Don’t Commute … Scoot!

Attaching a sidecar to a scooter is a more complicated task than it might first appear. Fortunately John (my mechanic) has done this before, although under different circumstances. He knows what to do so that when we’re done the sidecar/scooter combination will handle as well as possible.

We took the body of the sidecar off the frame before we started attaching it to the Stella. This was partly to keep the paint from getting scratched up, but also to make things a little easier to work on. It turns out that some of the adjustments are easier to make if you can stand in the middle of the sidecar frame. You also don’t spend quite as much time lying on the ground trying to get at bolts from underneath.

The body of the sidecar is attached to the frame with three fittings on the back that are basically heavy rubber bands hooked to some metal brackets. The front is bolted to some thick rubber pads. The combination makes for a pretty smooth ride for the passenger. There’s also a torsion mount for the sidecar axle, which helps keep the wheel in contact with the road.

The next thing we did was to put the Stella on its side and remove the center stand. There is a very heavy fitting that bolts to the bottom of the floorboard, using the center stand mounting holes as well as a couple of new holes that have to be drilled.

Note the foot brake. The sidecar mount tends to interfere with its operation, so we wound up filing the mount before installing it. The interference wasn’t much, but its better to deal with the issue before everything’s bolted together.

Here you can see the mounting bracket attached to the bottom of the Stella. Those four bolts are a big pipe clamp that needs to be loosened so that the connecting flange (on the left) can be rotated up and down. There’s a similar clamp on the sidecar frame.

That flange is the major adjustment point for the sidecar. There are five attributes that need to be adjusted:

• Lean – how much the scooter leans away from the sidecar. We tried to set it to be as upright as possible, recognizing that when the rider gets on the scooter his weight will cause the scooter to lean out from the sidecar.
• Toe-in – the angle of the sidecar’s wheel relative to the track of the scooter. There should be a little toe-in (the front of the sidecar wheel pointing toward the scooter’s front wheel) but not too much. This mostly affects how quickly the tread wears on the sidecar’s tire.
• Sidecar level – the side-to-side and fore-and-aft level of the sidecar relative to the ground. You want the sidecar to be as level as possible, in both directions. Load will affect this, so try to make it level when the sidecar is empty.
• Camber – the amount the bottom of the sidecar’s wheel sticks out from the top. You do better to have the bottom outside the top than vice versa. This also mostly affects tire wear.

It took us some time before we hit upon a technique for getting everything adjusted just right. After bolting the sidecar frame to the Stella we put a jack under the sidecar frame in front of the sidecar’s wheel and set it so that the sidecar was level front to back. Then we loosened up the pipe clamps and twisted the flange until the rear wheel of the Stella was straight up and down. While I held everything in place John went underneath and tightened up the clamps. We then checked the toe-in, and made some “fine” adjustments by loosening the pipe clamps only under the Stella, not under the sidecar.

When the lean, toe-in, and level settings seemed to be correct we attached the under-seat bracket and hooked the strut between the Stella and the sidecar. This strut can be used to force some adjustments, be it made more since to us to have it be as unstressed as possible.

Note that the picture is wrong – that clamp in the middle of the strut should be on the front side if you want to be able to remove the cowling and work on the engine. (We’ve since corrected it.)

The last adjustment we made was to the camber of the sidecar wheel. Fortunately the axle mount can be rotated. Of course, doing so will throw off other settings, but we were able to get things close enough without too much problem. We also swapped the sidecar’s tire with the spare so that we have whitewalls all the way around.

Now that everything’s together, I have to learn how to ride this thing!

I am so excited! After five months of waiting, the sidecar I ordered has finally arrived! I can now get started building my SUV (Scooter Utility Vehicle).

This is the first scooter or scooter component I’ve received that came in an honest-to-god wooden crate. The truck driver was as impressed as I was – nobody ships stuff in wooden crates anymore! I’ve been told that that’s largely because of insect infestation issues. Bugs get into the wood, and get out into environments that aren’t able to deal with them.

Here’s what it looked like once I opened up the crate.

The crate is lined with a rather nice tarp that has been sewn to fit the inside of the crate with a flap opening for the top. Most of the pieces (wheel, rear rack, etc.) are bolted to the sides of the crate through the tarp. The main body of the sidecar, already attached to the frame, is secured in place with a couple of two-by-fours that are nailed through the tarp to the sides of the crate. Only the smallest pieces are packed inside a box that’s then wedged between the two-by-fours. Nothing is free to rattle against anything else.

Even though John (my mechanic) was off for the day I was able to get some assistance getting the pieces lifted out of the crate and arranged on the floor. As you can see, the sidecar comes with the body (the skinny bathtub in the middle) already attached to the frame. On the left is the wheel and fender, along with a chrome “crash bar” that goes around the wheel and fender. Below that in the picture is the cover that you can snap over the top to keep rain and stuff out.

On the right you can see the rear rack and the two pads that form the seat. Below that is what I consider the “heart” of the sidecar, the fitting that bolts to the bottom of the Stella that the sidecar frame bolts to. I lined them up to give you an idea of how they fit together.

Below that is a bag of hardware, and at the bottom is the sidecar’s windshield.

There’s only one piece missing – the instructions! There’s a lot of non-obvious parts in that hardware bag, some of which I have no clue what they are or where they go!

After some fishing around on the Web I discovered some good instructions at ScooterSidecars.com which I think will help us get this thing mounted. If nothing else, I now know what some of those unknown pieces of hardware are!