain

The roll centre is the virtual (ie invisible) point about which the car rolls. It is determined by the geometry of the
suspension. If the roll centre is below the centre of gravity, the vehicle body will roll conventionally ie lean away from
the cornering line. The amount of body roll that occurs with a given cornering force largely depends on the
relationship between the height of the centre of gravity and the roll centre. Raising the suspension roll centre, or
lowering the centre of gravity, will decrease roll. However, while having a high roll centre therefore sounds attractive,
it has significant negatives associated with it. In fact, most well set up cars run a roll centre at, slightly above, or
slightly below ground level. Most important is that the roll centre doesn’t move around much, either laterally with
body roll or vertically with poor suspension design.
All this stuff is far easier to understand when the lines are drawn to show roll centres. In the case of a double
wishbone suspension, the lines of the two wishbones (ie through their pivots points) are extended until they meet.
This point is called the reaction point or instant centre (‘A’). A line is then drawn from this point to the contact patch
of the tyres (‘C’). The roll centre (‘R’) is where this latter line crosses the centreline of the car (ie the vertical line that
passes through the centre of gravity).

So let’s jump forward about 10 weeks in construction and look at the roll centres of the front suspension on the near
complete HPV. (Click on the pics to enlarge them.)

This shows the wishbone angles with the HPV at its normal ride height, ie loaded with my weight. The location of the
roll centre has been specified after Gillespie (Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics, page 265, SAE – 1992). The roll
centre height is approximately 75mm above ground. Note that the red lines are drawn through the pivot points, which
in the case of the upper wishbone is not initially obvious.

As can be seen, the height of the roll centre changes little (perhaps 10mm or so) when the suspension is at full bump.
Note that the piece of tube and plate the wheel is sitting on is 95mm high.

This diagram shows the roll centres at standard ride height and at full bump. It doesn’t take into account lateral
movement caused by shifting of the centre of gravity due to body roll but as can be seen, the vertical movement of
the roll centre is very small.
At full droop the virtual swing arm becomes very long and the roll centre rises just a little more.

This shows the camber increase gained in full bump. Static is negative 5 degrees at normal ride height and dynamic
adds about another negative 7 degrees. The castor further adds camber when cornering. However, body roll reduces
the effective camber gain of the suspension.

You reckon it’s getting complicated? Wait for next week when I design the springs and then have them
made!

Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 4

The springs and dampers

With the suspension links finished front and rear, it was time to organise the springs and dampers.

As covered in previous parts of this series, the front suspension comprises unequal length double wishbones. The coil
spring is held captive between the lower spring mount – located about a quarter of the way along the lower wishbone
– and a frame extension. The separate damper is largely in parallel to the spring; however it is mounted further
outboard and is slightly angled.

The rear suspension comprises a longitudinal swing-arm. It also uses a separately mounted spring and damper, with
the spring leverage ratio in this case being about 2.5 to one.

Corner Weighting

Before having the springs made, the first important step was to measure the weight acting on each wheel.

Measurement of the corner weights was achieved using digital bathroom scales, positioned under one wheel at a time.
(At this time the yet-to-be-made springs were replaced with appropriate length blocks of wood.) The two wheels at
which the measurement was not being taken were supported on blocks the same height as the scales and the human
occupant (me!) positioned on the HPV. The scales were then read, the support blocks and scales moved, and the
measurement process repeated at the next wheel. This showed that each of the two front wheels supports about 43kg
and the rear wheel, 27kg.
Weight Distribution?

In Part 1 of this series (see Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 1 ) I said of the Greenspeed
GTR:

However, the Greenspeed has some brilliant design characteristics, optimised in the long period
over which the machines have been constructed. The relationship between the seats, forward-
mounted pedals and the side-mounted steering arms is perfect. The weight distribution (a third
on each corner) is the optimal compromise between rear wheel traction up steep hills (more
weight wanted on back wheel), lateral cornering performance (more weight located between front
wheels), and braking performance (weight wanted on the back to stop the trike lifting its rear
wheel).

So what’s this about the front wheels of my design having 43kg each on them and the rear wheel
only 27kg?

Partly it’s just how it turned out (especially with the front suspension ended up much heavier than
I had expected), and partly it’s where I decided to place the seat within the wheelbase. Paul Sims
of Greenspeed made the point to me that better cornering is achieved by placing more of the
mass between the front wheels of a three-wheeler. However, the downside of this is reduced
traction up hills and potential rear wheel lifting under brakes. However, by this stage I realised
my design was going to end up heavier than the Greenspeed so I knew that even with a more
forward weight bias, there’d still be enough on the rear wheel to keep it planted for grip and
braking.

Sprung vs Unsprung Weight

So the two front wheels each support about 43kg and the rear wheel, 27kg.

These are the total weights acting on the contact patch under each of these tyres. These comprise a little unsprung
mass (the mass of the wheels and axles; about half the mass of the control arms; and about one-quarter the mass of
the springs) with the rest being sprung mass. The springs support only the sprung mass so if we’re to work out how
much mass the springs are going to support, the unsprung mass needs to be subtracted from the sprung mass. When
this is done, the figures become approximately front: 40kg each and rear: 23kg. However, if a heavy load is placed on
the carrier, the rear spring’s load will increase a lot, perhaps as by as much as an additional 30kg.
The Rear Spring

So from the foregoing, the rear spring needs to cope in normal conditions in supporting 23kg and at times as much as
53kg. But that’s not quite right: in fact, because of the leverage ratio designed into the rear swing-arm, the spring
loading is going to be much higher than these figures suggest. The easiest way of working out what leverage ratio is
acting on the spring is to carefully measure the wheel travel from full bump to full rebound and compare it with the
distance the spring is compressed.

However, there are a few major practical traps in this. Firstly, as you’ll subsequently see, the ratio of spring to wheel
movement is mathematically squared, so even a small error in the ratio measurement will result in a large error in the
calculations. For this reason, it is best to measure the wheel and spring movements over small increments all the way
through full travel. Secondly, the spring compression measurements must be made from centre to centre of the
spring, rather than – for example – at the edge of the spring seat. Finally, in some systems the leverage ratio will
vary as the suspension moves through its travel, so you’ll need to take an average.

On the HPV, the rear measurements were:

Wheel Spring
movement compression
increment in (mm)
bump (mm)

17 7.5

17 7

17 7

17 7

17 7

17 7

Total 102 42.5

In other words, over the usual suspension movement, the wheel moves 2.4 times as far as the spring. This is called
the motion ratio, as shown in the table below.
Wheel Spring Motion Ratio
compression
movement in
(mm)
bump

(mm)

17 7.5 2.3

17 7 2.4

17 7 2.4

17 7 2.4

17 7 2.4

17 7 2.4

However, the motion ratio must be squared to work out the relationship between the wheel rate and the spring rate.
In this case, that means the spring rate (eg expressed in kg per millimetre) is 5.8 times the wheel rate (again in
kilograms per millimetre). That’s a very important calculation...

Wheel Spring Motion Ratio Wheel rate

compression
movement in vs Spring
(mm)
bump Rate ratio

(mm) (ie Motion

Ratio
squared)

17 7.5 2.3 5.3

17 7 2.4 5.8

17 7 2.4 5.8

17 7 2.4 5.8

17 7 2.4 5.8

17 7 2.4 5.8

The next step is to calculate the required wheel rate. In the case of the rear suspension, the total travel is about
100mm. Let’s say that we want to proportion that travel as about 1/3 rd in rebound and 2/3rds in bump. (That would
place the wheel one-third of the way into its travel when stationary with the rider on board.) Taking the mass being
supported by the wheel as 23kg, we want 23kg to move the wheel up by about 33mm. In other words, we want a
wheel rate of 23/33, or 0.7kg/mm. That means that for every 0.7 kilograms of weight the rear wheel supports, it
compresses the suspension by one millimetre.

From above we know the spring rate is 5.8 times the wheel rate, so the required spring rate is the wheel rate (0.7
kg/mm) multiplied by 5.8, giving 4 kg/mm. So if the rear suspension is to compress by 33mm when the rider is
aboard, a spring rate of 4 kg/mm (in imperial units that’s 223 pounds/inch) is required.

But what about when that load on the carrier is in position? That was the weight that would take the rear wheel load
from 23kg to 53kg. The wheel rate is 0.7 kg/mm which indicates that with a total load on the back wheel of 53kg,
76mm of the 100mm suspension travel will be used up. Even with an adjustable height spring seat, that suspension
compression is a bit high – so why not increase the wheel rate a little? Lifting it to 1 kg/mm means that the 53kg load
compresses the rear suspension by 53mm and the normal body weight load compresses it by 23mm. That latter figure
leaves only 23mm of droop capability – hmmm, a bit small.

OK, then what about a wheel rate of 0.8 kg/mm? Full load will compress the rear suspension by 66mm while normal
rider body weight will compress it by 29mm. Perhaps that’s a good compromise, and a 0.8 kg/mm wheel rate when
multiplied by 5.8 results in a final spring rate of very close to 4.6 kg/mm (or 259 pounds/inch).

Specifying the Spring

From the above we know we want a spring with a rate of 4.6 kg/mm. But more information than that needs to be
known before a spring manufacturer can be contacted!

1. What is the spring’s required free length? The above calculations assume that there is minimal preload on the
spring – in other words, in needs to be compressed only a tiny bit to keep it captive between the spring seats
at full droop. Since this distance is 122mm (as measured on the HPV), a spring length of 123mm will keep it
captive without upsetting the calculations too much.

2. What is the spring’s required travel? This is vital because under full bounce you don’t want the spring to be
compressed to the extent that it’s coil-bound – ie that all the wire coils are closed right up and are touching
each other. From the motion ratio of 2.4 we know that when the wheel has moved 102mm (that’s full travel),
the spring will have compressed by 42.5mm. Therefore, we want a spring travel of at least 42.5mm or to put
it another way, our spring must be able to compress from 123mm to 80.5mm long without getting coil-bound.

3. What is the required outside diameter of the spring? In this case, where clearance to the drive chain was an
issue, this was set at 45mm. Considering the length and required rate, this is a small diameter – something
which has implications for the spring stress level (see below).

4. What ‘end treatment’ should the spring be made with? The main options are unfinished (where the coil just
stops) or ground and close-wound, where the ends of the spring are flat. The latter is much easier to deal with
in that a simply made flat-bottomed spring cup spreads the load evenly.

Together with some discussion about the application, this information is sufficient for a good spring maker to:

 Specify the wire thickness and the number of free coils to give the required spring rate
 Work out the spring stress level and advise on the likely spring longevity

These are both very important. Despite equations existing to allow you to easily calculate what the required wire
thickness and number of free coils to give the desired rate, for two reasons this is best left to the spring maker.
Firstly, they know what wire gauges they have available to them, and secondly, the ‘number of free coils’ depends a
lot on their winding style – eg where or not the final coils are closed-up, etc.

In any application where the spring is being used in a vehicle you must have the spring stress level calculated. Spring
manufacturers use software programs to do this; once the spring specs are input, the data is available in seconds. As
a guide, the first spring I considered for the rear had a calculated stress level almost five times greater than the
maximum normally allowed spring steel stress.

Simply put, the spring would have broken in use.

Final Rear Spring Specs

Rate: 4.6 kg/mm

Free length: 123mm

Spring travel: at least 42.5mm

Outside diameter: 45mm

End treatment: flat ground

Max spring stress level: suitable for a road vehicle suspension

Mass: as light as possible

Measuring Spring Rates

Spring rates up to about 13 kg/mm (or over 700 pounds/inch) can easily be tested by using a
drill press and bathroom scales. Place the scales on a supporting block of wood on the drill press
table (or base, if the table is too high). Compress the spring onto the scales using the drill press
feed handle and at the same time read the spring deflection with a digital caliper. Compress the
spring by 10mm and then divide the reading by 10 to get the rate in kg/mm. Multiply by 55.88 to
get the results in pounds/inch.

When testing, make sure the spring can’t fly out sideways under the pressure!

The Front Springs

Much of the same calculation process was followed with the front springs. The weight acting through each wheel is
about 40kg. With the same suspension travel of 100mm, and the desire to have the suspension sitting at about one-
third of full bump, the same requirement of having a 33mm deflection arises, this time with a 40kg per wheel load.
That gives a desired wheel rate of 40/33, or 1.2 kg/mm.

Whether from measuring inaccuracies or because this is what actually occurs, the motion ratio in the front suspension
varied to a greater degree that in the rear suspension, and so of course did the calculated relationship between the
wheel and spring rates. However, the average of the latter is 11.9 and that’s the number that was used.

Wheel Spring Motion Ratio Wheel rate

compression
movement in vs Spring
(mm)
bump Rate ratio

(mm) (ie Motion

Ratio
squared

17 6 2.8 7.8

17 5 3.4 11.6

17 4.5 3.8 14.4

17 4.5 3.8 14.4

17 5 3.4 11.6

17 5 3.4 11.6

With a desired wheel rate of 1.2 kg/mm and a spring:wheel rate relationship of 11.9, the calculated required spring
rate is 14.3 kg/mm or 800 pounds per inch. As can be seen, the required stiffness of spring increases very fast when
there’s a high leverage ratio working on it!

Final Front Spring Specs

Rate: 14.3 kg/mm

Free length: 140 mm

Spring travel: at least 26mm

Outside diameter: approx 55mm

End treatment: flat-ground

Max spring stress level: suitable for a road vehicle suspension

Mass: as light as possible

Checking Calculations

Wherever possible, it makes a lot of sense to source a trial spring to see if your calculations are
in the ballpark. For the rear suspension I had available to me a spring that I shortened to fit by
cutting off the end (and so ruining the previously flat end!). When inserted in the rear
suspension, it looked about right. And its actual rate? I measured it at 43 kg/cm, or 4.3 kg/mm.
That compares with the calculated requirement for a 4.6 kg/mm spring.

The very high spring rate required in the front suspension was harder to simulate. In the end I
used a block of solid rubber which deflected by an appropriate amount when inserted in the
suspension. (It didn’t have anywhere near the travel to cope with bumps but it showed the
appropriate spring rate needed for the required deflection with just the rider on the HPV.) Its
measured rate was 13.5 kg/mm – and calculations showed a 14.3 kg/mm spring was needed.

Getting the Springs Made

The springs were made by Thomas Marsh and Co Pty Ltd of Brisbane. (Contact details at end of article.) For no
additional cost, they used their software to design the springs so that the correct rates were achieved with the lowest
mass and without exceeding an appropriate stress level.

Unfortunately, the very stiff front springs (10.5mm wire thickness!) and large number of turns (8.5) resulted in a
mass per spring of just under 1kg. (It may have been better to design the front suspension with a lower motion ratio
and so use a lighter spring.) With its lighter rate, the rear spring has a much lower mass of 435g.
Here are the design specs of the front springs. (Click on the images to enlarge them.) As can be seen, all the specs
were met with an outside diameter of 57mm (approx 55mm was the request).

Here are the design specs of the rear springs. The really tight spec is in the travel achieved before coil bind. A spring
travel of 42.5mm was requested and in fact the travel to solid length is 43.1. However, the spring designer pointed
out that the allowable travel is only 36.7mm. The difference is because the spring rate starts to change when the
spring is compressed nearly fully. (This occurs as because of manufacturing tolerances, some coils close right up
before others.) So a travel of 36.7mm is the recommended maximum although the possible physical travel is
43.1mm. In a vehicle application, where a bump rubber is being compressed as full travel is reached, this compromise
is acceptable.

The springs cost AUD$77 each.

Delivery
After waiting for a week to have the springs made, I was pretty excited when I picked them up. But I was initially a bit
taken aback - the front ones looked so stiff! In fact, they looked more suitable for a car than a light-weight HPV...
Clearly, at a rate of 14.3 kg/mm they were going to be stiff, but when I first saw them, I was very worried that I’d
made a mistake somewhere in the measurements and calculations. To give you an idea of how stiff they are, when I
stood on top of them the deflection barely registered – scary!

However, with the front and rear springs trial-installed in the HPV suspension and with my weight aboard the partly
completed frame, the suspension deflected by within a few millimetres of the amount I’d designed: the calculations
were correct.

The Dampers

The dampers used on the Human Powered Vehicle are based on steering dampers from Suzuki GSXR 1100
motorcycles. While they’re (in HPV terms!) heavy at 500g each, they’re also exceptionally strong, can be easily pulled
apart and at AUD$75 each at a motorcycle wrecker, are relatively cheap. However, because of their original function,
they have equal damping force in each direction. So what are the implications of that?

Bump vs Rebound Damping

Dampers tend to get surrounded by mysticism or broad statements like “the dampers need to be matched to the
springs” that don’t stand up to close scrutiny. (It sounds good but what does it mean, precisely?) In short, the
function of a damper is to stop the suspension bouncing after the bump has been met and passed. ‘Bump damping’
refers to the damper’s resistance to movement encountered when the suspension is compressed over a bump;
‘rebound damping’ refers to the resistance to extension. Clearly, the bump damping is massively aided by the spring,
while the rebound damping is really all about resisting the spring’s extension force.

It’s all made clearer if the damper has equal bump and rebound damping – as the motorcycle steering dampers
originally had. Even without the HPV being able to be peddled, testing of the rolling chassis showed that having equal
bump/rebound damping resulted in a much firmer ride than was achieved without the dampers in place. After all,
every bump wasn’t being resisted just by the spring but also by the damper! And the sharper the bump, the more the
damper resisted the compression – dampers being the sort of device that rapidly increase in firmness with higher
shaft speeds.

Two examples show what was happening.

When the rear suspension was finished (but the front springs still replicated with blocks of wood) I was able to roll the
machine slowly forward on the workshop floor. I placed the rear wheel on a 75mm high block, sat on the machine and
then rolled off the block. The rear wheel dropped 75mm and I could judge the firmness of the ride. And, it was firm!
However, I could increase the height of the drop to a stunning 200mm without damaging myself, the frame or the
rim. The suspension had the travel, but the bump damping made it very firm when doing so. A softer bump damping
would use up more of the travel (perhaps to as far as the rubber bump-stop) but in more normal circumstances,
would give a far better ride.

So why have any bump damping at all? That’s a question I posed to the experts at Whiteline Suspension and they
made an interesting point (obviously it was about cars!).
“If there is insufficient bump damping,” they said, “it takes too long for a car to take a ‘set’ when cornering.”

In other words, when you think about cornering and not just straight-line bumps, the bump damping is important in
resisting roll, especially transient roll of the sort encountered when swerving through an S-bend. Or, to put it another
way, high bump damping results in minimal weight transfer when the vehicle is thrown around.

And that brings me to the second example. When the front springs were in place (and again the HPV working just as a
rolling chassis) I was able to corner at a constant speed. And even with the bump damping as firm as the rebound
damping, body roll was obvious. With softer bump damping, body roll could be expected to increase...

It’s for this reason that separate anti-roll bars are normally used specifically to counter body roll – the mix of spring
stiffness and bump damping is insufficient to do so, especially on a long corner (where, irrespective of their bump
damping rate, the dampers will continue to compress).

To achieve a decent ride without the springs oscillating, it’s normal to run much firmer rebound damping than bump
damping.

Modify the Steering Dampers?

Disassembly of the Suzuki steering damper showed the internals. Mounted on the 12.5mm chrome-plated steel
through-shaft was a small piston that was slightly undersize the bore. When the damper was stroked, the oil squeezed
through the gap between the piston and the inner bore. This gave equal damping force in each direction, with
damping force able to be easily altered by changing the viscosity of the oil within the damper. (That’s possible without
damper disassembly because a small fill plug is provided.)

So how to modify this design to give unequal damping force? And, furthermore, was it possible to give altered high-
and low-speed bump behaviour?

Initially I looked at the possibility of installing flow regulating valves within the existing piston. I cut open some twin
tube car dampers and extracted the piston and valve assemblies. (Note: cutting open gas pressurised dampers is
dangerous and so should not be undertaken – there are warnings to this effect written on gas dampers.) The valves
from the twin tube dampers could then be further disassembled until just the valve orifices and their associated spring
shims were available. However, their design and size did not match the piston used in the steering dampers and so
adapting them for this use would have been extremely difficult.

I then considered have two threaded fittings welded to the side of the steering damper’s aluminium body so that
external valving could be used to regulate the flow of oil. (The internal piston could be left as standard – if thicker oil
was used, little would bypass the standard piston resulting in most oil passing through the external regulating
valving.) However, what form should the external valving take? That depended very much on the required
sophistication of the damper design. The valving was required to provide a softer bump than rebound, but what else
was needed? High speed bump and high speed rebound could also be made adjustable, although at an increasing level
of complexity.

Rather than try to fabricate valves from scratch, I sought out existing valves that could be adapted for this use,
starting off with the criteria that just a softer bump than rebound should be provided. Industrial valves tend to be
quite expensive and so I turned to cars, deciding that rear brake pressure proportioning valves may be able to be
adapted to this application. I searched a wrecking yard and decided the valves installed on the brake booster of the
Daewoo Cielo looked the best bet. These valves are standalone (ie one for each rear brake circuit), are made from
light aluminium, are designed to be easily disassembled, and contain a sophisticated inner spool valve assembly.
However, it turned out that the metric threads used on this valve made getting cheap hydraulic fittings for it
impossible. In fact, by the time the valves were modified to take off-the-shelf fittings and then high pressure braided
hoses were made up to suit, the cost would have been in the order of AUD$100 or more per damper!
Just Change the Oil...

The costs and complexity were rapidly spiralling out of control so I decided that before taking the drastic step of
drilling holes in the damper bodies and having fittings welded on, I should simply try running a thinner oil in the
damper and leaving the bump/rebound resistances symmetrical. Part of the reason for this decision was by now I’d
been able to ride the machine and the unmodified front dampers - even with their standard bump/rebound behaviour
- were working pretty well, giving an excellent ride but still resisting roll and quickly damping out oscillations.

I sourced some very thin 2.5W 5 oil (designed for use in the front forks of motorcycles) and filled the rear damper
with it. And the results were again pretty good – sufficiently so that I abandoned (for a while at least) the thought of
complex external valving. The ride isn’t quite as good as would (presumably) be obtained by having unequal
bump/rebound damping rates (or even adjustable high speed damping), but it’s still excellent.

The front and rear suspension designs had consumed lots of time and energy - but their design and
construction were nothing when compared with the steering... next, the nightmare really begins! Note:
due to problems (that included frame failure!) there will be a delay before the next article in this series
appears.

Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 5

The steering system
HPV Steering

Unlike a cars or motorcycles, the steering of most HPVs uses vertical rods positioned each side of the seat (indicated
as ‘1’ on this photo of the Greenspeed GT3). These rods are connected through a single pivot (‘2’) below the seat –
they’re rather like handlebars of a bike but with their axis rotated through 90 degrees. Pushing forward on the right-
hand side bar causes the left-side bar to move backwards, and the wheels are steered to the left. Therefore, steering
is very quickly picked-up because it’s much like a bicycle - even though initially it appears nothing like it!

Tie-rods are used to join the handlebars to the front wheel steering arms, with a number of different systems used.
Some approaches have long tie-rods that are crossed-over while others use shorter, direct tie-rods (one is arrowed on
this pic of a GT3).

However, and this is a critical point, in HPVs without long-travel front suspension (ie, nearly all of ‘em!), the design of
the steering is much simpler because no account needs to be taken of bump-steer. So what’s bump-steer, then?

Bump-Steer

Bump-steer is the term given to unwanted steering inputs that occur when the suspension moves through its travel.
In other words, when the steering wheel (or in this case, handlebars) are held in a fixed position, the wheels may still
be inadvertently steered as the suspension moves from full droop to full bump. This undesirable trait occurs if the tie-
rods are moving through different arcs to the wheels’ uprights, so causing the tie-rods to pull or push on the steering
arms. In other words, you go over a bump (especially when cornering when the loads on the front wheels are
unequal) and the vehicle darts right or left.
For a given suspension, the amount of bump-steer that occurs is dependent primarily on three things: the position of
the inner steering ball-joint, the position of the outer steering ball-joint, and the length of the tie-rod. This diagram
[taken from Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics (Gillespie)] shows the ideal length of the tie rod (here called a ‘relay
linkage’) and the correct position of the inner and outer balljoints to avoid bump-steer in a double wishbone
suspension.

In my case, the suspension was by this stage built and the outer ball-joint position largely fixed. (Well, I thought it
was fixed – as you’ll see later, it had to be moved!) That meant that tuning-out of bump-steer was to be done by
altering the length of the tie-rod and the position of the inner ball-joint.

But the first task was to precisely measure bump-steer. To do this, a 1-metre lever (arrowed) was attached to the
wheel upright. The lever protruded forwards, parallel to the ground. A piece of particle board was then positioned
vertically and parallel to the lever. Any steering of the wheel showed as unequal gaps between the board and the
lever.

A trial tie-rod was then installed and the inner ball-joint clamped in position. The suspension spring was removed and
the frame jacked off the ground, leaving the wheel hanging on its damper in the full droop position. The suspension
was then lifted to its maximum bump position and the wheel released. As it slowly sank on its suspension, the
‘steering’ movement of the wheel lever was assessed.

This simple test gave some stunning results. It was quite easy to have the location of the inner ball-joint (and/or the
length of the tie-rod) sufficiently wrong that bump-steer over the full suspension travel of ~100mm was more than 14
degrees! Furthermore, with a fixed tie-rod length, changing the position of the inner ball-joint by as little as 5mm
made a clearly measurable difference to the amount of bump-steer!
And it’s even more complex than this. With some combinations of inner ball-joint location and tie-rod length, the
amount of bump-steer changed asymmetrically as the wheel moved from full bump to full droop. For example, the
wheel would initially steer in one direction before reaching a mid-point and then steering back the other way!
Remember, in all cases the steering ‘wheel’ is being held fixed in the one position...

However, it didn’t take more than a few hours of experimentation to locate an inner ball-joint position and tie-rod
length that gave bump-steer of only about half of one degree through the full suspension travel.

Steering

With the position of the inner ball-joints fixed, the next task was to steer them. This apparently simple task proved to
be a bloody nightmare. It is without a doubt the single hardest mechanical design-and-build exercise I have ever
undertaken.

The rebuild of the BMW six? Easy!

The fitting of a turbocharger to a hybrid Toyota Prius? A walk in the park!

Stuffing a water/air intercooler and big turbo under the minuscule bonnet of a Daihatsu Mira? Straightforward!

To give you some idea, developing the steering system took as long as designing and building the whole of the rest
of the vehicle... suspension and all. So what made the steering system so difficult? After all, it is only steering...

First, as indicated above, the measurement of bump-steer had shown that the fore-aft positions of the ball-joints were
very important – so if the ball-joints were moved backwards or forwards as part of the steering process, bump-
steer was likely to re-intrude. And most (all?) HPVs with indirect steering move the inner ball-joints backwards and
forwards as the machine is steered. (So do cars with steering boxes as opposed to racks – interesting....)

Second, with the use of vertical handlebars positioned either side of the seat, the distance that the handlebars can be
moved before they run into things depends a lot on where their pivot point is located. If the pivot point (green in this
diagram which is a plan view) is offset a long way forwards or backwards, the handlebars will have a lot of sideways
movement, which greatly limits how far they can be moved before fouling the seat. Of course, even with no pivot
offset, the handlebars will still foul the side of the seat when moved a long way.

Since movement of the handlebars controls the steer angle from straight-ahead to full lock, the shorter the total
distance the handlebars can move, the greater the sensitivity of the steering. I wanted slower steering than my
Greenspeed GTR, so a short handlebar travel was no good (ie for the same amount of steering lock I want to move
the handlebars further than the GTR, not less).
Third, the system had to weigh little, and fourthly, I had to be able to build it! And there’s even more: fifth, the
system had to provide a reasonably tight turning circle; six, had to conform at least loosely to Ackermann steering
principles (see below); seven, had to clear the chain – the list went on and on.

I designed on paper perhaps 30 different systems; I built working models of six different systems; I physically built
parts of five steering systems and completed and tested on the road four different systems.

So what were the problems? One system gave light and precise steering but the turning circle was too large. To
tighten the turning circle, the wheels had to point through a tighter angle (duh!) but to achieve that without the tied-
rods/steering arms going ‘over centre’ (see below under Ackermann), the inner ball-joints needed to be moved
forward. This necessitated a complete redesign to prevent bump-steer re-intruding.

The next system had a good turning circle but because the wheels now turned further for the same amount of
steering lever movement, the steering was much too heavy. In fact it was so heavy that, when attempting to gain full
lock, the steering system components deflected under the load. This was partly because I was using lighter materials
in the steering than I was generally using in the rest of the HPV (trying to reduce the daily increase in weight!) but the
bending was primarily because the steering loads were very great. (This is something I never considered. If you’re
running lots of castor and/or steering axis inclination, the forces required to steer the wheels can be very high.)

The next system connected the two inner ball-joints to one another via a rod sliding laterally in high density
polypropylene bushes. This allowed the wheels to be steered with the inner ball joints not moving even a millimetre
forwards or backwards – no bump-steer here!

However, because of the offset design of the ball-joints, this rod wanted to rotate when the steering loadings were
placed on it, so changing the amount of toe. To prevent the swivelling, I added a second chrome-plated steel rod in
parallel to the first, with both rods passing through their own set of plastic bushes. But getting the two rods perfectly
parallel in both planes so that they slid sweetly through the bushes was a nightmare. Even the slightest misalignment
(eg 1/10th of a millimetre) dramatically increased stiction. With this system I could just imagine having zero feedback
through the steering and the inputting of tiny corrections being very difficult. So that was another system scrapped.

The final system looks like this.

Two side-mounted steering levers are mounted from the seat frame. The pivot point is low on the lever; close on the
other side is a ball-joint that translates the arc of the lever into a fore-aft movement. This set-up is mirrored on the
other side of the seat. So when the steering lever is moved back and forth a long way (red arrow), the longitudinal
link moves a much shorter distance (green arrow).

The longitudinal movement of these rods causes a lever to move sideways (green arrows) as it pivots around a large
bearing (blue circle). In turn this causes the lateral movement of the other end of the lever (red arrows). The Y-
shaped lever is attached to the tie-rods at either end of the red arrows.

So in summary, the two inner ball-joints are moved sideways by a 370mm long Y-shaped member that is mounted
along the longitudinal axis of the frame. Each end of the uppers arms of the Y connect to a ball-joint. The pivot is
placed at the other end of the member – down the bottom of the upright of the Y. This results in a long lever being
used to steer the front ball-joints - minimising (although not eliminating) the fore-aft movement of the two inner ball-
joints as they move laterally. (Click on pic to enlarge it.)
The vertical steering rods – one each side – are pivoted from the seat frame. They can therefore move fore-aft from a
relatively high pivot point parallel to the seat, which gives a greater steering lever travel (400mm) than is achievable
with a central vertical pivot under the seat.

Incidentally, the Y-piece is shaped in that way (rather than like a ‘T’) to give clearance to the chain drive.

This steering system gives the following positives:

 Steering handles have a lot of travel – ie a slower ratio steering

 The ability to change the leverage ratio manually by gripping the rods high or low
 The ability to easily change the leverage ratio during development by having differing mounting points on the
lower part of the steering levers for the push/pull rods
 Conventional ‘one lever moves back as the other moves forward’ steering, where pushing forward on the left-
hand lever and/or pulling back on the right-hand lever causes the trike to turn right

And the negatives?

 A slight arc of forward/rear movement of the inner ball-joints

 Changing Ackermann compensation which complicates this aspect of design
 The use of 8 ball-joints in the steering system
 Increased weight over other approaches
 A greater possibility of deflection in the steering components because of their lengths and the fact some are
subject to bending forces not just compression/tension.

It’s a measure of how difficult I found the steering system development that I was not at all confident that even this
system would work well until I could test it on the road. So it was with immense relief that I found it to work very
well!
Variable Ratio Steering

One of my criticisms of the Greenspeed HPVs is their steering. It’s ultra-quick and direct; fine for
slowly traversing cycle paths but very nervous at high speed. (Think Evo 6.5 Lancer but even
more direct at speed!) So it had always been my intention to create a variable ratio steering
system – one that is slower around centre than it is at the extremes.

Implicitly, a variable ratio system of this type means that as more steering lock is applied, the
steering arms are moved by an increasingly greater amount. (See The New Breed of Controls -
Part 1 for more on variable ratio car steering.) However, just as implicit is the point that without
power assistance, the steering will therefore get heavier as more and more lock is applied.

That might be OK but when there’s not lots of castor being run and Ackermann steering geometry
isn’t present, but when you have both, you in fact need more and more assistance as you apply
steering lock. In other words, even with a fixed ratio, the steering will get heavier and heavier as
steering lock is applied. So, to keep the steering weight even, you actually need a variable ratio
that works in the other direction – one that gives you more leverage (and so a greater
movement of the steering input) as more lock is applied.

So which do you want – steering that is slower around centre and quicker as lock is applied (but
gets ultra-heavy at the extremes), or steering that retains a similar weight at all turning angles
but gets slower as lock is applied? Keep in mind that in some iterations of my HPV steering
system, the steering became so heavy that it was impossible to get full lock, and you can see
that the leverage ratios might need to be organised quite differently in the real world to what
might first appear attractive in a paper analysis!

Ackermann

Ackermann refers to the fact that when a vehicle turns a corner, the inner wheel needs to turn at a tighter angle than
the outer wheel. Well, it doesn’t have to, but if it doesn’t then bad tyre scrub will occur. The difference in the two
wheel angles achieved during cornering is called the Ackermann angle. Most HPV constructors consider Ackermann to
be absolutely vital, primarily because tyre scrub in cornering creates drag and so slows the vehicle (or makes the rider
work harder!).
Ackermann compensation is usually achieved by angling the steering arms. The extension of these angles meet
somewhere along the centreline of the vehicle. The point at which they meet was traditionally the rear axle line,
however in practice, this point can be quite a lot further forwards or backwards. Note that Ackerman steering
geometry can also be achieved without angling the arms in this way – the Greenspeed trikes use a variety of methods
of achieving Ackermann.

Despite other HPV constructors considering Ackermann to be vital (there is even spreadsheet available to calculate
optimal Ackermann – (see www.eland.org.uk/steering.html) , I found that while it was important that Ackerman
compensation be present, quite a wide variety of steering arm angles gave sufficient variation in the inner/outer wheel
angles that scrubbing was quite small or not discernible at all. And the scrubbing that did occur did so only at large
steering angles, so it wasn’t a huge problem in normal use anyway.

But as part of the design process, why not optimise the steering arm angles for best Ackermann? The answer is that
the steering arm angles also influence the amount of lock that can be achieved before the tie-rod becomes in-line with
the steering arm. One constructor told me that his steering arm could even go over-centre versus the tie-rod – this is
an easy mistake to make. The more Ackermann that is achieved by angling the steering arms inwards, the smaller the
angle through which the wheels can be turned before this becomes a problem.

These diagrams show the issue. Here the steering pivot can be seen in blue, the steering arm in green and the tie-rod
in brown. The inner and outer balljoints are both shown in red. In this plan view, to steer the wheel to the left, the tie-
rod must move to the right.
But as the wheel turns to the left, the steering arm and tie-rod become increasingly in-line. This has two effects. (1) It
limits the steering angle that can be achieved, and (2) the steering of that wheel becomes heavier as the mechanical
advantage diminishes. (See below for more on levers!) And the critical point is that the more the steering arms are
angled inwards towards the centreline of the vehicle to gain increased Ackermann compensation, the greater this
problem becomes.

I chose to prioritise a tight steering lock and zero bump-steer over Ackermann compensation, with the result that – as
seen here – the extension of the steering arms’ angles meet a bit behind the rear wheel. (And of course this is also
affected by how much static toe is run – here, the HPV is running a few millimetres of toe-in.
Steering

Steering ratio, weight, feedback, consistency and the presence/absence of kickback make an
enormous difference to how a steered vehicle feels - whether that’s a car or HPV.

For example, Australian Ford Falcons tend to have steering that's very quick either side of centre,
giving an initially slow response then almost a sudden darting. The driver gets used to it and
compensates, and it's one of the reasons these large cars feel more nimble than you'd expect.
But you can equally well point to cars that have steering that's too slow around centre for driving
quickly - the Mitsubishi Magna is an example. The Evo 6.5 Lancer has steering that’s nervous at
high speed on bumpy roads, partly because the hard ride makes holding the wheel dead-steady
difficult. (Subsequent Evo models far easier to drive on real roads.) The Toyota Prius – all models
– have dreadful steering, partly because of the tune of the electric power steering and partly
because of the steering geometry. The Mitsubishi 380 has excellent steering until you’re going
really hard around bumpy corners where it can kick-back strongly.

I find the steering of my GTR Greenspeed trike nervously twitchy at high speed, primarily
because of the overly quick steering ratio – the top of the levers are moved only 300mm to go
from full left lock to full right lock. However, at low speed, the quick ratio gives the trike a nimble,
kart-like feel. The steering is light at low speed and lighter still at high speed.

Sorting steering requires thinking about all the different aspects, not just applying a generic
‘good’ or ‘bad’ tag. It’s really important that the nuances of steering are recognised – steering is
simply not just steering.

(This might all seem pretty obvious to car nuts but in on-line discussion with other HPV riders and
constructors there appeared to be little recognition of how the subtleties of steering design can
have a major affect on how the machine feels on the road.)
Levers....

Read any basic engineering textbook and the coverage of levers will be apparently
straightforward. As this diagram shows, a lever provides a mechanical advantage. When the end
of the longer side of the lever is moved, the other end of the lever will move a shorter distance
but is able to provide a greater force. In this case, an effort of 5 Newtons results in a developed
force of 30 Newtons. The relationship between the forces at each end of the lever is dictated by
the relative lengths of the lever to the pivot point. Easy, huh?

The trouble is, in nearly all situations where the lever works in conjunction with a link or another
lever, this is only half the story! In fact, levers working with other levers or links almost always
change their mechanical advantage as they move. Or, more precisely, the mechanical
advantage of the system changes. (If I’d known this before I started the steering, it would have
halved the time it took me to develop an effective steering system design!)

Saying that the mechanical advantage of the system changes is akin to saying that the pivot
points of the levers move when they are being used – a pretty radical idea if you’ve been brought
up with the idea that levers have a fixed mechanical advantage!

In the final HPV steering system you can see this changing mechanical advantage – if you know
what to look for.
Here mechanical advantage is being lost as the left-hand wheel is being steered left and the
steering arm and tie-rod are becoming increasingly in-line.

And here at the same time on the right-hand wheel the mechanical advantage has reached a
maximum and is declining.

Here the mechanical advantage increases as lock is applied, from this....

...to this. This has two benefits – as seen by the straightened elbow, it makes gaining the last
degrees of steering lock easier (a near straight arm can’t provide the force of an arm bent at the
elbow) and it also offsets the increased effort needed as the steering arms (see above) reach full
lock.

Discussion of the idea that linkage systems vary in mechanical advantage is covered in a few
textbooks – although it isn’t even mentioned in many more that purportedly deal with
mechanisms and levers. While in general it is much too complex for to me understand, the
Mechanical Advantage chapter in Mechanical Design – Analysis and Synthesis, Vol 1 (Erdman, A
and Sandor, G, Prentice Hall, 1991) at least showed I wasn’t going mad and there were good
reasons why my initial steering systems didn’t work, even though the leverage ratios around
centre looked and felt fine.

Conclusion

Trying to optimise the magnitude and linearity of the steering effort, produce a small turning circle, reduce scrub on
sharp corners to a minimum, provide near zero bump-steer, and have good steering feel and straight-line stability
was a huge task. It’s one element of the HPV with which I am now really happy, but it’s also one that took an
enormous amount of work.

Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 6

The frame and chain drive... and catastrophic failure

The original intention was to make the frame solely of 50 x 50 x 3mm aluminium tubing. And that’s just how it started
out: a longitudinal backbone of square tube. At the rear, a cross-member in the same material provided pivot points
for the rear longitudinal swing-arm. At the front, a more complex double L-shaped lateral member provided the upper
spring and upper wishbone mounts. (The lower wishbone mounts are on brackets welded to the main longitudinal
tube.)

That was all well and good but then I had the seat frame bent up. I’d intended that this was going to be made of large
diameter, thin wall aluminium round tube – and in fact sourced some 40 x 1.6mm wall thickness tube very cheaply.
But could I find anyone who could mandrel bend it? Nope! I tried a crush bender – even though the bender didn’t
have exactly the right mandrels – but the result was terrible.
So the main criteria in selecting the seat frame tube became: what aluminium tube could be mandrel bent? The
answer was 32 by 3mm wall, a much heavier and stronger tube than I’d envisaged. I got the seat frame tubes (two of
them) mandrel bent at a cost of AUD$15 for each of the six bends – ouch! Just as well the bends were superb...

About this stage I started to become worried about the increasing weight. It’s hard to accurately weigh everything
when it’s still in bits and pieces (parts aren’t accurately sized, lightening holes often yet to be drilled, etc) but it was
starting to look like the seat frame and its supports were going to weigh more than the main square tube frame! And
if that was the case, the seat frame had better do a lot more than its original non-structural role had suggested.

Structural Seat

The seat has two main forces acting on: it supports the weight of the rider and very importantly, it provides the back
support when the rider is pushing forward on the pedals. This latter force is trying to push the seat rearwards; the
weight of the rider is of course trying to push the seat downwards.

The weight was supported by two short members that angled down to the main longitudinal square tube. It would
seem logical that the push of the pedals could be catered for by two tubes angled well forwards and upwards to the
seat frame from the rear cross-member. But there was another factor: I wanted to be able to install a heavy duty –
but removable – rear carrier. This would – of course – be part of the sprung weight and so had to be supported by the
back of the seat and the rear cross-member. If more vertical struts were used to support the rear of the seat, these
members could also be used as part of the carrier support frame. However, when the carrier wasn’t there, pushing on
the pedals would tend to move the top of these tubes backward, putting bending loads on the lower welds. The
solution to this problem was to slightly angle the seat supports forward and to place small braces at each of the
corners.

The seat frame therefore triangulated the rear half of the frame. The full length of the frame could be triangulated if
the forward edge of the seat rails were braced to the front suspension pick-up points – but was the extra 400 grams
of tube (at this stage, a total mass increase of about 8 per cent) worth it? I decided to have the seat welded into place
without these forward tubes and then do some deflection tests – ie jump on it and see if it moved. (Little did I realise
that this decision would come back to haunt me!)

Watching Weight

By this stage I was drilling holes in everything but the round tube (very, very hard to put symmetrical holes along a
length of round tube.) The rear swing-arm was mostly air, the front wishbones had dozens of holes in them and the
main square tube frame and cross-members were, in part, like Swiss cheese. While holes in the right places reduce
mass without affecting strength by anywhere near the same proportion as the loss in mass (see Making Things, Part 2
), I now had a LOT of holes. But I was determined that the weight was to be kept down.

In fact, I was actually appalled at how heavy some things were that I’d never bothered even considering. The long
chain – a full kilogram! The front cogs, bearing, cranks and pedals – 1.6kg! The hydraulic disc brakes – 1kg! The
gears – derailleur, cables and selectors – 0.8kg. This was all top quality, brand-name gear and so it all sounds light
(and it probably is), but these incidentals added up to 4.4kg.

Then add the rear wheel (including its internal gearbox) at 3kg and the front wheels at 1.5kg each, and suddenly
there’s a mass of 10.4kg – without any frame, suspension arms, ball-joints, bushes, dampers, springs, steering or
seat! The dampers I was using weighed 500g each and the steel springs totalled no less than 3.5kg – so there’s
15.4kg.... still with no frame, suspension arms, ball-joints, bushes, steering or seat!

Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anywhere near my goal of under 20kg, so instead I resigned myself to a heavy HPV –
but one that was engineered very well in terms of durability and strength.

Talking about durability and strength, have I told you about the clothes pegs man? No? OK, well
listen to this.

When I started construction of the machine, I joined a few web discussion groups and mailing
lists, hoping to bounce ideas off other people who had built pedal-powered recumbent trikes.
Unfortunately, very few had had anything to do with suspension and so most of my questions
were met with blanks. However, one guy had built some suspension machines and – according to
his web site – pedalled them far and wide in the US. He was the only person who seemed to
understand concepts like scrub radius and roll centre, and so I looked with interest at his replies
to my posts.

Until he mentioned the clothes pegs.

I’d brought up the topic of suspension dampers, telling people that I intended to use modified
motorcycle steering dampers as my shock absorbers. These are hydraulic, very well made and
compact. The downside is – as mentioned above – their mass, which is about 500g each. Lots of
people on the discussion group suggested that using hydraulic dampers was a poor decision, not
only because of the mass but also because of odd ideas like “lack of reliability” (huh? How ‘bout a
billion cars, trucks, trains, planes equipped with hydraulic dampers...?) and being overly complex
for the application.

Then the guy who’d built more than a few HPVs chimed in. He suggested what I needed to do was
to get rid of the hydraulic dampers and use wooden clothes pegs. Yep, wooden clothes pegs. He’d
used clothes pegs (clamping them around an aluminium rod that moved with the suspension) and
he could tell me that wooden clothes pegs were just the right thing for damping the suspension of
Human Powered Vehicles...

When I recovered from my mirth I pointed out that this approach seemed to have a few minor
problems, ones like getting rid of heat, having separate adjustment of bump and rebound, and
durability.... But nope, this guy had none of that – for example, heat problems could be solved by
tipping some water on ‘em....

So you can see that when I decided I was prepared to wear some extra mass, it was with the
realisation that some of the machines I’d previously been making weight comparisons with
weren’t very well designed....

(I should add that I found three very helpful people on-line. One was a guy in New Zealand who
has made himself a superb fully suspended trike with front double wishbones, and who sent me
some good pics. Another was an Australian AutoSpeed reader who noticed my name on the
discussion groups and contacted me directly. He’s built several recumbent trikes and consistently
made excellent points during the construction of my machine. And the third was a Swede who has
done lots of long distance touring on bikes and trikes and sent me a brilliant list of what he’d
taken with him and the volume it’d consumed.)

Chain Drive

Recumbent pedal trikes use a very long chain, about 2.5 times that of a conventional bicycle. The pedals and front
cogs are mounted on a boom extending forwards and upwards. The tension side of the chain is guided and supported
by toothed rollers that run on sealed ball bearings. The non-tension side of the chain is largely left to follow its own
path from the derailleur back to the front cogs, although – like some lengths of the tension side – it’s partly guided by
plastic piping. The pipe guides also prevent the rider’s legs getting tangled-up with the chain.

My HPV uses two rollers – the chain passes under one positioned under the leading edge of the seat and over one
positioned near the rear of the frame.

Unlike a conventional pedal bike equipped with suspension, the pedalling force of a recumbent trike is largely fore-aft,
rather than up and down. On conventional bikes the suspension has to be designed (especially in damping behaviour)
so it doesn’t compress with each downwards thrust of the pedals, otherwise an unpleasant bobbing motion occurs. For
this reason many bike dampers have a ‘lock’ position that is manually set.

However, the other design aspect of conventional bikes than can cause pedal-induced suspension movement still
applies. In fact, because of the immense torque a recumbent ride can develop (it’s not limited by the rider’s weight:
he/she can push back against the seat), the design aspect applies even more strongly. So what’s the problem then?
Basically, if the chain alignment is not correct, the pull of the chain will cause the rear suspension to extend or
compress with each power stroke.

The conventional wisdom appears to be that to avoid this, the chain’s tension path should be through the rear
suspension’s pivot point. In other words, the chain pulls along the same path as a line joining the axle to the
suspension pivot point. This is then claimed to place no resulting vertical force (up or down) on the wheel.

But this is wrong.

In fact, the chain should be parallel to a line that connects the axle to the trailing arm’s pivot. The pull of the chain is
then parallel to the resistance (ie normally compression) of the suspension arm, so no upwards or downwards forces
are applied to the wheel. However, when rear derailleur gears are used, maintaining this relationship is easier said
than done because a chain idler location that gives a parallel chain in one gear will result in a non-parallel chain in
another gear! So in this area, a compromise will be needed.

However, when the wheel moves up and down another, entirely different, vertical force is generated that tries to
extend or compress the suspension. To see why this is the case, think of how the backwards push of the tyre on the
road results in forward push on the body of the machine. If the suspension arm (either actual or virtual) is parallel
with the road, this push results in just a forward push on the vehicle, with no vertical forces involved.

But if the suspension arm is not parallel to the road (perhaps because the wheel is experiencing bump or droop),
there will be a vertical component to the force being transmitted by the suspension arm to the vehicle. If the arm is
parallel at normal ride height, during suspension bump it will head downwards to the suspension pivot, resulting in a
downwards force on the pivot. This will cause the suspension to compress – effectively the suspension bump will be
increased. When the suspension arm is angled the other way in droop, there will be an upwards force transmitted to
the suspension pivot, effectively causing the droop to be increased. Significantly, the actual effect of these changes
will not only depend on the ‘at rest’ inclination of the suspension but also on the amount of bump and rebound travel
that is available (since this will help determine the angle that the suspension arms adopt in each direction).

And there are (at least!) three other aspects to keep in mind.

 The developed tractive effort is highest in low gears. Therefore, the compression/extension behaviour is better
optimised for low gears than high gears.

 The spring will resist efforts to compress it to a much greater extent than efforts to extend it. Partly offsetting
this is that the damper is (usually) stiffer in rebound (ie extension) than bump (ie compression).

 The rear of the vehicle will try to squat under sudden torque inputs so if the suspension is extended a little
under power, this may be used to offset the squat.

Doing It

The above points are the result of external engineering input and much experimentation – I couldn’t find any HPV
resources that dealt with any of these points in detail.
I started off with the ‘chain through the pivot point’ philosophy but even simple testing with just a bare frame and the
rear wheel showed that this created a very large suspension extension force. Unfortunately, I’d been so confident that
there wouldn’t be problems in this area I’d had the idler pulley mounts welded into position – so the rear mount
needed to be ground off and radically revised.

To find the best position for the idler, I rested the back wheel on the ground, replaced the spring with a very soft,
short spring and placed the chain over the lowest rear gear. I placed packing under the spring to give normal ride
height and then applied pedal torque by hand, being very careful not to input any vertical forces into the pedals as I
did so. The rear chain idler pulley was supported on blocks at different heights; the best height was found when the
suspension neither compressed nor extended before the tyre slipped on the concrete.

(Note, as described above, it is vital that the tyre is transmitting torque to the pavement during this testing. It is not
the same just jamming something into the wheel to prevent it turning!)

Having then found the best idler height for this ride height and bottom gear, I changed the spring packing to simulate
movement of the suspension arm from full bump to full rebound, testing each few centimetres of travel. As a result of
this testing, the idler pulley height again needed changing to retain the best compromise.

Then, when this was done, I moved the chain to the smallest cog and did it all again.

Having to move the idler from its previously welded position was a pain but every cloud has a silver lining: I was able
to reduce the lateral angularity the chain was forced to adopt when moved from the highest to the lowest gear.
Previously, because of clearance issues with an inner bolt holding one of the suspension pivots in place, I’d needed to
have the idler mounted pretty well in line with the largest rear cog (ie lowest gear). That was fine for that gear but
when the tallest gear was selected, the chain had to bend pretty hard.

But with the idler pulley mounted further rearwards and much higher, the clearance to the inner bolt was fine. This
meant the pulley could be positioned so that it lined up with a middle rear gear. However, I went one better - there
was the space to insert a mechanism that allowed the pulley to float laterally, so that it was always in a straight line
between the front idler pulley and the selected rear cog.

This mechanism comprises a 12.5mm chrome-plated steel rod (another one salvaged from a car shock absorber) on
which the guide pulley is mounted. The rod slides in wide-spaced high density polypropylene bushes, allowing the
lateral movement to take place.
Chain Forces

The forces acting on the chain are huge. But huh, isn’t this just a pedal-powered machine? Let’s
first take a look at the torque being generated.

The pedal cranks on my machine are 170mm long. That is, the force applied by a pedal is 170
mm from the shaft centreline. On a normal bicycle the maximum force that can be applied to the
pedal is dictated by the rider’s weight, so an 80kg rider can apply a max of 80kg. However, a
recumbent pedaller can push harder than their body weight because they’re pushing back against
a seat. So the force that can be developed is high, perhaps by an 80kg person as much for a
short period as 120kg.

A force of 120kg applied 0.17 metres from the axle is a torque of 20.4 kg/m or almost 200Nm!

(kW is Nm x rpm divided by 9550, so if the pedals are being turned once per second, the power
being developed is 200 x 60 divided by 9550, or 1.25kW, which is possible for a human to
develop for a very short period of time. A continuous pedalling force of 15kg is easily able to be
achieved by humans, which at a cadence [ie pedalling] rate of 1.5 per second calculates out to
235W.... so the figures make sense.)

So don’t think that the forces involved are trivial...

Frame Breakage!

At this stage I was able to ride the machine. Clearly, it was unfinished but it was always my intention to do lots of on-
road development so changes could be made as necessary. At this stage I was having problems with a slipping chain,
something that was eventually traced to the use of a secondhand rear gear cluster. (I hadn’t realised how critical it is
that the chain and cogs ‘wear in’ together.) However, when chasing the slipping chain, I’d been really throwing the
HPV around, thinking that the suspension movement might have been causing gear cables to pull and so cause
inadvertent ‘half‘ gear changes.

During this process I’d been heavily stressing the frame in a way I’d never considered: torsion. Torsional (twisting)
stiffness is regarded as very important in cars, where any frame twist will cause the suspension geometry of a wheel
to be altered. But in a three-wheeled vehicle, any twist in the frame is of little consequence because the three wheels
will still find an equal footing. But what I’d forgotten is that with the frame design I’d built, all the torsional forces
were being concentrated in one short section of frame.
This plan view shows what the problem was. Shown are the main longitudinal, front wishbones and wheels, and rear
trailing arm and wheel. (The scale is arbitrary!) The seat frame is shown in blue. Remember that the rear wheel has
no lateral roll stiffness, so any roll forces (cornering or even simply leaning over in the seat) are all resisted by the
front wheels and suspension. The rear two thirds of the frame were much stiffened by the seat assembly, so
concentrating all torsional forces on....

...the bit shown in the pic by the arrow!

Making matters worse was this section of frame had had several 32mm holes drilled through it. These holes were
positioned for the steering system – later abandoned – that used two laterally sliding rods mounted in poly bushes.
The holes were originally strengthened by having 32mm aluminium tubes welded through them but when the steering
system was changed, I ground-out the welds and removed the tubes, leaving the holes behind.
And here was the result. A spectacularly failed part, I think you’ll agree. The breakage didn’t dump me on the road (it
just made for some weird lean angles) but clearly things had to be changed. The seat frame extensions (mentioned
above) were no longer optional; they were critical!

So I replaced the failed part with some new tube that was undrilled....

...and extended the rails to the front crossmember.

This shows how the seat extensions provide much better torsional stiffness – and bending stiffness too.

Conclusion

Even something as simple as the path of the chain turned out to be pretty damned complex in real life. The frame –
and its failure? This was an engineering lesson in itself! The end result is a frame very stiff in bending and moderately
stiff in torsion, although with the latter I wouldn’t want to quote it in degrees per Newton... I (still) don’t think it would
be very high.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at the on-road tuning of the suspension

Building a Human Powered Vehicle, Part 7

Tuning the suspension

Road Testing

So now I was on the road. After hundreds of hours of work I could assess steering feel and weight, ride, handling,
suspension bob with pedalling – and all the rest that I’d tried to optimise in the design and build process.

So what is it subjectively like?

Let’s start with the ride quality. Realistically, the ride quality provided by the new trike depends on two things – (1)
the surface on which the machine is being ridden (amplitude, sharpness, wavelength of bumps), and (2) how fast
you’re going.

The latter is very important – even a brick can be ridden over with little harshness if you do it at a snail’s pace.
(That’s why non-suspended bikes can be ridden up and down kerbs – you just do it very slowly!). So if an HPV is to be
never ridden faster than about 10 km/h, I don’t think an elaborate suspension system is worthwhile.

So while at very slow speeds you can see the suspension working (on typically bumpy bitumen roads around where I
live, wheel movement in these conditions is about 20mm) and while the sharpness is certainly taken off bumps, the
ride isn’t really transformed over a non-suspension HPV that uses the same 20 inch wheel diameters.

But even that’s not quite true. The entrance to my driveway is a 75mm (3 inch) high, 45 degree chamfer where the
bitumen road finishes and my driveway starts. (I leave the bump there because it’s perfect for testing the impact
harshness of press cars at low speeds!). And in the same way, it’s also a very tricky bump for an HPV – especially
because you often negotiate it while braking hard after riding down a steep slope. When braking, the non-suspended
Greenspeed GTR is very harsh indeed across the bump, whereas the suspended trike is far better.

So in some low speed conditions, the suspended trike is far better that the non-suspended trike, but as a general
statement, at low speed there’s usually not a lot to pick between them.

The differences really start to show as you go faster than 10 km/h, and rise exponentially from that point. At 15 – 20
km/h (a very easily achievable cruising speed on the flat) the ride of the suspended trike is clearly far better than a
non-suspended machine. A road that with the Greenspeed GTR gives constant impact harshness and three or four
back-jarring bumps is despatched by the suspension HPV with zero of both. You can feel the road isn’t smooth but you
have to look down at the road to see the bumps coming - you simply cannot feel their magnitude. (Also see the
section later in this story on data-logging vertical accelerations...)

At these speeds, typical urban riding (cycle paths, footpaths, ramps from roads up to footpaths) uses about 60mm of
the front suspension travel (bump and rebound) while the rear uses about 33mm. Note: most of this suspension
movement occurs when negotiating ramps from roads to footpaths.

At 40 - 50 km/h (eg downhill) the difference between a non-suspended HPV and my suspension design is like chalk
and cheese. Bumps which literally launch the non-suspended GTR into the air (not nice – a huge impact and very hard
to keep steering control) are on the suspension trike simply a rapidly passing bump-thump. You know you’ve gone
over a sharp bump but the tyres stay on the road and the rider isn’t disconcerted – or sore afterwards!

So the sweet spot for the suspension trike is when you get moving. In fact, at 15 – 60 km/h the ride is simply
transformed over a non-suspension HPV - you just glide along.

One of the reasons that I have described in detail such a variation in speeds is that my local roads are all very steep.
How steep? Well, some are hard to walk up – you need to be pretty fit to walk up one particular road without stopping
several times for rests. Therefore, on any ride that I do around here, I might be in 1 st gear for 5 or 10 minutes while
climbing a hill at 4-5 km/h, and then, seconds later, be in 72nd gear, pedalling as fast as I can at 65 km/h! On the way
up the hill, I curse the extra mass imposed by the suspension; on the way down the hill, I revel in the ride and control
that it gives me.

The suspension trike is exemplary in off-road work. My test road doesn’t have gutters and in some places the soil
adjacent to the bitumen has been channelled by the rain to a depth of 10-15cm, forming steep-edged depressions
about 40cm wide. I can ride straight through these channels while the suspension simply articulates its way over
them. The HPV moves vertically but there’s absolutely no impact harshness or sudden bounces. In these conditions
the front and rear suspension travel used can be as high as 90mm.
Note: for all the ride tests described, tyre pressures were set at 90 psi, far higher than I can run in a non-suspended
trike without experiencing back pain.

It’s a lot of fun heading down a bumpy hill on the suspension HPV, noting with delight how well it copes with the
bumps I know so well from testing dozens of different cars over the same roads.

So the ride is pretty good – what about the handling and steering?

At this stage the HPV exhibited quite a lot of body roll when turning hard, although even with this amount of roll, the
outside tyre still gripped extremely well. The cornering limit was reached with understeer, to be expected with a
three-wheeled machine with most of the mass positioned between the two front wheels. But unlike a trike without
suspension, the machine did not pick up an inside wheel when cornering very hard – the outside suspension
compressed and the inner suspension drooped so that both wheels stayed on the ground. But the body roll was
disconcerting.
Dynamic (Im)Balance

On my Greenspeed GTR I find that if I am pedalling very quickly in a tall gear (which means
travelling at 50 – 60 km/h), the front of the trike develops a sideways oscillation. This translates
to a steering input, causing the machine to swerve from side to side down the road. If pedalling
fast enough and travelling fast enough, this swerving can get bad enough that I have to stop
pedalling – then the machine settles down again.

Many people suggest that this movement is the result of the rider inadvertently steering as their
arms move in sympathy with their legs, but I found that even if holding my arms as still as
possible (or even taking my hands off the steering levers!), the same thing occurred. I then
decided that it was a result of insufficient self-centre’ing castor – one of the reasons I decided to
give my suspension trike greater castor. Another way I attempted to get rid of this trait was by
using a slower steering ratio.

In the main these two approaches have been successful, but some weaving still occurs when
pedalling fast at high speed. Why?

I now think it is the dynamic imbalance of the rotating assembly comprising the legs, feet and
pedals. In Fundamentals of Automotive Engine Balance (Thomson, W. ISBN 0 85298 409X) the
author actually uses cycle pedals as an example of a system that has a fundamental rotating
imbalance.

When the pedals are in one position, the centrifugal force acting in opposite directions and offset
from the centreline tries to rotate the whole assembly anti-clockwise. When the pedals are 180
degrees different in position, they try to rotate the assembly clockwise. Therefore, in each full
rotation of the pedals, there is a twisting force one way then the other way.

In a normal bicycle, where the pedals are located about midway between the front and rear
wheels, this force is easily resisted. But in a recumbent trike (and, I assume a recumbent bike),
as the pedals are ahead of the steered wheels, these forces actually steer the machine. Of course,
it’s not just the pedals that are rotating: you also need to add the mass of the feet and perhaps
half the mass of the legs – quite a lot of weight whizzing around!

This affect could be overcome by adding balance weights – but of course the mass of the whole
HPV would also then rise.

Tie-Rods

Toe is set as close to zero as the adjustment allows. This decision was made not on the basis of handling
(significantly, toe changes seem to make little difference) but on the basis of tyre scrub and drag. Setting a large
amount of either toe-in or toe-out considerably increased drag, to the extent that when the HPV was pushed along by
hand, the extra resistance could be easily felt.
However, a problem developed with the tie rods. As shown in Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 5, the steering
system uses what are effectively four tie rods; two of the traditional sort connect the steering mechanism to the
steering arms on the uprights, and another two transfer the motion of the two steering levers to the rest of the
system. All four rods were made from aluminium tubing. To allow adjustment of length, and to allow the ball-joints to
be easily connected, threaded spuds were turned-up from aluminium and then TIG’d into the ends of the tubes. Jam
nuts were also fitted on these threads.

All worked fine for a while. But then one day I noticed that the toe had changed. That was especially significant
because only the day before I’d very carefully adjusted the toe to be as close to zero as I could make it. Now it was
out by quite a few millimetres. I inspected the tie-rods to find that the ones connecting to the wheel uprights were
bending, not as might be expected in the tubular section but at the threaded spuds.

I replaced all four aluminium tie rods with threaded steel bar.

While previously mentioned in this series, it is worth repeating: if you run a lot of castor and/or steering axis
inclination, the loads in a steering system can be very high indeed.

Sway Bar

With one of the major deficiencies being body roll, I decided to make and fit a sway bar.

This was difficult – the front suspension is very tight for clearances, primarily because of the combination of compact
dimensions and 100mm of suspension travel. The long suspension travel and the limited length of the lever arms that
could be incorporated in the sway bar shape means that long sway bar links were necessary if the angularity of these
links wasn’t to become excessive as the suspension moved through its full travel.

Long sway bar links meant either positioning the sway bar high and attaching the links to the lower wishbone, or
positioning the sway bar low and picking the links up off the upper wishbone. I did the latter.
The sway bar was made from 10mm spring steel (a guess in thickness) which was cold-bent using a vice and brute
force. Heating the bar would have made bending it much easier, but the bar would then have needed to be re-
tempered. Because I didn’t want to weld to the bar, and using a die to place a thread on spring steel is very difficult,
the sway bar had to be constructed so that the links could be attached to the bar without the need for threads or
eyes.

This was achieved by using nylon bushes (machined on the lathe – hell, doesn’t nylon machine beautifully!) press-
fitted to aluminium tubes that in turn were welded to the sway bar links. The sway bar links were made from square
tube. The nylon bushes simply slipped over the ends of the sway bar with the bushes lubricated with plastic bush
grease. Spring steel clips were then press-fitted over the ends of the sway bar. This gave strong and lubricated lower
pivot points for the sway bar/link connections. (However, the disadvantage of this approach is that sway bar stiffness
cannot easily be adjusted by moving the sway bar links.) The upper suspension connections were made with ball-
joints.

The sway bar pivots in nylon bushes. To get these one-piece bushes onto the centre portion of the sway bar, a cut
was made in each bush so that it could slide over the end of the bar and then be expanded sufficiently to get around
the bends in the sway bar.

The other advantage of this mounting approach was that if the sway bar needed to be changed in thickness, all four
bushes could be easily replaced to suit.

The body supports for the sway bar were formed by a transverse aluminium tube and flat plate mounts. The stainless
steel clamps holding the sway bar pivot bushes in place were sourced from a boating supplies shop.

Testing the Sway Bar

The thicker a sway bar, the more that body roll will be resisted. However, the firmer will be one-wheel bumps and the
less independent will be the suspension. In addition, the thicker the sway bar, the more the inside wheel will be
picked up when cornering.

To be honest, I simply didn’t know what was desirable in terms of sway bar roll stiffness. I wanted to reduce body roll
without needing to change springs or dampers, but I didn’t want to be often flying an inside wheel because the inside
suspension no longer drooped sufficiently. I also figured that the sway bar was an area where a dozen iterations could
easily be trialled, all with slightly different results.

But, whether by luck or the fact that any of a variety of bars would have been far better than having none, the 10mm
swaybar gives an outcome with which I am happy. Body roll has been halved and the HPV takes a cornering ‘set’ far
earlier. Flip-flop weight transfer in S-bends is vastly reduced... something I’d have thought was more dictated by
damping rates than the swaybar. However, there is still enough inner suspension droop that the inside wheel stays on
the ground.
But one-wheel bumps are firmer – in fact, big one-wheel bumps are quite a lot firmer! If a sway bar is to be fitted, it’s
important to realise that spring rates should be considered in the context of the ‘bar stiffness. Had I known that a
sway bar was going to be required, I would probably have used slightly softer front springs.

New Lower Wishbones

As described in Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 3, the lower front wishbones (which carry the whole forward
weight of the machine: the upper wishbones don’t carry any weight) were made from square tube with lots of holes
drilled in them for lightness. However, after the failure of the main frame where cracks had propagated from holes
(see Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 6), I decided I wasn’t happy with this design. I replaced these
wishbones with two new ones, made from 33mm x 3mm round aluminium tube. In addition to being very strong
indeed, these also look better!

New Upper Wishbone Bushes

Because the whole front suspension can be observed while the machine is being ridden, I was able to see that under
hard braking something interesting was happening. What was occurring was that the upper wishbones were deflecting
quite a lot on their bushes, with the outer upper ball-joints consequently moving forwards. This decreased castor
under brakes and also dulled the initial brake bite.

To overcome this problem, the upper polyurethane bushes were replaced with ones machined from nylon.

(Note: if replacing polyurethane with harder material, be careful to size the new bush to suit the required dimensions,
rather than just copying the poly bush. Poly bushes tend to ‘flow’ when being press-fitted and so are often a little
oversize in outside diameter and undersize in inside diameter.)

With the new bushes in place, the upper wishbones are rock solid under brakes. The on-road difference isn’t huge but
the brakes have more initial bite and the steering is a little sharper around centre (the bushes must also have been
deflecting sideways a bit).

Dampers

In Part 4 of this series (see Building a Human-Powered Vehicle, Part 4) I described the suspension dampers that were
being used. These are based on steering dampers from Suzuki GSXR 1100 motorcycles. Because of their original
function, they have equal damping force in each direction. Testing of the rolling chassis showed that having equal
bump/rebound damping resulted in a much firmer ride than was achieved without the dampers in place. After all,
every bump wasn’t being resisted just by the spring but also by the damper! And the sharper the bump, the more the
damper resisted the compression – dampers being the sort of device that rapidly increase in firmness with higher
shaft speeds.
After initially considering internal or external valving changes, I decided to simply fill the dampers with very thin fluid
- 2.5W 5 oil, designed for use in the front forks of motorcycles.

However, following extensive road testing, I decided that the bump damping was too great, especially on the front. To
overcome this, I decided to pull the steering dampers apart and change the internal valving.

Then followed days of frustration!

Fitting an internal one-way valve that allows bump damping to be much weaker than rebound damping sounds simple
but I found it unbelievably complex. The best results I could get were obtained by using a thin nylon washer backing a
custom made piston with slots cut in it. On bump the nylon washer deflected, allowing fluid the pass through the
grooves in the piston. On rebound, the fluid had to squeeze past the edges of the piston as the nylon washer closed
off the slots.

Sounds good, eh? Yeah, but I found that anything positioned inside the damper within about 10mm of the nylon
washer also affected dynamic flow – even something as simple as a circlip or small diameter washer on the shaft. The
fluid inside the damper was obviously rushing around at such high speed that the presence of other obstacles totally
changed the damping behaviour. And there was a further problem. After a few strokes, the fluid would get aerated,
which changed the damping rates still further. After spending dozens of hours painstakingly building tiny assemblies
that simply didn’t work, I decided to have a radical change of heart, and try the trike with no external dampers at all.

And the fascinating thing was that the front suspension was far better without external dampers! A ‘step’ input (like
jumping on the trike) died away to nothing within 2.5 bounces.

But where was the damping coming from? The conventional answer is that friction damping was being provided by the
upper and lower wishbone bushes, and also the ball-joints and the sway bar bushes. But how could that be when I’d
taken such great care to make all these joints free-moving? The answer is that only a little of the damping was
coming from this source.

The major form of front damping is in fact being provided by lateral movement of the tyres. Because the roll centre is
not located at ground level, and because dynamic camber increases in bounce, the front track changes by about
20mm as the suspension moves from full droop to full bump. The only way that this can occur is if the tyres are
dragged laterally across the ground. Given that each front tyre typically supports a mass of 55kg, the strong damping
affect of this movement on the suspension is easy to imagine. The greater the bump, the more of this friction
damping that occurs (and of course the greater the tyre wear!).

But the rear suspension is a completely different story. There is no lateral tyre movement through the full suspension
travel, and with only two bushes, also less bush friction. The result is that running the rear without an external
damper resulted in lots of oscillations. In fact, pedal torque inputs in first gear (that can cause squat) could be timed
to be close to the resonant frequency of the rear suspension, so resulting in greater and greater bouncing. (See below
for an explanation of suspension resonant frequencies.) To damp the rear suspension I fitted it with my most
successful experimental asymmetric hydraulic damper.
Natural Frequencies

When I decided to forgo external front dampers I was initially a bit worried: would the trike
develop a high speed suspension oscillation that could throw me off? They key to predicting the
behaviour of the suspension system is to look at the natural frequency of the suspension. That is,
the number of times per second it would naturally bounce if pushed down and released.

The natural frequency in cycles per minute (divide by 60 to get cycles per second, or Hertz) can
be found by: 188 divided by the square root of the static deflection, measured in inches.

On my HPV, without dampers fitted, the front drops by 2.75 inches when the weight of the person
and trike settles the springs. This indicates a natural frequency of 1.9Hz. So a problem would
occur if you met a bump 1.9 times per second, that is, bumps 0.52 seconds apart. In that case,
the natural frequency of the HPV suspension would cause the suspension movement to grow and
grow.

At speed (say 50 km/h or 13.9 metres/second), the bumps would need to be regularly spaced at
7.2 metre intervals – pretty unlikely. However, at slow speed (say 6 km/h – 1.7 metres/second)
the bumps would need to be spaced at only 88cm – quite likely if traversing a concrete footpath
with regular expansion gaps. But then again, it’s only at slow speed so it’s very unlikely to be
dangerous.

The further the frequency of bump input from the natural frequency of the suspension, the less
excited the suspension will naturally get. A very high natural frequency is achievable only with
almost no deflection – ie a bloody hard suspension! So that’s no good. A very low natural
frequency requires a lot of deflection, in turn needing a lot of suspension travel and relatively soft
springing. In fact 1Hz is deemed as optimal, but that requires a static suspension deflection of 10
inches!

And what of those HPVs running very small suspension travel? A suspension which compresses ¼
inch with load has a natural frequency of about 6.5Hz, or will get very excited by a bump
occurring every 0.15 seconds. At 50 km/h this translates to a bump every 2 metres – a quite
likely scenario. (Well, a much more likely scenario than a recurring bump every 6.2 metres!) At
slow speed (6 km/h), it’s a bump every 25cm – again a quite likely scenario.

So in addition to a short suspension travel having limited compliance, it will have a higher natural
frequency that is more likely to be excited by the frequency of bumps found in the real world.
That’s why most cars have a suspension natural frequency in the 1 – 1.5Hz range, rising in
performance cars to 2 – 2.5Hz.

So what differences occur in ride with relatively small changes in natural frequency? Lots! We’ve
all experienced how cars ride better with extra people in them. If the car has a static suspension
deflection of 4 inches, the natural frequency of the suspension is 1.6Hz. If the static deflection
increases by another 1.5 inches when 4 people get in the car (giving a total static deflection of
5.5 inches), the natural frequency of the suspension has decreased to 1.3Hz. That’s why the ride
has improved! (Of course, if there is insufficient suspension travel and the extra static deflection
causes the suspension to hit the bump stops, that’s another story...)

It’s interesting to note that increasing natural suspension frequency from 1 to 2 Hz causes
vertical accelerations experienced by the sprung mass to increase by several hundred percent.
References:

Dixon, John C., The Shock Absorber Handbook, ISBN 0 7680 0050 5

Gillespie, Thomas D., Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics, ISBN 1 56091 199 9

www.rqriley.com

Data-Logging the Suspension

 Suspension Travel

When I started describing the suspension of the HPV – and the on-road results I was getting – many people in the
recumbent trikes on-line community suggested that the amount of suspension travel I had was way in excess of what
was required. “What sort of roads are you riding on,” they said, “paving stones?” I’d already measured damper travel
by means of cable ties on the shaft but now, without any dampers fitted to the front suspension, travel was harder to
measure.

So, primarily to show for doubters that at real speeds on real roads a lot of suspension travel is used, I decided to
data-log the front suspension.

I mounted a rotary potentiometer near the suspension and attached to its knob a sprung lever. This contacted the
upper wishbone of the right-hand front suspension. As the wishbone moved, the lever also moved, rotating the pot.
To log the output of the pot I used a Fluke 189 Scopemeter, measuring pot resistance. By manually moving the lever
and checking the Scopemeter reading, I could work out what resistance corresponded to what suspension deflection.
The relationship wasn’t perfectly linear but it was pretty good.

With the Scopemeter mounted on the trike, I pedalled to the top of my local test hill. This is a steep road with a
bumpy bitumen surface. However, it’s just a local suburban road – it’s not a little-used dirt back track. On this road I
achieve a maximum speed of about 65 km/h. At these sorts of speeds the non-suspension Greenspeed GTR launches
into the air over the short, sharp Big Bump and is harsh and uncomfortable over many others.
I stopped at the top of the hill, stepped off the trike and activated the logging. I then sat back on the trike, which
settled to its normal ride height, fiddled a little with the pedal toe-clips, then rode onto the road and accelerated down
the hill. I then started hitting the bumps and depressions (the Big Bump is clearly visible on the data log record), with
the trike (and me!) remaining unfussed by the road surface beneath. At the end of the street, about 90 seconds later,
I negotiated part of the roundabout which is placed in the cul de sac – the extension of the right-hand suspension
through body roll when negotiating this radius can be clearly see. I then stopped, got off, and stopped the data-log
record.

When analysing this record there are a few points to note. Firstly, on this road at this speed, the spring rate and travel
are almost perfect – the suspension does not use full bump or full droop once. This means the tyres are far more
likely to always be in good contact with the road.

Secondly, lots of travel is needed! The data log record shows that, if you don’t want to subject the rider to high
vertical accelerations, the suggestion that only one or two inches (25 – 50mm) of suspension travel (ie the total of
bump and rebound) are needed is completely wrong. In fact, to keep the natural frequency low (2Hz or below)
requires soft springing – and so you must have lots of travel if you’re not to bottom out under bump, or fall into holes.

Thirdly, major suspension deflections were more often in droop than bump (although the Scopemeter-calculated
average for this stretch of road was very close to normal ride height), which implies that on a vehicle of this sort, the
static deflection should put the vehicle at about the mid-way point in suspension travel.

Fourthly, the friction damping provided primarily by the lateral movement of the front tyres looks pretty good – big
suspension movements are not immediately followed by further large oscillations.

Finally, notice how at both the beginning and end of the data log record shows less suspension movement? This
primarily because here the HPV was moving slowly – and if you’re going slowly, lots of suspension travel isn’t used.

To some extent the data-log record contained very few surprises for me – it’s largely what I could see and feel the
suspension doing. However, I have the feeling it might surprise lots of other people!

 Vertical Acceleration

So the front suspension data-logging was interesting, but what about vertical acceleration? Vertical accelerations are
the key indicator of ride quality. To measure these, I bought an electronic accelerometer.

I logged the output in two ways – (1) on a fast reading multimeter that allowed the recall of average, min and max
voltages - corresponding to maximum upwards acceleration, maximum downwards acceleration and average vertical
acceleration; (2) a Fluke Scopemeter, which could continuously log vertical acceleration over the course of a ride.

Let’s look at the peak readings first.

The test track was the section of grass/bitumen/concrete shown in these two videos –
www.youtube.com

www.youtube.com

As it looks, this is a very bumpy, difficult section. The accelerometer was mounted on the seat of the suspension trike
(in fact I sat on it – it’s only 25 x 25 x 2mm) and the test was ridden. This gave a maximum vertical acceleration of
plus/minus 0.49g.

I then mounted the accelerometer on my non-suspension Greenspeed GTR trike and rode the same course. (Tyre
pressures the same, same wheel diameters, same seat accelerometer location.) On the GTR the maximum vertical
acceleration on the seat was a staggering plus/minus 1.3g! An upwards acceleration of more than 1g will have you
literally accelerating out of the seat, while a downwards acceleration of 1g doubles your effective body mass. So as
can be expected, a machine that gives plus/minus 1.3g of vertical accelerations is impossibly hard in ride.

So, compared with the Greenspeed GTR, the suspension trike reduced the magnitude of the peak vertical
accelerations by 62 per cent.

However, the GTR is not intended for riding over such surfaces. What were the differences on normal roads?

This time I continuously logged using the Fluke Scopemeter. The test course was a ride from my house to a local
roundabout – a very slow steep climb up my street (say 5 km/h) followed by a slightly downhill run to the
roundabout, and then return. Max speed was about 30 km/h and the road surface is slightly bumpy. To me it
represents a pretty typical ride. (It doesn’t include any massive bumps taken at high speed, for example.)

I rode the course (it takes about 5.5 minutes) on the GTR, logged the result, then rode the same course on my
suspension trike. The results are shown here. The top graph is the Greenspeed GTR and the lower graph is my
suspension trike.

As can be seen, the difference in bumpiness is astounding. Not only are peak accelerations far lower, but for much of
the ride, there simply aren’t any bumps. Remember, this is just a normal road, at normal speeds, measured at the
seat and so very accurately replicating what the rider feels.

Another comparison can be made. My suspension trike gives a similar maximum vertical acceleration to the non-
suspension GTR – but that’s when when my trike is ridden across the ultra bumpy off-road course and the GTR is
ridden on the normal road!
For those really into this, I also measured peak vertical acceleration on a front wheel, ie the input acceleration. On the
off-road course the max was plus/minus 1.7g. So my suspension trike reduced this by 71 per cent, and the
Greenspeed GTR (assuming the same acceleration inputs), through the flexing of its frame and seat, reduced this by
24 per cent.

Other Design Aspects

 Boom – the forward-mounted boom that supports the pedals has proved to be stiff in both torsion and
bending. No changes were needed in this area. However, I found that the initial height at which I set the
pedals was much too high. In fact, it seems to me to be as important to get their height right as it is to get
the leg distance to them correct. (Lots of discussion is made of the latter – and all commercial HPVs are
adjustable in this regard – but the former almost never seems to get mentioned.) I therefore made an
adjustment mechanism that allows the height to be varied over a wide range.

 Seat shape – before the front seat extensions were welded in place, the forward part of the seat was angled
upwards (initially it was too flat). Some have suggested that the straight backrest (ie lacking a forward curve
to allegedly match the shape of your back) is a retrograde step but I find the seat very comfortable.

 The rear damper tends to rattle in its mount and needed neoprene strips inserted to allow some lateral
movement but stop the rattles.

 The braking system, which comprises Magura Big hydraulic front discs, was initially operated by a single
lever. However, I decided to change to two individual levers. This was done for two reasons – (1) It suddenly
occurred to me that with only a single lever, a hydraulic fluid leakage would result in total brake failure - not
good when riding down a hill towards a dead-end at 60 km/h... and (2) Braking when cornering is much more
efficient if the brakes can be applied unevenly – eg the rider can prevent the inner (unloaded) wheel from
locking. But braking at high speed needs to be done with finesse – yank on one brake harder than the other
and (of course) the trike will swivel around the slower turning wheel.

 Spring preload – at one stage I inadvertently ran a different spring preload on one side at the front. (This
was caused by a damper being wrongly adjusted for length). Despite the additional preload being only 7-
8mm, this had a dramatic affect on that side’s suspension compression and ride quality. It also made
cornering asymmetric, to the degree that when turning one way, the HPV would dramatically lift an outside
wheel, but when turning the other way both front wheels would stay on the road.

So that's it for this series. But you might be interested to know that I almost immediately began a new,
much better design - see Another Human Powered Vehicle!
The Carrier

Designing the rear carrier was difficult for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I wanted it removable so that the extra mass can be easily lost when load carrying isn’t
needed. Also, making it removable means that when transporting the HPV, it can be easily
disassembled to fit in a 1 cubic metre box. Incidentally, to fit into that volume, the rear
suspension swing arm and wheel are removed (four bolts) and the front boom carrying the pedals
and chain wheels unbolted (two bolts).

Secondly, the carrier needed to have a large capacity – I’d decided that if the HPV was too heavy
to be a sports machine, it was definitely going to be a good tourer! And while I may never do it,
the idea of self-supported long distance touring is very attractive – and for that, the more
carrying capacity, the better.

Thirdly, the carrier needed to mount as much as possible of the load mass low and symmetrically
about centreline of the machine

The last one needs more explanation. Picture the rear carrier on a motorcycle and you can
immediately see that it must be high enough above the rear wheel to clear the vertical
movements of the wheel on its suspension. Apply that to an HPV and you can see that the load
will be positioned very high relative to the centre of mass. Furthermore, it will be a long way
rearwards of the wide-spaced front wheels, potentially making the three-wheeler unstable in
cornering. The solution is to carry gear in low-mounted panniers, one positioned each side of the
rear wheel. However, I wanted more carrying capacity than even large panniers could provide.

To solve the problems, the load-carrying areas of the carrier were positioned at two heights. One
storage area (arrow) was placed immediately behind the seat and above the rear suspension
swing-arm. This put it in front of the rear wheel (so within the wheel-base) and only 46cm above
the ground. This area can be used for heavy gear. Behind that - and high enough to clear the
100mm of rear wheel travel - is positioned a large carrier, suitable for lighter objects.
Furthermore, four panniers can be suspended low each side.

This gives a total carrying capacity of a massive 240 litres – two 40 litre panniers, two 38 litre
panniers, 35 litres in the ‘heavy’ area, and 50 litres in the ‘light’ area. (Note: you can see how
from a touring point of view, a trike totally wipes a bicycle!)

The carrier was made removable by the following process. Two machined spigots are located low
on the frame. The angled carrier supports slide over these spigots. The upper supports are bolted
into place. With appropriate tools, this allows the carrier to be removed or replaced in a minute or
two.

The carrier was fabricated from 33mm x 3mm round aluminium tube and 3mm aluminium sheet.
It has a mass of 5kg.