I like to gain inspiration for projects from a number of sources and Youtube is one. I watched Colin Furze construct his own drift trike from scratch years ago and thought, why couldn't I make one too? 

Everything starts as a thought and this build was no different. I did a rough white board drawing to take my ideas from my head and transfer them to reality.

This is a rough example of what I desire the trike to be. A front end from a bike, with a basic square frame to house both rear wheels, and a seat directly infront of the engine.

Here is me disassembling different metal objects (Mainly an old treadmill), to gain enough solid steel to weld up a frame. While we do have some new steel stock its best use up everything you got for free and put it to good use. 

Next the steel was used to rough cut five pieces which would allow a solid square frame that you can easily mount an engine to.

Being happy with the frame, I welded up the five componets to allow a solid base to mount the rest of the trike components to.

The front end of the drift trike required a lot of work. first the original bike frame tube had the wrong angle so I was forced to cut it off and replace it. Then I needed to figure out front brakes, as this is the only wheel not sliding it need to be somewhat controllable.  I modified a rear BMX bike wheel by removing the sprocket and in its place mounting a disk brake rotor.  I designed and machined an aluminum adapter to mount the brake rotor.  I also had to weld on a larger mounting plate to the fork with holes to attach the brake caliper.

We needed to  rebuild and clean the carburetor, so we took it off.  The gasket between the intake manifold and the carburetor tore, so we measured the old one, created a shape in CAD, saved a drawing in PDF format, loaded it into Glowforge software and cut a replacement out on our Glowforge laser cutter using a sheet of gasket material.

I had a second brake rotor so I attached it to the rear axle to hopefully gain a bit of control on the rear. Next the seat was mounted to the frame and a sprocket was assembled onto the rear axle. With that done the last thing needed before a test was a chain.

While the trike did work as intended, I hoped for better control. Therefore improvements must be made.

1. The old seat didn't have much for sides, so it was easy to slide off the side!  When we were walking through Ikea, we saw this modular red seat and it was perfect.  I bent a piece of 14 gauge steel, drilled holes to match the inserts in the bottom of the seat, and adjusted it to the frame.  I removed the seat and the support to the frame.

2. The BMX foot pegs on the axle were always problematic, as when you turn the wheel, the tire would contact your legs, so you would need to have your feet in the air to do donuts!  So, I created new foot pegs mounted to the frame to ensure that the tire never hits your feet.

These major improvements made all the difference. The new pegs allowed much better control and safety.  It seems this also reduced the front tire wear. Also with the new improvements it is much more controllable and it allows 360 spins and controlled drifting much easier. However there is still much to be improved, such as changing the gear ratio, as the main sprocket is large and anything over 1/4 throttle breaks traction on the rear wheels.

The new modifications allowed me to majorly improve my driving ability of the drift trike. One thing I learned was snapping the wheel to do multiple donuts in a row. The side bolsters on the seat was another much needed improvement, it holds you in, preventing you from sliding sideways off the seat.