Great work guys!
I continue to be awed by your persistence and ingenuity - now add some post-apocalyptic crash bumpers for some Mad Max styling and go out and salvage gasoline for the Lord Humungous…
JAG “Last of the Old VTECs” MAN
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Will be working on modifying the front spindle / steering arm and testing the slicks tonight(wednesday) if anyone is interested in helping work on the kart.
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Turns out that if you don’t understand the implications of leading vs trailing arm steering geometry then you really shouldn’t be designing a gokart from scratch, after way too much trial and error, we arrived at this, which is at least better than it was with about ~40% ackermann instead of reverse ackermann.
Here is a pic of the massive fail where I was offsetting the pivot point in the wrong direction (because it is leading instead of trailing arm setup),
This is what you want to do:
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The PVC rear tires worked great in the wet, havent downloaded the gopro footage yet, I’m wondering if anyone would be interested in a how to drift class using the kart? Would have to be limited size due to battery capacity (anyone want to donate $500 for another battery pack and charger?)
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can you do more detail on the mounting of the pvc to the wheel? Just curious…
Friction and hope…
The tire is almost the same as the ID of the pvc when deflated. But it it still kept sliding off (the typical application is with a 5" wide gocart slick not a bald ~2.5 inch wide hand dolly tire), each time it would slide off I tried doing a bit more
- wire brushed the inside of the pvc a bit
- put some strips of duct tape crossways and increased to 35 psi
- wrapped two layers deep of duct tape to decrease inner diameter
- applied some e6000 glue between tire and pvc
And haven’t tested it with the glue yet, but each modification has seemed to make it a bit more secure
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How fast did you say you intend to go on this?
oh, drifters don’t GO that fast…
they just do it all sideways…
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I was at a campground along I-10 a few years ago. I got all packed up into my Honda Civic and got up to freeway speed on the entrance ramp. What I didn’t know was that the entrance ramp actually was a T off the short road down which I was racing. I made the turn abruptly, and found myself flying sideways. I’m pretty sure I was actually a few inches in the air. I think I would have flipped if I had hit a curb. Fortunately, when I landed, I just swerved a few times and managed to hold my lane. I regretted that I didn’t have my video camera recording right then, but I sure wasn’t going try repeating that stunt.
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Now that you’ve got some experience under your belt, you should enter the competitions…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nx2pKryN0w
Turns out drifting for extended periods of time at 15mph will wear through PVC fairly quickly,one side got up to over 200 degrees and failed structurally, the pressure from the tire caused it to start bulging. Can get probably an hour or so of life out of the pvc tires if you let them cool often between runs (which is roughly 1 penny per second of driving), of course my trying to see if I can hold opposite lock at full speed is much more destructive than most of our test drivers so far.
Interesting you can see that due to the uneven axle we got one side of the tire worn down more than the other.
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You guys had too much fun on this project. Who would have guessed looking at that picture in the classroom on the original post?
Hey guys! So some people at my school are really interested in building their own go-kart and their wondering if anyone would be interested in helping them out. If anyone is interested please email [email protected] for more details. Also appologies for not creating a new post, but they really need the people who have been working on this project a lot.
-Josh McDonaldWe should attach ski’s to the front so next february when the lemon’s race gets iced out we can have fun with our make-shift snowmobile.
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Tried it with the slightly larger slicks on the rear, and its probably a bit too fast. Hit nearly 40 mph, on the uneven concrete in our parking lot, it feels very floaty / not planted at that speed. With more traction on the slick tires the turning is worse(the inside rear tire must slip to allow turning).
Will probably look into purchasing a larger section of 10" PVC to use instead of buying precut pvc
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So for the past few months I have been working on CADing up a V2 of the Space_Kart.
I give you the Space_Kart V2 Release Candidate.
Let me know what you think and any changes y’all think may be necessary before I order parts and start cutting wood.
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Looks great, would batteries go under front of seat? Could do some testing on rigidity and then use a hole saw to reduce mass
Looks Sharp,
I vote we make it foot steering and the handles bars just for holding on. 
Good work @frank_lima
You could pack the cart full of batteries in the frame between the two layers and help keep the weight low.