Week Eight

Finally we finished the building of the first tricycle. But there is still a big job to do. We thought that we could finish the tricycle on Monday. This was unfortunate but it wasn’t possible, again. But Tuesday in the afternoon the last thing to finish were the brakes. Because we had enough of building we finished the brakes but were not very nice.

We want to test the tricycle, so we took the tricycle to the head office. During the ride we noticeyou hve to be very strong to drive the tricycle and also the stability was not very high. Caspar was driving back and he had to avoid a goat so he drove into a gulley. That was a really test for the tricycle. The frame was not broken, but the wheels didn’t work any more. This was because someone from the village did not do a good job with the spokes of the entire wheel. After this happening we had to buy two new wheels.

Wednesday we tested the tricycle the whole day. We have written a testing protocol. This protocol will be used before improving the first tricycle so we can see what we have to change to the tricycle. And also the testing protocol will also be used after the improving of the tricycle so we can see whether the improvements were good enough. The following points are the main negative points of the testing protocol. The tricycle was not stable enough, the drive is very heavy and the brakes are bad. These are the things we want to change next week. We have also a few other things to do to finalise the tricycle, like installing mudguards, brakes which can be used when the tricycle is standing still and been painting.

So Wednesday till Friday we were busy with the testing protocol. In the same time we wrote a manual for building the tricycle. In the manual we gave a description of every part of the tricycle, the prices and how you get the parts. For example we use a bicycle for the parts. But you have to cut the bicycle to make pieces useful for the tricycle. Finally the manual describes how to fit the parts to each other and how you can fit them together. We hope that IcFEM can use this manual to continue with building of tricycles and to improve them in the future.