I decided to boycott civilization a while back and started living in vehicles. Then I decided that I like life better when my lifestyle doesn't change every time I run out of money. The living in vehicles thing is fun but I have to deal with mandatory insurance, registration, cops, and jerk drivers. Most of the places I like to go have forest roads and trails to them but I also need something that will go overland without damaging anything if I want to get to the remote areas. Anything with an engine is going to bring me back into having to pay for things constantly and I'm too busted up to pedal/hike like I used to. Going back to a backpack also means giving up my tools and projects, which is something I just don't want to do.
The solution for me was to design a solar/pedal powered camper trike that I can build myself!
The trike will provide shelter, transportation, water catchment and filtration, a kitchen, and solar power, inexpensively and sustainably providing for all of my basic needs except for food, community, and communication, and so far, I've only invested about $3k into it. I think I could do it for less than $1k if I used chain instead of belts and derailleurs instead of the Hammerschmidt and NuVinci. To meet the food needs, I'm a freegan and bushcrafter and like to steward the growth of native edibles and wildlife in my area. For community, being able to travel freely will make it possible for me to visit friends. For communication, a future project is an open source, meshnet enabled smartphone replacement and some horticulture support/meshnet node drones.
I'm going a little overboard on the first one with the hopes of impressing as many people as possible with it as I can. I also can't imagine wanting to live in a house or RV again so I want it to last forever. I really believe that a functional, comfortable, simplified version could be built for under $1kusd.
I'm going to release exact plans for my trike once it's done but will also point out cheaper alternatives to the expensive parts I used. These things will be as unique as the individuals that build them but the building and design principles are the same and can be adapted to vehicles of different sizes and configurations.
The body and frame on my trike will be made from plywood, bamboo, hemp cloth, and super sap resin. The plywood will be cut into gussets and used for flat surfaces and high stress areas like the rear wheel, rear swing arm, rear swing arm mounts, front A-arm mounts, and the bottom bracket holder. The bamboo will be used as perimeter and bracing for the upper and lower shell halves. The bamboo joints will be wrapped with hemp twine coated with Entropy resins Super Sap 10/100 and Super Sap CLR natural based expoxy resin. The bottom half of the body will be reinforced with thin plywood and everything will be wrapped in hemp cloth coated in the resin.
The windshield and windows will be lexan in plywood/hempcloth, resin frames.
When set up to camp, the top half of the body will lift up and be set on three foot tall bamboo pole risers, it's side doors folding up to increase ceiling area. The doors on the sides of the bottom half will fold down, increasing flood space. Tent material with mosquito netted windows will be clipped in to fully enclose it. Interior space will be 7' long x 7' wide x 6' tall. There will be a hammock made of 3/8" hemp rope that attaches to the risers. Inside, it will have water storage and filtration, a wood/propane/sun mini oven that fits into the sink for travel, storage for food and clothes, and a floor drain for showering. A thermal loop will be embedded in the roof for water heating.
The rear wheel will bolt together, creating a beadlock for a Heidenau K60 Scout 150/100-17 motorcycle tire. The entire wheel will be 16 inches wide with 12" minibike rims screwed and bonded on the outer edges. In between the minibike rims and the mc tire, rubber flaps made from cut up tubes will be screwed in to act as paddles when it gets in deep sand, mud, snow, or water.....yup, it's going to be amphibious!
The front wheels and suspension are from a salvaged Yamaha 350 Raptor Quad and I'm running sand tires with a ridge down the middle. Because of the light weight of the vehicle, and low speeds it's designed for, the 21x1x10 sand tires should last a long time. There are two reasons for using the sand tires. When on hard surfaces, the tires will roll more efficiently on the center ridge and in loose conditions, the ridges can dig in and provide excellent grip. I don't plan on taking many paved roads because of bad drivers, exhaust fumes, and cops so my trike is going to be super tough and offroad capable. It will have a foot of suspension travel all the way around and the whole thing will lean/tilt when steering, just like a motorcycle.
The front brakes are from the Raptor quad and the rear will be an old Hayes hydraulic disc setup with a 203mm rotor. The front suspension will use two Marzocchi Roco TST-R rear mountain bike shocks and the rear suspension will use a White Brothers tunable remote reservoir shock from the banshee quad.
The pedal drivetrain will consist of a Hammerschmidt two speed planetary crankset and a NuVinci N360 continuously variable transmission mounted inside and mid drive. A bike chain will go from the HS to the NuVinci. A Geo Tracker timing belt will drive from the NuVinci to the jackshaft/swing arm pivot, and a timing belt from a Subaru Imprezza will run to the rear wheel. I have left over pieces of 8mm pitch Gates PG2 profile pulley stock from my last project which will be final machined to complete the belt drive.
The electric drivetrain will use a Ryobi 40v brushless electric chainsaw. The saw will have the bar removed and bolted to a gear reduction interface with a plywood/resin friction drive with a cast resin/decomposed granite drive wheel and will interface with the bike chain. A pair of CSK-25PP one way bearings will allow the electric drive to freewheel when pedal only mode is desired. The reasons for using the chainsaw is: It can be unbolted quickly and used as a chainsaw. The saw is already made in an economy of scale big enough to keep the prices down. The battery chemistry is safe. The saw can be removed and boxed up for international border crossings, negating motorized vehicle customs fees and making the vehicle legally a bicycle worldwide.
The roof and upper side doors will be coated with roughly 600 watts of 3"x6" scrap solar panels that will be encapsulated in the SuperSap CLR. The top section will run to one 20amp mppt charge controller and the two side sections will use 10 amp PWM cheapies. Those charge controllers will feed two 12 volt 60ah sealed gel cell Universal batteries in parallel. Those will feed a 600 watt pure sine inverter which will run two saw battery chargers, and my music gear. Lighting will be LED's run from the 12v house batteries.
Except for one front shock, I have all of the parts and tools I will need to build a pedalable, camp-able trike. The tools needed are a jigsaw, a drill, a dremel tool with circle cutter and router attachments, basic hand tools for the bike/quad stuff, a 5-way plastic trowel, and some mixing cups for the resin. I'll have to do some machining at a local hackerspace to use the belt drives but trikes using bike chain will only need basic tools to construct.
With the plans and a good work ethic, a person should be able to build this in between 100-200 hours, maybe less.
I started this a couple of years ago and suffered many setbacks but I still have all of the parts. The main setback has been finding a shop to do the work in. Because my neck's so screwed up I can only work in short bursts so rental/borrowed shops just won't work. I've tried and my stuff gets moved around/lost by others when I'm having downtime. I bought a portable shop tent but it only lasted a few months before the AZ wind took it away. I'm really close to being able to buy a little scrap of land in the middle of nowhere and I was given an old bus to use as a shop.
The bus is only a mile from the land I'm looking at line of sight but I'm going to have to build a road to get it in there. Basically, if I can come up with about $4k, which I'm hoping to do soon by selling off parts for my other projects and a few rv's I've accumulated over the years, I can get setup again and build!
I hope that this inspires others to think outside the box(or house)!
Hopefully, I'll be able to start building again soon. I will post updates once I do!
Peace,
Ernesto
