Friday, August 29, 2008
Introduction
Chapter I Preliminaries
The first question most people ask is, "Why?" (Though it generally comes out more like "What in God's name were you thinking??!!")
Resisting the temptation to reply, "Why not?" I'll try to explain.
It all started back in 1962, I think it was. We were driving up to Ann Arbor to visit my grandmother, and kept passing way too many way too old cars on the Interstate. When we got there we discovered it was Old Car Week at Greenfield Village, so we went over for the day. There were Duesenbergs and Bugattis and Pierce Arrows and Cords and I don't know what all, and more Model T's and Model A's than you could shake a stick at, and then I saw it. This tiny black roadster with red wheels in the front, no wheels (visible) in the back, and a spare tire poked into the tail like a cork in a bottle, looking like a cross between a Sopwith Camel and an English bulldog. I decided on the spot that it was just the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Fast forward to 1985. I saw a small item in the back of Road & Track on the Triking, noting it was Guzzi-based. The same week there was a secondhand 850 Eldo in the Post. I was working at a large sign shop in Washington D.C. at the time, making odd-shaped metal objects on a regular basis, so I shelled out $700 and took the Guzzi home. A year or so later I had cut up the Guzzi and devised a frame and a timber-framed aluminum body. At this point I was figuring to keep the Guzzi motor and tranny together up front, with a conventional driveshaft running offset through the cockpit, but I didn't really have the capabilities to pull it off.
So there things sat, more or less, while my life in D.C. went downhill (we won't go there,) and in the fall of 1989 I returned to Kentucky and went to work for my cousin Albert, who had started a sign shop in my absence. It was about this same time that Kit Car Magazine (not Hot Rod's cousin, the other one) ran a 3-part series on Dave Anders' Guzzi-based replica. I decided I liked a lot of his solutions better than where I was going, so I resolved to re-engineer things. And there things sat. I had money, but no time, so the trike went into a u-store bin.
Life goes on. Things at Albert's got to where we were mass-producing parts for Long John Silver's fish houses and not a whole lot else, and I was sharing about 3/4 of a job with Albert's sister. I had a chance to go paint murals for a restaurant chain, so I left the 3/4 of a job to Mamie. That dried up just about the time my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, as a result of which I took 5 or 6 years out to deal with that. (My brothers were all raising small children, and my sister was becoming First Lady of Oregon. I did it because I could.) I took on occasional Special Projects for Albert that I could do at home, and sold a painting now and then, but that was about all.
About the time Pop got to needing more care than we could give him at home, Albert told me if I had a PC he'd put me to work from home. So I got one, and he dumped me Autocad. I needed to draw something to figure out all the bells and whistles in Autocad, so I reworked the trike, based on the Anders stuff, the dimensions of me and the components I had, and a little 1/16 scale Mog kit I'd put together while sitting home.
In the meantime I'd connected with Stevie, on the recommendation of Ed from next door. Ed had a Honda that he took to Stevie, and when I bought Mom's old Civic he recommended I do the same. (When you look up Good Neighbor Policy in the encyclopedia, they have Ed's picture there.) Well, I took the kit and my drawings to Stevie (who was just finishing up stuffing a small-block Ford V-8 into a Crosley HotShot in his spare time,) and off we went.
As things turned out, the onlt parts from the original attempt that survive are the top of the grill shell, the rear of the Guzzi and the dashboard. And I had to rework the dash.
The first question most people ask is, "Why?" (Though it generally comes out more like "What in God's name were you thinking??!!")
Resisting the temptation to reply, "Why not?" I'll try to explain.
It all started back in 1962, I think it was. We were driving up to Ann Arbor to visit my grandmother, and kept passing way too many way too old cars on the Interstate. When we got there we discovered it was Old Car Week at Greenfield Village, so we went over for the day. There were Duesenbergs and Bugattis and Pierce Arrows and Cords and I don't know what all, and more Model T's and Model A's than you could shake a stick at, and then I saw it. This tiny black roadster with red wheels in the front, no wheels (visible) in the back, and a spare tire poked into the tail like a cork in a bottle, looking like a cross between a Sopwith Camel and an English bulldog. I decided on the spot that it was just the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Fast forward to 1985. I saw a small item in the back of Road & Track on the Triking, noting it was Guzzi-based. The same week there was a secondhand 850 Eldo in the Post. I was working at a large sign shop in Washington D.C. at the time, making odd-shaped metal objects on a regular basis, so I shelled out $700 and took the Guzzi home. A year or so later I had cut up the Guzzi and devised a frame and a timber-framed aluminum body. At this point I was figuring to keep the Guzzi motor and tranny together up front, with a conventional driveshaft running offset through the cockpit, but I didn't really have the capabilities to pull it off.
So there things sat, more or less, while my life in D.C. went downhill (we won't go there,) and in the fall of 1989 I returned to Kentucky and went to work for my cousin Albert, who had started a sign shop in my absence. It was about this same time that Kit Car Magazine (not Hot Rod's cousin, the other one) ran a 3-part series on Dave Anders' Guzzi-based replica. I decided I liked a lot of his solutions better than where I was going, so I resolved to re-engineer things. And there things sat. I had money, but no time, so the trike went into a u-store bin.
Life goes on. Things at Albert's got to where we were mass-producing parts for Long John Silver's fish houses and not a whole lot else, and I was sharing about 3/4 of a job with Albert's sister. I had a chance to go paint murals for a restaurant chain, so I left the 3/4 of a job to Mamie. That dried up just about the time my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, as a result of which I took 5 or 6 years out to deal with that. (My brothers were all raising small children, and my sister was becoming First Lady of Oregon. I did it because I could.) I took on occasional Special Projects for Albert that I could do at home, and sold a painting now and then, but that was about all.
About the time Pop got to needing more care than we could give him at home, Albert told me if I had a PC he'd put me to work from home. So I got one, and he dumped me Autocad. I needed to draw something to figure out all the bells and whistles in Autocad, so I reworked the trike, based on the Anders stuff, the dimensions of me and the components I had, and a little 1/16 scale Mog kit I'd put together while sitting home.
In the meantime I'd connected with Stevie, on the recommendation of Ed from next door. Ed had a Honda that he took to Stevie, and when I bought Mom's old Civic he recommended I do the same. (When you look up Good Neighbor Policy in the encyclopedia, they have Ed's picture there.) Well, I took the kit and my drawings to Stevie (who was just finishing up stuffing a small-block Ford V-8 into a Crosley HotShot in his spare time,) and off we went.
As things turned out, the onlt parts from the original attempt that survive are the top of the grill shell, the rear of the Guzzi and the dashboard. And I had to rework the dash.
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