The 1899 Locomobile Steam Car Replica, known as the Lykamobile is a full scale live steam automobile manufactured in 24 kits. This kit is available from a company called "Steam Traction World" located in Daventry, United Kingdom. Each kit is to be manufactured and sent once a month for 24 months. However for cost considerations I have chosen to have my kits batched and dispatched in larger crates to the United States (Topsail Beach, NC).

Specifications:
• Length 7ft 2.6in • Height 5ft 3in • Width 4ft 7.1in • Weight 904 lbs.• Water Tank Capacity 12 Gallons • Fuel Tank Capacity 7.3 Gallons

Construction:

CHASSIS Tubular steel fabrication, combination weld, bolted and silver solder.
STEERING “Ackerman” design tiller steering.
DIFFERENTIAL & DRIVE Spur gear differential similar to the original Locomobile, drive shaft and bearings.
WHEELS & TYRES Single tube pneumatic, treaded.
BREAKING SYSTEM Disc brake system.
ENGINE 21/4" diameter, 3" stroke modified “Hackworth” valve gear.
WATER FEED Twin mechanical pump.
BURNER Fuelled by diesel.
BOILER Multi Fire Tube, fully constructed and complete with necessary paperwork and inspected by notified body.
BODYWORK & SEATS Wooden with steel frame, seating capacity of 2 persons, with turned decorative spindles with leather style upholstery.
Gears: forward and reverse.
Assemble with hand-tools only
Step-by-step instructions
Technical service and help-line backup
Designed on ‘Solidworks’ CAD
Manufactured on modern CNC machines for build accuracy and high quality


Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Lyka Kit #5 & #7 Part 2 Front Wheels & Brake Disc & Calipers

In this kit you must first place the outer taper bearing race into the each side of the wheel hubs. The Wheel hubs are of aluminum, so make sure that there isn't any damage to the inside diameter from a knick or scratch that might have occurred from handling. I saw a ding on one of my hubs that was raised up that I took care of with the small rounded half file. Once you are satisfied with the interior hub surface, you need to squirt some bearing retaining adhesive on the interior of the hub and some on the outer bearing race and press each outer bearing race into the hubs.

Inside Hub.
Outer Bearing Race
Positioning outer bearing race.
Tapping the bearing race into the hub.
Next I place the Front Hub Spacer aligning all the holes to the M6 tapped holes.
And then I place the Brake Disc aligning the holes. (Later I will change out for Stainless Steel and apply some medium thread lock on them)
And temporarily fixing the disc with five M6 Csk Flat Head Screws.
Now it is time to pack the bearings with grease.
Then you need to place the inner hub wheel bearing into the hub and press the Grease Seal next into the inner hub. Don't press the seal too far into the hub. This will impede the bearing from rotating. I placed the seals flush with the hub.

Inner Bearing placed into the Hub.
 Seal into the inner hub.
Next trial assemble the wheel to the front wheel spindle.
 Placing the outer bearing into the hub.
 Securing with the M14 washer and Castle Nut.
And here we go !! HUH OH ! A slight interference fit with the brake disc to the steering spindle weldment.
No worries, bring out the flap sanding disc right angle drive and away it goes.
Test assembled it again.
Next I test assemble the disc caliper. And even though Steam Traction World made an adjustment to the Front Hub Spacer the disc pads on the inner side where very tight.
In fact I decided that the Front Hub Spacers needed to be faced off another 0.020 inch (0.5 mm). I took the hub spacer to a local machine shop to have this done. In retrospect I believe I could have taken another 0.015 inches off and this would have been better. I reassembled the front wheels and retested everything. The wheels still dragged a little on the disc pads. This would wear clear eventually, but I decided to make a few more modifications to allow me to adjust the caliper alignment better to the disc. The first thing I did was to grind/file off the counter bored holes on the calipers.
Counter-bored holes on Calipers
Counter-bored holes filed off.
And I opened up the mounting holes to about 11.5 mm (from 10 mm diameter). I made some thick flat washers/spacers to place over the mounting nubs on the steering spindle. This provides more surface to mount the calipers.
Mounted caliper.
As you can see, I now have some daylight on both sides of the brake pads next to the disc.
And the wheels spins with just a slight ring to it from the disc not being totally flat or parallel to the spindle axes, but pretty darn good.
 
And the final touch assembly of the hub cap.
And below you see I have modified the right disc by Wire EDM (Electro-Discharge-Machining) a gear tooth profile for driving a Model T Speedometer that I plan to install later.
Now that everything is assembled I did unscrew the flat head steel screws on the two front discs and replaced them with stainless steel flat head screws. I added a touch of medium strength thread locker to the middle of the threads. I thought that I really didn't want to glue the whole length of the thread because it might be a difficult task removing the screws someday. In this case less is better.

And the final product of Kits 1 through 7.




3 comments:

  1. If you been following my post on facebook likamobile, then you know about the rear end gears failing on my lika. still don't know why they failed. The car only has about 200 miles on it. I will be doing some tests for hardness on the gears. That my give me some clue about them.

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  2. one other item about the speedo on the early cars they did not use a swivel on the wheel gear, that was introduced around 1908 or after.

    ReplyDelete
  3. what type of display panel for all the parmentiers are you using I heard that STW does not supply a display as in series 1 cars.

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