Treescooter (Part 2/2)

I meant to update part 2 forever ago…but here it is now!

Last time I finished rambling about the deck and the fork. After that I started working on the folding and locking mechanism:

First I wanted to give the base of the handlebars more material so that I could make a fairly beefy pivot joint for the folding mechanism. I could have found a big block, drilled a hole in it the diameter of the handlebar, and then glued it in. But I didn’t have a big block, so instead I chose to glue lots of smaller bits to the base to build into a block. In order to have flat surfaces to attach small blocks to, I started by cutting the base of the handle at an angle.

lots of extra material needs to be trimmed off

after trimming the first two blocks, gluing on two more, and then trimming those

here you can see all the blocks pieced together (minus the fourth one which went on top to build up the thickness more)

Next I wanted to make a mechanism that would securely clamp this pivot to the front fork. I really wanted to use a bike quick-release mechanism, but I didn’t have the right tap, and couldn’t think of an easy way to do it. So this is what I came up with:

First, a bracket that goes on the front of the fork:

I found the curve of the front of the fork by shaping a popsicle stick, and then tracing the popsicle stick onto some 3/8″ Al plate.

This bracket receives two threaded rods that go through the front fork. On the other side there is a latch that clamps to the back of the handle bar pivot.

(almost) full clamp mechanism (missing a lock nut in the top left corner)

clamp and carefully drill two holes for the threaded rods

the latch on the back of the pivot (the scooter is in the unfolded configuration)

yes, these pictures are taken in a bathroom.

About this time I took it all apart and applied two coats of polyurethane. I used spray on, high gloss, which resulted in kind of an orange peel texture. But the bark isn’t smooth anyway, and its something that I will step on with shoes, so its probably better to not have a perfect gloss surface.