Well as i mentioned recently i’ve been messing about with my father in laws trike. the brief i got in about october was that he was going to view a none running trike that had been built from a bmw k100 motorbike with a fixed rear axle from a robin reliant and that it wasnt the prettiest thing judging by the photos he’d seen. and so he went, some money was exchanged and this is what turned up at my house not long after…
far from the most attraactive of things. my job here was simply to make it look better - not get it running right as i was doing this as a family favour and my payment was to be a 1950’s gokart that was mel’s when he was a lad, this will be my own little project for my two daughters complete with (hopefully) the 175cc villiers engine it had back then 
unfortunatley the only thing that was going to lt this project down would be the budget - as little as posssible - this meant leaving the engine in and not sorting the frame out, which i have to say although it would have meant a lot more time it would have made all the difference, hey ho, not my wallet so not my call.
at this point i should mention that i didnt get as camara happy as i should have done, one reason being i picked my phone up and put a fingerprint of fibre glass resin on the camara lens lol - not gonna help is it!
and so to start painting… the colour sceme was to be red and another colour(of my choosing) and some chrome bits.
the choosen colours, lexus meesa red and good old anthracite.
after a few hours filling and sanding(i couldnt believe what bad shape everything was) heres the tank, seat mount and front arch.
obviously the rear wheel arches needed chopping off and forgetting, along with the vauxhall nova wheels or what ever they were, and fortunately i stumbled upon someone else giving up on their project so i bought his wheels and wheel arches, the wheels were kerbed quite badly and the arches had no mounts, but after a bit of fettling things soon looked better…
i’m sure i had pictures of the originals but maybe not - might edit this later if mel has any good pics 
painted the front wheel to
to mount the wheel arches, i didnt want any holes anywhere so i bought in some 20mm steel bar and made up some bolt on brackets (as i wanted everything to come back apart easily if needed) and then bonded the arches to the steel using tiger seal bodykit adhesive, once that had gone off i put three layers of fibreglass sheet just to seal the deal, hopefully it should all hold together, there is no rear suspension dont forget so there will be quite a lot of vibration! 
mel also wanted a tow bar bracket adding and a luggage rack, for 40 quidm again from ebay i found this luggage rack, just needed a way of mounting it, so some 10mm steel bar was used, again bolt on, and some old box section and angle for the tow bar bracket, welded directly to the rear axle - it wont be carrying any great weight so should be fine.
now as i’m doing this, i’m cursing for not having more photo’s of stuff 
anyhow, mel wanted the sides doing in chequer plate to match the crome bits, i kind of overruled him a bit here and after faffing about with cardboard templates and cutting the chequer plate, realising that the original panels had been bodged on and werent exactly great to get edges to line up nicely i thought it would look a lot better and more subtle if i painted them - i was going to sand the peaks back to the silver but once i saw them painted i thought they looked bang on without doing that…
at this stage the job is coming to an end, just 2-3days work and it would be about there, besides, easter bank holiday was fast approaching and i had an old apple tree in the back garden that needed a house building in it as promised for the kids for christmas
the last main job was to make a new dash board, not sure why exactly but when you convert a bmw motor bike into a trike you lose the output for the speedo, so we ordered a gps one from somewhere in america and bought some lights and i set to work with my welder 
some bits of plate, 5" diameter exhaust pipe soon started to look like something functional…
primed,
painted,
crome handle bars on
so after fitting the rear lights, but not wiring them up, it was just about done, had the tree house project not been looming i may have offered to try and sort the wiring out, but instead mel is hopefully going to find a decent autoelectrician as it would seem it needs a new ignition barrel, there is only 5.5v coming out of it so the starter relay wont engage, also the original dash needs to be plugged in as it seems to control the fuel pump - no major jobs to sort, just time consuming, time i did not have spare!
a bit of polishing and off it went
hopefully when i see father in law next he might have some more pics on his phone i can add. i have told him to bring it back for another polish when he’s had the gremlins sorted, that old dash dangling off the front kind of spoils things - there are a couple of bits i want to do extra to aswell when i get it back, so all being well if the suns out i’ll get some better photo’s.
hope you enjoyed the read!
