Go Kart 1.0

Here is the finished kart with paint (did the flames myself).  The basic kart was built from a ten horse riding mower.  The original trans and engine were used allowing 5 forward gears, neutral and reverse.  The pully's were changed from the engine and trans unit to change the torque curve and get a reasonable amount of speed from it.  Justin-credible followed behind me on the street bike and clocked the karts top speed at 42mph.

As always we got so excited on starting the project I forgot to get pictures of the original mower before we tore it apart.  At least I remembered some pics.  Here is the remaining parts that were used from the mower.  In the back is the layout we had decided on for the karts' frame.  In the front you can see the engine, seat, wiring, ign. box and battery.  Electric start you say......  you bet!

The original layout (left) wasn't much to inspire but it got us going.  Looking at the trans you can see we actually have it mounted up side down from the original configuration.  This was done to keep the engine and trans toward the bottom of the cart and make for a low center a gravity and create stability since go karts are known for sharp corners and not much suspension.  By mounting the trans in this way it actually rotates backwards so turning the trans an additional 180 degrees on its axis allowed the pulley to spin the right direction, otherwise we would have had 5 speeds of reverse and one speed forward.  

Here is the basic layout tach welded together and checked for parallelism at the corners.  We had some real difficulty at this point deciding exactly how we were going to attach the clutch and brake to the same pedal and fit a shifter in there somewhere in a neat and clean looking package, but for the interest of time and space we opted for function over appearance. I wanted the operation of the clutch/brake to be similar to the mower's original configuration since it was simple and only required two pedals to operate.  In a nutshell... the rod that connects the clutch lever to the left foot pedal is joined halfway up by the brake lever rod.  Once the pedal is depressed halfway or more the clutch is disengauged, as the pedal is depressed further then the brake begins to apply.

Here you can see the nearly finished kart.  It was so light in the front it was nearly impossible to keep the front wheels on the ground and also accelerate.  Adding almost 30 lbs of weight in the form of a front bumper seemed to make it quite controllable in the corners and also slowed us down a bit which was probably a blessing in disguise. Here Mike and Justin are checking the pulley runout after we welded it on the engine, at first we had some difficulty with the belt getting thrown every time we shifted gears.  We eventually found that shifting off throttle solved this whether or not you used the clutch when shifting.

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