That's MIT!!!

The trike's been holding up very well.  I take it out frequently to drive to most places around campus, and the steering is now controlled enough that I can manage getting up to top speed without hurting anyone around me...most of the time.  It takes a lot of getting used to, but the drifting makes for a crazy fun ride when you're trying to get somewhere on time.

Between the lights and sound system at night in addition to the trike just being wacky to begin with, I've started to attract some attention when people see me driving around.  When I go up to the lab, I usually go up over the railroad tracks back behind the dorm.  There's often a number of homeless people chilling out there, and I've started making some fans out of them.  I was driving through one day, and there were two guys out there.  As I drove past them, they gave me high fives and started yelling "That's MIT!" It's the times like those that make cruising so much more interesting than just walking.

Some Extra Finishing Touches

The entire rear gate assembly was still fairly crude, so I took it off to clean it up a bit.  The bike grip didn't quite want to fit down over the lever handle, as the 1" steel pipe was considerably thicker than the tube for bike handlebars.  I had to clamp the whole thing in the vice and twist the grip down for a bit, and eventually it fit all the way on.  

The angle iron bars that we used for the gates also had a lot of sharp edges and corners that everyone had been cutting their legs on when walking by, so I finally got a chance to round all the corners with the angle grinder.  Then I welded the back side of the white tube to make sure that it was firmly secured all the way around, since the tube had still been only tacked up to the angle iron up to this point.

The bare, exposed steel was also starting to corrode, so I covered it up with some quick coats of spray paint.  It had been too cold outside to spray paint during the past few days, so in a typical case of me being me and being dumb, I set up a spray painting station in our bathroom.  The ventilation seemed to be good enough, so I just put a fan and a bunch of newspaper down in the shower and only sprayed little bits at a time.  I sprayed the entire piece with a coat of white primer first.  Then I taped up some newspaper around the tube and painted the ends blue.

I suppose it was less than ideal, but it did the trick without me suffocating from the fumes.  Now I still get a kick out of seeing our unconventional combination of soap and spray paint in the bathroom: 

I'll see if it'll still need more coats, but for now the pieces came out alright.  At least for now, it'll be better than the bare steel.  

Nothing like new paint