One Year + 600 Hours Work = One Velomobile

YES! My velmobile is completed!

 After one years time and 600 hours of designing and building I officially declared at 7:00 pm tonight that my Radius T-T velomobile project is completed.  It has been a long and fun process to create what you see here.  For those of you who do not already know the name Radius T-T comes from radius being the rounded shape of my design and T-T being short for TerraTrike which is the recumbent trike that is the heart of the machine.

I spent last night mounting the body to the chassis, mounting the hood to the body, installing the windshield, and mounting various locking straps and check straps to the interior of the velo.  By nine o'clock I was done in for the day so I called it quits until this evening when I installed the rear view mirrors and finally put my tools away once again and grabbed my camera.

The paint as you can see from the photos turned out beautifully.  Hard to believe that this paint was not sprayed on but was brushed on.  I love the gloss and the whole paint scheme turned out great.  I really like the little mirrors being a useful and great looking addition to the velo.

I took all kinds of photos tonight of the velo and this one stood out as a keeper.  The body of the velo has a very clean smooth shape and this photo shows that off nicely.

This is what the velo looked like last September.  Hard for me to imagine back then that it would turn out like the photo below. 

My velomobile is 8 1/2 feet long, 37 inches tall, and 36 inches wide.  I weighed the body before I mounted it to the chassis of the TerraTrike Tour II.  The TerraTrike weighs 35 lbs by itself.  The body weighs another 45 lbs with absolutely everything that you see on it.  So I am happy that I got the weight pretty close to my target weight that I wanted and looking as good as it does.  

  Now once I get some free time I can start doing some test runs with it and getting any bugs out of it should they show up. I know the neighbors have been lining up waiting for me to roll it out of the garage after all of this time to get a look at the finished product.  It will be a show stopper in my little town that I live in.  

  First stop will be the police department in town.  I know for sure they will pull me over just to find out what the heck it is that is cruising down the main street.  I know I would do the same if I saw something like this and didn't know that it was human powered.  Will be interesting to see the look on their faces when they take a look at it. As soon as I can get a video camera operator I will shoot a short video of it running around.  Should also be interesting to see.  In the mean time enjoy these photos.